Coming soon: a moratorium on TG-sending scripts

[Glen-Rhodes]

I'm kind of disappointed in this, because the administration of NationStates has failed to address the most damning argument against blocking these types of scripts. A minor increase in the number of actively recruiting regions would also flood inboxes beyond their current capacity. If this happens before the new telegram system is implemented, what will the response be then? I doubt it will be to ban manual recruitment. This has been routinely ignored in these discussions. I suppose the silver lining here is that we will finally have concrete evidence of how much of an impact these scripts have on recruitment "spam." If we still see 90% of the inboxes being consumed by recruiting without scripts, then this anti-script fear will finally be proven to be unfounded.

Furthermore, how are scripters supposed to control to whom telegrams are being sent by end-users? Are we being required to limit our scripts to sending telegrams to delegates only? I ask this because of NationStates' recent decision to make scripters responsible for the actions of end-users in some cases. It's unclear whether the exception in the distribution rules would allow our current scripts to be deployed without limiting them to sending telegrams to delegates. Furthermore, since we can't force users to uninstall previous versions, I would like to ensure that scripters won't be held responsible for use of previous versions that can break new rules.

[Sen]

While we're at it, can we just ban recruitment TGs outright? I seriously doubt anybody likes getting piles of unsolicited spam.

[Frisbeeteria]

Furthermore, how are scripters supposed to control to whom telegrams are being sent by end-users?

While we haven't discussed this in any great detail yet, the most likely punishment for illegal use of scripts would be to block the offending puppet from sending TGs, while warning / advising the puppetmaster to knock it off. On the scripting side, I believe Auralia's new GUI script automates the creation of a unique userAgent, which is an excellent approach in identifying unique users on a distributed script. That's one way to distance yourself from having your scripts used badly.

I ask this because of NationStates' recent decision to make scripters responsible for the actions of end-users in some cases.

The special case of "distributing an illegal script" should not be conflated with "distributing a legal script whose usage has now been made illegal". It's a distinction with a difference, and we're aware of it.

[Poopcannon]

While we're at it, can we just ban recruitment TGs outright? I seriously doubt anybody likes getting piles of unsolicited spam.

Without recruitment, many large regions will shrink, and much of their activity will disappear with their population count. I don't think that's worth it just to cut out a little spam.

[Glen-Rhodes]

Furthermore, how are scripters supposed to control to whom telegrams are being sent by end-users?

While we haven't discussed this in any great detail yet, the most likely punishment for illegal use of scripts would be to block the offending puppet from sending TGs, while warning / advising the puppetmaster to knock it off. On the scripting side, I believe Auralia's new GUI script automates the creation of a unique userAgent, which is an excellent approach in identifying unique users on a distributed script. That's one way to distance yourself from having your scripts used badly.

My script doesn't leave that kind of user agent; it should just be the same user agent that's left by a normal visit to a page. My script was posted quite a few times around the forums, so I can't update all of them. But to me the best course of action right now would be to limit it to sending telegrams to delegates, and I'll get around to that later today. Other scripts probably can't do that, if they were written specifically to send telegrams to a list of new nations, rather than a user-inputted list.

The special case of "distributing an illegal script" should not be conflated with "distributing a legal script whose usage has now been made illegal". It's a distinction with a difference, and we're aware of it.

Okay, I just wanted to make sure. The distribution rules are new, so this is first time under those rules that scripts that were previously legal will soon be illegal.

[Sen]

While we're at it, can we just ban recruitment TGs outright? I seriously doubt anybody likes getting piles of unsolicited spam.

Without recruitment, many large regions will shrink, and much of their activity will disappear with their population count. I don't think that's worth it just to cut out a little spam.

Is that supposed to be bad?

And if your region requires a constant influx of new members to keep going it's not healthy anyways.

[Glen-Rhodes]

While we're at it, can we just ban recruitment TGs outright? I seriously doubt anybody likes getting piles of unsolicited spam.

Without recruitment, many large regions will shrink, and much of their activity will disappear with their population count. I don't think that's worth it just to cut out a little spam.

