NationStates API (nationdata/regiondata)

[Bowzin]

Does NS keep a log of the amount of unique issues answered, or options answered?

And if so, is that something that could be added as a shard alongside the current answered shard?

Do you mean something like "issue 123 was answered 123321 times"?

Even if this wasn't their suggestion, having access to this data, as well as the data behind how many times each option was chosen, would be super interesting, if at all possible.

[Thorn1000]

Took a quick read around and I cant say I found it mentioned anywhere else and I am happy to cross post this to wherever else it might need to go, but I was wondering about getting a nation's trade history API shard (broken down into buys or sells or maybe that isnt needed). We have the stored buys and sells already of each nation (at the present moment I can see mine is 4188 buys and 2969 sales!) and we even have API access to each individual cards buys and sells but it isnt easy to encompass specific nations with that information. Would be nice to have something that spits out information like the general trades shard or the specific card trades history so we could have some information tracking or see how much a nation spends vs how much they sell. Something like this maybe?

Code: Select all

<TRADE>
<CARDID>1</CARDID>
<SEASON>3</SEASON>
<PRICE>450.00</PRICE>
<SELLER>Thorn1000</SELLER>
<TIMESTAMP>1668660299</TIMESTAMP>
</TRADE>


[20XX]

One-month *bump* on this query. Something that I thought of would be influence returning as a list, like this for example:
<influence>
<region id="a region">124.0</region>
<region id="testregionia">2.0</region>
</influence>
This is obviously a change from my prior response of "current region only," but after thinking about it a bit more while I wrote this post, it seems more logical to provide all the data instead of a small subset.

Bump on this. As Eluvatar asked about possible ramifications - I don't think that this would endanger many sleepers. While you could use this to track what regions a nation has spent update in, that's already trivial to do by comparing data dumps. As noted, There is already a historical catalog of where nations have spent major update

This could potentially enable you to also track where a nation has spent Minor update, assuming they are jumping from region to region between updates, however realistically that won't impact sleeper operations - making a lot of noise on the happenings feed is the antithesis of stealth.

[Thorn1000]

And while we are at this could we make these numbers actually specific and correct/true and not the hazy pseudo accuracy it has right now by including in endorsements?

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

And while we are at this could we make these numbers actually specific and correct/true and not the hazy pseudo accuracy it has right now by including in endorsements?

Yes, right now, the Census (and API) SPDR number is...not real. It shows some sort of inflated value that is, as far as I can tell, roughly your current inf + what you're expected to gain next update, but not exactly that either (i.e. if someone endorses and then resigns), and without accounting for any Decay either I think. The end result is that, for example, a nation I just looked at in TNP which was founded yesterday and has had ~25 endorsements through only one update, shows as having >50 SPDR, but half of that is not real yet.

Breaking down the per-region values in the API is also something I support on top of "fixing" the census total value; it's per-region values that matter for regional actions as I understand it, so clearly those are already tracked. As was said, it adds relatively little info about that nation's history that the Activity feed and Dumps do not already contain.

Big picture: As was discussed in a bipartisan manner (i.e. both raiders and defenders in support) with a measure of Admin agreement, over in the Frontiers thread, there really isn't any reason for Influence to be pseudo-secret in 2023, in terms of what you have or what things cost. R&D players and large regions benefit from someone somewhere figuring it out and sharing it, and it's only the random average native that's out here getting shafted by the effective class-difference in site mechanical knowledge. The site would be a better, more equitable, and more accessible place for all players if it clearly disclosed both the influence cost formulas for various tasks and also the actual influence in various regions that a player has. Especially as Influence, as a mechanic, is now a lot more relevant to a lot more average people under Frontiers, I think the time is ripe to make this change towards mechanical transparency here that puts all players of the game on common ground.

Edit: To add, I also think Decay should be transparent too. But let me know if I'm getting more into "make a separate tech thread about inf transparency" than what's appropriate for the API thread.

