NationStates

I am back with a couple more small suggestions, this time for telegrams and dispatches, as well as a minor bug.

1. Telegram mailing lists. These would be kind of like templates, where the user can paste a short code in the "To:" field. If a mailing list is longer than eight nations, it would require stamps. Basically, the site would take the mailing list code and interpret it as a list of nations. Creating one could be as simple as sending a blank message to multiple nations, which currently returns the error "Your message appears blank.", but could instead return a code similar to a telegram ID.

There are many use-cases for such a thing. If your region has a political party with a fairly constant membership, for example, you could send regular telegrams to them without having to remember all the names or hunt down a list. You could telegram all your region's government officials at once, or the entire roster of an R/D military, which may be spread across multiple regions. There are things I would do, myself--I am sure others could come up with even more creative ones.

2. Showing upvotes/downvotes on dispatches. I was thinking that maybe they should be displayed only to the dispatch author. The score alone would be visible to other nations, the way it is now, to reduce visual clutter. This is because (in my experience) downvotes are used less often for bad dispatches and more often for good dispatches that certain groups want to hide. Letting the author see the points would at least provide them with more feedback.

3. Finally (unrelated to TGs or dispatches), here is a glitch I found when modifying an RO that had CTEd:

By the way, the new features from my last thread are working well, and are very useful. Thanks!

I feel like regional ROs should be a special mailing list, which should be free to telegram if you are one, the founder, or a WAD with any power (including executive, but not including just ordinary WA).

Cresenthia wrote:I feel like regional ROs should be a special mailing list, which should be free to telegram if you are one, the founder, or a WAD with any power (including executive, but not including just ordinary WA).

I agree in part with this, but maybe only for nations with Comms authority. Also, in many regions, the government does not consist of the ROs, so I am not sure how useful it would be.

August wrote:

Cresenthia wrote:I feel like regional ROs should be a special mailing list, which should be free to telegram if you are one, the founder, or a WAD with any power (including executive, but not including just ordinary WA).

I agree in part with this, but maybe only for nations with Comms authority. Also, in many regions, the government does not consist of the ROs, so I am not sure how useful it would be.

Well, ROs are a good way for the game to know who is in the government or not.

I found a couple little bugs. Rather than make a new thread, I figured I would tack the report onto this one, since it has not gotten an admin reply yet.

First, my nation of September is an RO in Conch Kingdom, but is not present in the region. When I try to get an ejection influence cost using that nation, I get the following message.
Of course, when I tried it, I got the "not enough influence" message, so this is just a cosmetic issue rather than a loophole that allows zero-influence ejections. Now, when I moved the RO nation into the region, I got the following message, which is the correct one.

The second bug seems to be a mistake with the implementation of #2 here. Conch Kingdom had two embassy requests today, one incoming and one outgoing, and my RO nation received notifications for both. However, my founder nation never received any. This is not a huge deal, but I doubt that excluding founders was intentional here.

If you figure out how you kept your Founder nation from receiving notices on embassy requests, please post here. I would love to stop getting those.

Conservative Values wrote:If you figure out how you kept your Founder nation from receiving notices on embassy requests, please post here. I would love to stop getting those.

I just tested this again, using the regions Conch Kingdom and AALounge (both founders are mine), and I still received no notification. The nation September, which is an RO in both regions, received the notification twice. I would support having a checkbox on the Subscriptions page for embassy events, though I would personally keep it enabled.

Another thing I have noticed, regarding embassies: if a nation has Embassies authority in two regions, it cannot request embassies between those two regions. This might be intentional, I cannot tell.

On the subject of nations with RO authority outside their regions of residence, would it be possible for such nations to retain their pinning ability? I cannot remember if the game knows where any given nation has RO authority (including founder status), but if it does, it would be convenient to be able to pin dispatches in a region while not being present there. That would imply having multiple pinning buttons on dispatches when applicable, which would be even better.

Now that the CTEd RO bug and the embassy notification issue that I brought up earlier have been reported elsewhere and gotten responses, I figured I would bump the thread with another report.