Just saying, this is the natural evolution of the anti-automation argument. It's unfortunate that people aren't spending their energy focusing on other ways to recruit. As NationStates grows, there will be more reason to recruit, which means more recruitment telegrams being sent, which is a huge problem for the anti-automation community!

/rant

[Frisbeeteria]

Anyone with alternate recruiting suggestions is welcome to open up a discussion thread in Technical for their preferred method.

Me, I'm fond of the idea of a dedicated advertising page off of "The World". Anyone clicking the "Tired of life in <region>?" would be taken to that page, with a search box at the top and region ads underneath. Maybe fit the Tag Cloud in there somehow. I just haven't figure out a way to make it work or keep it from dying under the load of spam. Anyone who wants to take the idea and run with it, go ahead and start a thread.

[Poopcannon]

I'm not even thinking of automation here. Just recruitment in general. There's no real reason for it to be stopped, other than cleaning a new player's inbox up a bit.

We have no problem with manual recruitment. In the past, we created all sorts of incentives within the region for people to recruit. Automatic recruitment was just a more efficient method, so we went with it.

[Cerberion]

Banning all recruitment would effectively kill a massive part of the NS community.

What's the point of starting a new region if you can't ask someone to join you in it?

The important factor for any recruitment is there has to be someone behind the TG. People periodically reply to TGs and if there is nobody there then it reflects poorly on the game. True newbs can use some help and they aren't going to get that from a bot.

If you really give a crap about the person you are trying to recruit, you'll take the time to be there if they ask you a question. Not a day or three later when you log into your recruitment bot.

[Poopcannon]

You would be surprised the lengths we go to in getting people up and running after they've joined the region...

[HenryVonHoffman]

Pardon me, but the answer shouldn't be 'to go backwards'. We're already here at this junction, so we might as well look at ways to better it at the moment instead of just straight-up banning scripts again. I mean, Auralia just put their script out for people to use and others are using their scripts as well; all you would have to do is change the rules to reflect that people using automated scripts may only send a certain amount of telegrams.

The system as it stands is broken because you all have failed to implement the new TG system. That isn't a stab at you, but it has been six months. You've failed to put any forward progress to it at all. That's not our fault and we shouldn't be punished for your lack of oversight.

For the moment, until you do get the new tg system scripted and in place, why not just reduce autorecruitment TG's to 1 or 2 every few minutes? Yeah, that's way slower than manual recruitment, but it does clear up the spam issue and if people are really going to autorecruit anyway, this cuts back on a lot of TG's sent. Obviously people are going to get a lot of TG's. Did you really think that with all of the regions and nations in the NS-verse that this wouldn't be so?

I don't see how the answer can be 'to go back to manual.' You've already ruined that for us by allowing it in the first place. Nobody is going to do so, except a few regions serious about staying alive, and you're going to wind up losing a good amount of players. Tensions will be higher and people will be more stressed out. Especially now that they have seen that the grass IS greener on the other side.

What you're talking about is the equivalent of Real Life Technology suddenly being plunged back into the dark ages. You don't want that; seriously.

[Cormac Stark]

Probably later in the week.

So let me see if I've got this straight. The NS admins introduce a massive change to the game and allow whole regions to crop up that have never manually recruited, and that are populated almost entirely by people who are newer to the game and who have also never manually recruited. These folks, not realizing the schizophrenic pace at which the admins will change their minds, don't realize that they need to be preparing their citizens for manual recruitment. And then the admins give these regions less than a week to make the adjustment?

Gee, thanks. How very kind of you.

For the record, I would argue that if the admins are going to ban auto-scripts all auto-scripts should be banned. Spam is spam; if you're going to argue that auto-scripts shouldn't be used for regional recruiting because it's generating too much spam, then the massive amounts of spam that WADs are going to get from WA auto-scripts isn't ok either. Let's be consistent here and not place the precious World Assembly in a category above regional recruitment.