[Esfalsa]

Eh, I think this would be new information, because neither daily dumps nor census shard history covers minor updates, and happenings only go back a week. (I could've sworn census shard history used to cover minor updates as well, but maybe I'm just imagining things there...) In any case, I'd find it useful as well and think this kind of information would be cool to have . Admittedly, I'm not too familiar with implications outside of R/D .

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

Eh, I think this would be new information, because neither daily dumps nor census shard history covers minor updates, and happenings only go back a week. (I could've sworn census shard history used to cover minor updates as well, but maybe I'm just imagining things there...) In any case, I'd find it useful as well and think this kind of information would be cool to have . Admittedly, I'm not too familiar with implications outside of R/D .

Any influence value that takes longer than the activity feed's 7 days of history to decay is almost certainly going to involve staying in a region through a major update and ending up in the data dumps, in practicality; as someone who has to lead stealth ops, I see no impact in that field from having a per-region breakdown of current influence be available.

[Esfalsa]

Right, I should've been more clear that I wasn't referring to sleepers/stealth ops. Personally, having per-region influence values would also be useful, for example, in the middle of a raid. Currently, there's plenty of inaccuracy from nations that have accumulated signifiant influence in other regions, data dumps and census shard history only covering every other update, deliberate update surfing (e.g. to preserve influence, avoid Delegate tipping, etc.), and so on.

But at the end of the day, new information or not, I still think it's information that would be nice to have! It's presumably useful for both sides of the R/D dynamic to identify potential targets, measure transition costs, etc... sure, it feels like new information to me, but I don't see why that's a bad thing; if anything, that just means I'd be more excited to have this information

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

If you mean specific to the values themselves, they're largely possible to approximate as-is with the influence census, endos census, activity, and a loose approximation of the decay rate - accurately enough to get the job done at least. I do it for ops all the time. It just requires a massive pain in the ass spreadsheet of starting inf + endos at update (in or out of the region) - assumed decay, updated twice daily.

"Tim jumped on main, but we don't care about that, he updated in region with about 45e the first update, left to cross and was late this update so gained none but decay is minimal first-day, then came back a third time and had 55e this jump, so he has about 110 in the region regardless of what the value displayed is." Times dozens. For important ops, I've tracked dozens to hundreds of lines of that through jump after jump.


For natives, those census charts plus NSHistory/dumps can provide a good approximation of whether the bulk of someone's inf is in-region or not.

Which is all to say the data exists in a close-enough-for-practical-purposes manner... it's just a massive pain in the ass to gather and calculate that requires exclusive knowledge and loads of time, and it'd be more equitable and accessible to all players if it was transparent - and frankly, it would perhaps most impact the actual data available to people *outside* of Raiding where they *don't* have me carefully beancounting as things go and just want to know how much inf random nation X *actually* has for their purposes.

Edit: at most I think you could say it'd make precisely calculating the decay formula easier, but again, that's another thing that - like influence *costs* as discussed in the frontiers thread - relevant Gameplay orgs/regions have at least a general "good enough" understanding of already, and the pseudo-secrecy is only harming less established parties/raising the barriers to entry. In short, the site already provides enough information that anything relevant is already known by the elite who've back-calculated it, so it should just provide it clearly for everyone.

[Roavin]

If you mean specific to the values themselves, they're largely possible to approximate as-is with the influence census, endos census, activity, and a loose approximation of the decay rate - accurately enough to get the job done at least. I do it for ops all the time. It just requires a massive pain in the ass spreadsheet of starting inf + endos at update (in or out of the region) - assumed decay, updated twice daily.

Having done this myself, I feel your pain

I'll bring the suggestion up backstage.

[Aramos]

Hi, I'm here to report a missing shard on the API documentation. When making a "standard" nation API request, one of the tags returned is <FREEDOMSCORES>. However, the associated shard freedomscores is not included on the list of nation shards. It does exist in the API, but it is not currently documented.

[Esfalsa]

It seems there is no API field for the Governor's title. Could we have one, preferably included in the Daily Dumps so that detag-finding tools could find them?