This is one that I have not tested this extensively, but I have seen it quite a few times now, and it is frustrating for someone who relies on Welcome telegrams to deliver important information in multiple regions. The problem is that several nations (a minority of incoming traffic) have not received these telegrams, despite never having entered the region in question before. Most recently, the nations Helaw and The Pug Islands moved to Ridgefield, and neither received a Welcome telegram. The former had a very large amount of influence from another region, while the latter had a very small amount, but neither possessed any from Ridgefield. I am aware that some amount of "foreign" influence can be converted by a nation into "domestic" influence in their new region--is that the cause of this issue?

August wrote:Now that the CTEd RO bug and the embassy notification issue that I brought up earlier have been reported elsewhere and gotten responses, I figured I would bump the thread with another report.

This is one that I have not tested this extensively, but I have seen it quite a few times now, and it is frustrating for someone who relies on Welcome telegrams to deliver important information in multiple regions. The problem is that several nations (a minority of incoming traffic) have not received these telegrams, despite never having entered the region in question before. Most recently, the nations Helaw and The Pug Islands moved to Ridgefield, and neither received a Welcome telegram. The former had a very large amount of influence from another region, while the latter had a very small amount, but neither possessed any from Ridgefield. I am aware that some amount of "foreign" influence can be converted by a nation into "domestic" influence in their new region--is that the cause of this issue?

I'd just thought I'd corroborate this. Two of my nations (Princess Star Butterfly and Domination Industries) moved to Forest from the regions they had been in. Neither had a large amount of influence, and neither had been in the region before. Today, I created the nation Commander Peepers to test the above, and it moved to Forest just fine and received the welcome telegram, and currently has 0 influence overall. The Forest welcome telegram has not been changed as far as I am aware between the times when these nations were moved.

Now I am getting a little annoyed, because people are shamelessly reposting my ideas while my original thread gets no response. (For example: this.)

Things that have gone unanswered:
1. New nations not always receiving Welcome TGs.
2. Ability to enable/disable embassy notifications (Founders do receive them now--that seems to have been fixed.)
3. Pinning dispatches outside of current region.
4. Ejecting nations outside of current region.
5. Upvotes/downvotes on dispatches.
6. CTEd RO glitch (no response, but seems to have been fixed).
7. Telegram mailing lists.

August wrote:2. Ability to enable/disable embassy notifications (Founders do receive them now--that seems to have been fixed.)

Nope, my puppet (Embassy Master) isn't receiving any embassy notifications and no response to a thread I have open about it has come yet.

August wrote:Now I am getting a little annoyed, because people are shamelessly reposting my ideas while my original thread gets no response. (For example: this.)

This is still happening with several threads, but I will stop linking them. Instead, I will start bumping this thread without adding any new content, because apparently that is more effective.

Things that have gotten little to no response:
1. New nations not always receiving Welcome TGs.
2. Pinning dispatches outside of current region.
3. Ejecting nations outside of current region.
4. Upvotes/downvotes on dispatches.
5. Telegram mailing lists.

I knew I'd seen the issue with Welcome Telegrams somewhere, but I couldn't remember where I'd seen it. Apologies for reposting August.

Thread bump, and another request.

When more than ten embassies are being opened at the same time, the list is collapsed so that only the first ten are visible, and the rest can be found on the Region Admin page. Could the same be applied to mass embassy closures? When you close fifty embassies at once, it practically doubles the length of the page, and makes it much more difficult to look at.

August wrote:Another thing I have noticed, regarding embassies: if a nation has Embassies authority in two regions, it cannot request embassies between those two regions. This might be intentional, I cannot tell.

I've been having a similar problem. I believe it is possible - I've managed to open embassies between Bed and Sleep before, but can't figure it out at all now. It would be very useful to have an easy way to do this.

Warden Nakari wrote:

August wrote:Another thing I have noticed, regarding embassies: if a nation has Embassies authority in two regions, it cannot request embassies between those two regions. This might be intentional, I cannot tell.

I've been having a similar problem. I believe it is possible - I've managed to open embassies between Bed and Sleep before, but can't figure it out at all now. It would be very useful to have an easy way to do this.

You can request between regions you control, but the game sees it from the perspective of whichever region you are currently in. So you'd need go to the region you want to request from, request, move to the requested region and accept. Example:

That doesn't seem to work. I'm currently in Nude, trying to request embassies with Sleep. However, both region admin pages are displaying from their own perspectives. I see founder powers in both Nude and Sleep, and so there's no request embassy button.

You still have to type in the region here:

That worked, thanks.