[Crushing Our Enemies]

Manual recruitment has been allowed since Nationstates existed, with world populations far higher than the current number, without causing major telegram inbox issues like automatic scripts may cause. Regions that are dedicated to growing will recruit avidly, just as they have always done, and the work required will be enough of a deterrent to the less dedicated that it will not cause a major spam problem like automatic scripts threaten to do. This is a return to the normal. Guys can chill.

EDIT: "Far higher" might be a bit of a stretch. Suffice to say, the NS world has totaled over 130,000 nations before without an overabundance of recruitment telegrams being sent. To suggest that banning automatic telegram scripts will not prevent the potential inbox problem is ludicrous.

[Notolecta]

How would this accomplish anything. People will still get 20 or so telegrams within 24 hours of joining and that will only increase as time goes on. If the problem of flooding telegram inboxes is that important, which I don't believe it is because the oldest one just gets deleted, then the real way to fix this is to increase the limit of telegrams. I also have to wonder whether you are even working on the new telegram system. Is there any kind of estimated timeline for it at all?

[Glen-Rhodes]

Manual recruitment has been allowed since Nationstates existed, with world populations far higher than the current number, without causing major telegram inbox issues like automatic scripts may cause. Regions that are dedicated to growing will recruit avidly, just as they have always done, and the work required will be enough of a deterrent to the less dedicated that it will not cause a major spam problem like automatic scripts threaten to do. This is a return to the normal. Guys can chill.

As I said earlier, we now a chance to see if this is the case. It's not as if automatic recruitment scripts have been the only change in recruiting in the past three or four years. Recruiting methods have evolved, including how recruiting "armies" are organized. Even without automation, tools aiding in recruitment have gotten significantly better. This is to be expected, as more people learn how to make these tools, as more developers embrace releasing them to the public (as opposed to the secrecy of scripts in years past), and as browsers and internet technology continues to improve. If anybody is thinking that this moratorium means we're reverting back to trolling Regional Happenings for new nations, they are sorely mistaken.

EDIT: "Far higher" might be a bit of a stretch. Suffice to say, the NS world has totaled over 130,000 nations before without an overabundance of recruitment telegrams being sent. To suggest that banning automatic telegram scripts will not prevent the potential inbox problem is ludicrous.

You are trying to draw a direct correlation between the number of nations and the number of actively recruiting regions. But you don't offer any proof of that being the case. Again, we'll see what happens in the next few months. If players are still receiving 10+ recruitment telegrams, then blaming automation scripts was the wrong thing to do. If the number is significantly reduced, then we'll need to have a discussion about how reducing the opportunities for new players to discover new regions is beneficial to NationStates. Either way, as I've been saying before, we're all ignoring the bigger issue that NationStates advertising is simply poorly designed and needs to be revitalized. I'm sure we'll get to that point down the road, but it will take these long-term experiments to convince people that either side is wrong.

I appreciate Fris asking for input, but we've had these discussion before. All that came out was Embassies and Tags, which I don't think anybody will argue has had any significant impact on regional population levels. The only idea I've ever seen proposed that provided an entirely new way to advertise on an individual basis without using telegrams was an "invitation" a la Facebook. That went nowhere.

People are stuck in believing that telegrams are the only way to recruit. So when you try to make recruiting easier, they're concerned about inbox flooding. Ironically, the feeders have all banned RMB recruiting or made it impossible for ads to stand out (e.g. by banning bold, italics, underlines, limiting length, requiring asinine things like ASCII art of cats, banning links to your region if previous ads by other people had links to theirs, etc), pushing up both the necessity and attractiveness of sending recruitment telegrams over all other forms of advertisements.

A vicious cycle exists, where you have to send more telegrams to compete with other regions, which causes other people to get angry and annoyed. So those people push to make recruiting harder, which pushes recruiters to find new ways to make recruiting easier. All because we never seem to address the fundamental problem with relying on private messages for recruiting, instead of having a separate and robust recruiting system. We need an "all of the above" system, with broad and targeted advertisements. We need better was for people to self-discover new regions. (Tags simply aren't cutting it the way they're set up.) We won't get these things until the fight between people who want recruiting to be easier and people who want less recruitment messaging filling inboxes is exhausted.