Quick bump on this as it's been (a bit over) a couple months and this information doesn't seem like it's accessible programmatically at all without HTML scraping. I'll also echo that having this information in the region daily dump would be particularly nice — not just for detag-finding tools, as Merni pointed out, but I would say that there are untapped use cases here as well, such as for taggers to track their tagged regions or excluded regions based on governor title (just as regions may be excluded by tags, embassies, WFE contents, etc.).

[Empire of Australia1]

okay this may sound stupid, but i forgot how to recover the secret key so i can run an API. Any help here would be appreciated

[United States of Dictators]

Hello!

So while digging this thread for some information, I found this post from 2020 about a undocumented feature of the API that allows for nation creation, I would like to know if this command is still usable/legal now?

Thanks in advance!

[Merni]

Hello!

So while digging this thread for some information, I found this post from 2020 about a undocumented feature of the API that allows for nation creation, I would like to know if this command is still usable/legal now?

Thanks in advance!

This isn't part of the API at all. It's just the form submission that occurs when you click the final "Create Nation" button here in the normal nation creation page on the HTML site.

[United Calanworie]

Correct. build_nation.cgi is not part of the API and as such is subject to our script rules.

[Merni]

It seems there is no API field for the Governor's title. Could we have one, preferably included in the Daily Dumps so that detag-finding tools could find them?

Quick bump on this as it's been (a bit over) a couple months and this information doesn't seem like it's accessible programmatically at all without HTML scraping. I'll also echo that having this information in the region daily dump would be particularly nice — not just for detag-finding tools, as Merni pointed out, but I would say that there are untapped use cases here as well, such as for taggers to track their tagged regions or excluded regions based on governor title (just as regions may be excluded by tags, embassies, WFE contents, etc.).

Bumping this again. This seems like very basic information, akin to RO titles, and it would really be helpful to have it in the API and dumps.

[United States of Dictators]

It seems that I have accidentally crossed the API TG ratelimit, the documentation says that there will be a time window saying when I can try again, but my error does show the time window, just the 429 error.

Code: Select all

<!DOCTYPE html>
<h1 style="color:red">API TG ratelimit exceeded by client "".</h1>
<p style="font-size:small">Error: 429 API TG ratelimit exceeded by client "".
<p><a href="/pages/api.html">The NationStates API Documentation</a>

I tried to run the script 4-5 minutes later and it showed the same error, why is this happening?

NVM: I just remembered that we can only send 1 non recruitment telegram per 180 seconds and I was looping to send three, my bad.

[Darcania]

It seems that I have accidentally crossed the API TG ratelimit, the documentation says that there will be a time window saying when I can try again, but my error does show the time window, just the 429 error.

API ratelimiting information can be found in the response headers, not in the response body. I'll note though that the documentation is slightly incorrect: you'll want to check the Retry-After header rather than X-Retry-After (as the X-Retry-After header is not included anymore).

[United States of Dictators]

I was coding up a regional statistics script, and I noticed that some UCRs don't seem to have a founding date timestamp, just 0 like the GCRs, I'm not sure why, as they are user created shouldn't they have a founding date? most of the UCRs seem to except a few.

Examples:
The Land of Kings and Emperors
Europeia

[Notanam]

I was coding up a regional statistics script, and I noticed that some UCRs don't seem to have a founding date timestamp, just 0 like the GCRs, I'm not sure why, as they are user created shouldn't they have a founding date? most of the UCRs seem to except a few.

Examples:
The Land of Kings and Emperors
Europeia

Osiris has a founding date timestamp and that's a GCR. Think the founded time has to do with whether or not the founding is recorded in regional history, which was added after the foundings of those UCRs iirc.

[United States of Dictators]

I'm not sure if this has been requested before, but would it be possible to include in the API shards or preferably, data dumps, information about how many GA/SC proposals a nation has authored?

[Improper Classifications]

Is there a private API command that allows Executive regional officers to appoint and dismiss officers?

[United Calanworie]

Not at this time.

[Improper Classifications]

Are there any plans for one?