[Crazy girl]

Before we all go hating on everyone's favorite codemonkeys lets keep in mind they are UNPAID and UNDERAPPRECIATED (not by me, honest!) volunteers with lives and actual jobs. So if things don't go as fast as you (or me) would like to see, that might have to do with the fact that that RL takes precedence over an unpaid volunteer job on a website people play for FREE.

Thank you. Big hugs to Sal, [v] and dino

Now,the problem here is that auto-recruitment is causing new nations' inboxes to fill up too fast. Is this a problem? Why yes, it is. No one likes to join a game just to find their telegram box getting flooded. Imagine joining a game a friend suggested, he sends you a telegram, and the next morning the telegram, and any replies to your reply are gone. Or you ask a friendly looking mod *coughs* a question, and you miss the answer because of the spam. We don't want to overwhelm, annoy or even scare off new users. We wubs getting newbies. Right? Right.

Lastly, to repeat what CoE already pointed out: Manual recruiting has been allowed since forever, even when NS was a lot bigger and it never caused any problems. We've had experience with manual recruitment for 8+ years and it worked fine. We tried auto-recruiting for a few months now and it proved to be too much. Please don't be surprised, [violet] did warn that:

Remember the new script rules would be an interim measure, and I've already said I'd change things if it turned into a spamfest.

[Glen-Rhodes]

Now,the problem here is that auto-recruitment is causing new nations' inboxes to fill up too fast. Is this a problem? Why yes, it is. No one likes to join a game just to find their telegram box getting flooded. Imagine joining a game a friend suggested, he sends you a telegram, and the next morning the telegram, and any replies to your reply are gone. Or you ask a friendly looking mod *coughs* a question, and you miss the answer because of the spam. We don't want to overwhelm, annoy or even scare off new users. We wubs getting newbies. Right? Right.

Now imagine that recruitment was done without having to send a telegram. People could send messages to their friends and ask friendly mods questions, without ever worrying about missing a telegram because of recruiting. Isn't that the most optimal world?

Sorry for beating this point, but this is the perfect example of people being stuck in the TG recruiting paradigm without even realizing it. It's easy to use the above to argue for banning scripts (automation or otherwise). But, CG, what would you propose we do if scripts were banned and new players still had their inboxes flooded?

[Crazy girl]

1: that's not happening.
2: the admins are working to fix this problem, I understand it's troublesome, and not ideal, but please have a little more patient and I'm sure we can all come together and find a solution that works for everyone.

[Frisbeeteria]

Glen-Rhodes, we KNOW what the solution is. It's moving the telegram system to a database. The way they're currently stored has a memory limitation, not a disk space limitation. Creating working code, then moving 100K+ active nations plus around 3 million CTE nations. There are also hardware / memory optimization issues, plus scaling issues, plus adding features like designated Recruiting zones and such that complicate it.

Our admins are currently quite busy with RL issues and unable to devote tens or hundreds of man-hours to planning, designing, building, and finally migrating to such a system. Adding more admins isn't the solution, as finding trusted folk who can work within our system isn't easy. No one in this game wants the solution more than the admins, but they're slightly more concerned with feeding their families, working their jobs, and/or completing their education.

You don't complete a technical problem of this magnitude without careful planning and a significant block of time for coding. Then there's testing and bugfix, and the migration will probably shut the game down for hours or even days. Something as apparently simple as a server migration took weeks to schedule and days to perform. Even then, we ran into problems related to our immense historical nation base that had to be resolved in a different way due to OS problems. Nobody wanted downtime then either, but it had to happen.

We're not closing our eyes to the problems. We're working on them. It's just not something we can give you as instant gratification.

[HenryVonHoffman]

I would like to point out that I wasn't hating on the coding team, as I know they do the work because they want to and not because they get paid to do so. I was merely stating the facts of the matter.

Sure, there are other ways to recruit besides TG's, and RMB recruitment will always be the best alternate method, but we can't just set aside that TG recruitment IS the most effective. Honestly, I think if people are truly interested in getting involved in NS, they will sit there and read through every single one of those recruitment telegrams before deciding where they wish to go and making an informed choice.

I don't see the point of limiting how many TG's new nations receive due to peoples lack of patience or because some people simply choose which region to go to before reading through all of their TG's. That is a fault with those individuals and not the regions sending them. I believe it to be in the best interest of all of NS to keep the autorecruitment scripts until a filtering method can be achieved by the coding team. People can simply delete them after deciding where to move if they fear that the TG's will interfere with regular TG's they receive.

I still don't see the point of punishing those who use AutoRecruitment scripts just because things didn't go as planned. Things hardly go as planned in real life, either; but the answer is hardly ever to take a significant step backwards. Imagine that in real life, there was a huge concern of computer oriented AI's rising up to claim dominance over living creatures. Sure, scoff at the idea because it's been well-painted in such movies as The Matrix and iRobot, but imagine that the entire world decided to destroy all computers based on the fear provided by such movies. Where would we be then?

It is much too soon to tell exactly whether the effect made by autorecruitment is bad or good and you're talking of shutting it down simply because people are now receiving TG's from more than 4 or 5 regions? Do you honestly believe that people should be so limited in their decision-making process? With everything comes pros and cons. We weighed them out beforehand and you decided that it was worth the risk. Now there are the same amount of pros and cons, but the nature of them has changed.

If you've noticed, there's been a significant increase in player activity since the autorecruitment was legalized throughout NS. I believe that this will only continue to increase as people are forced to try harder to make their TG's more effective. People have come back to this game because they're heard that this was allowed and it excited them. They spread the word to their friends again to come join them in this game and have fun, because now smaller regions have a way of bringing more people to them and creating a better society for themselves. Instead of people just making a nation and walking away from it.

I have played this game since 2001-2002 and I can honestly say that with each improvement, things have gotten better. This is no different and it just needs time to settle in with people and become accepted, because it's no different than any other change that's been made to NS in the past that we've kept.

And honestly, people are going to complain no matter what. It's human nature and there are always people who are going to be dissatisfied because they're dissatisfied with life in general. I think that the majority of people in NS will stick around when the change is made no matter how long the down-time is. We have our offsite messageboards where we can still communicate with each other. If we have somewhat of a timeline when such a downtime would occur, we'd be better able to urge our member nations who have not yet joined our offsite messageboards to do so for when it does occur so that they can remain in contact and know what's going on.

We have many people who share citizenship in many different regions and the word will spread. I mean, it's not as bad as everyone seems to be making it out to be.

[Crazy girl]

Umm...2001-2002? I call nonsense on that. (game wasn't released till late 2002)

And I think previous posts have shown it is as bad as it's made out to be, and [v] did warn before allowing it that if it would turn into what it essentially is now, it would be reversed. You call it a step backwards, I call it a failed experiment.

[Glen-Rhodes]

Glen-Rhodes, we KNOW what the solution is. It's moving the telegram system to a database.

That's not a solution, Fris. That's just bringing NationStates up to browser-based game standards. That will allow more telegrams, but not an unlimited amount. You still run into the issue of combining private communications with regional advertisements, with the latter drowning out the former. It's bad design to rely on that as the sole or even main form of recruiting. Sooner or later, we will find ourselves in the same situation, having to juggle between allowing all regions a chance to have their telegrams read, and allowing players to utilize their inbox for communicating with other players.

If the current anti-script crowd is upset about 12 telegrams being sent to new nations, why would they be okay with 12 telegrams being sent under the new system? Violet's solution is to put all but the "most effective" (however that is judged) under a fold, but this will only ensure that those regions have an unfair advantage over everybody else.

In other words, if these few tools have allegedly caused such a large problem, how does this bode well for the telegram overhaul, which as Violet says, "... will be like a script for everybody?" If the solution to the problem here is to ban the scripts, I'm curious as to what the solution is for the overhaul.

Our admins are currently quite busy with RL issues and unable to devote tens or hundreds of man-hours to planning, designing, building, and finally migrating to such a system. Adding more admins isn't the solution, as finding trusted folk who can work within our system isn't easy. No one in this game wants the solution more than the admins, but they're slightly more concerned with feeding their families, working their jobs, and/or completing their education.

I understand this issue. I'm not unfamiliar with how much work goes into developing a game. Even smaller games requires hundreds of man-hours of development. But this issue is why Violet told us she decided to allow these scripts in the first place! To quote her, "Sending TGs is not supposed to be hard. It is supposed to be easy, but illegal to send too many. ... In recognition of the fact that NS has a very crude messaging interface ... [a] script or automated tool may send telegrams, providing that it does so at a rate of no more than 3 telegrams per minute." The message being sent by her was that, until NS has a new system for telegrams, we will allow automated TGs at a rate of X per minute, as a compromise between mass telegramming being tediously boring and being too much of a spam risk.

The response should have been an increase the rate limit. I think it was a bad decision to throw out 2 long years of discussion and compromise, and completely reverse the rules right when the first public auto-recruiter was released. Is there solid evidence that spam has become a problem because of auto-recruiters? I'm sorry, but I'm not going to believe there is just because a guy with a red username tells me to believe authority.

If there was, I don't think anybody would have been opposed to upping the rate limit. Then we could have seen if new players were still having their inboxes flooded at the same rate. If they hadn't, there would be more evidence that auto-recruiters are an issue. We'll get that evidence in the next few months anyways, but upping the rate limit wouldn't have caused controversy and wouldn't have (yet again) turned off the few developers in this area from having interest in making tools for NationStates.

Edit: CG, that's not an answer. It's not very reassuring that, as a representative of the NationStates administration, you so flippantly disregard an incredibly valid point.

[HenryVonHoffman]

Umm...2001-2002? I call nonsense on that. (game wasn't released till late 2002)

And I think previous posts have shown it is as bad as it's made out to be, and [v] did warn before allowing it that if it would turn into what it essentially is now, it would be reversed. You call it a step backwards, I call it a failed experiment.

Yeah, I was about 16 back then, so that makes about a decade. I wasn't sure of the exact year.

Previous posts have shown nothing but peoples current discontent with the system; which will alleviate once the system is firmly in place. As I said, people love to complain even though they will most likely use the system. Once it's in place long enough they'll complain if recruitment goes back to manual. Again, human nature.

Of course you would call it a failed experiment without the full results. You didn't allow it to fully come to fruition with the new TG system you've all been talking about. YOU GUYS are the ones who let the cat out of the bag early before you had even started work on coding the new TG system. The fault is on YOU, not the regions throughout NS, not the people who used the script, so once again, I don't see the purpose of punishing US for YOUR mistakes.

[Sedgistan]

A nation founded just a few minutes ago received 15 recruitment telegrams within 164 seconds of being founded (and has received another since EDIT - it's up to 18 19 TGs now). There is a problem with new nations being spammed with too many telegrams, and it's directly a result of auto-TG scripts. Before they were legalised, nations averaged around 5-10 recruitment telegrams, about half of which would arrive in the first few minutes, the rest later. That situation was ideal.

Of course you would call it a failed experiment without the full results. You didn't allow it to fully come to fruition with the new TG system you've all been talking about. YOU GUYS are the ones who let the cat out of the bag early before you had even started work on coding the new TG system. The fault is on YOU, not the regions throughout NS, not the people who used the script, so once again, I don't see the purpose of punishing US for YOUR mistakes.

It was always clear that this was a trial to act as a stress test for the new system. If you failed to keep up with the debates, and missed that, it's your fault entirely. As for 'punishment', to keep auto-recruitment scripts legal would punish new nations, whose inboxes are being spammed beyond use, and who can't get helpful advice from the nations trying to recruit them (as they're just scripts).