Should the featured region be hand picked?

[Sorianora]

So I’ve been noticing that recently the featured region has been a completely dead place with recent posts being from over 2 years ago! This is a real problem! The featured region is supposed to help new players find a good region to reside in. So featuring a puppet storage, meme region, or completely dead region is pointless! I propose that nationstates team has one or two real people look over the top 500 or so regions for nations. After looking through they should choose a region to be featured each day. This could be beneficial for new members to find a new home and it could help dying regions get back on their feet!

Tell me what you think!

[Unified Democratic Europe]

Well, that will make the process a bit biased but I feel like that's a good thing. You can't always have neutrality in this types of things.

[Sorianora]

Yes that is the only draw back is it can easily be biased.

[Luna Amore]

Nope.

Switching from an automated to manual process for something like this just isn't going to happen. The staff is volunteer based and I don't imagine we could realistically expect someone to manually pick the featured region every day.

[Sorianora]

I still think it could be revamped at the least. To clean it up and not feature regions with no activity.

[Kelvaros Prime]

I still think it could be revamped at the least. To clean it up and not feature regions with no activity.

I think that's a fair request but keeping the randomness in play for the Featured Region function is what makes it so nice. No man-hours spent perusing the list, no bias, the the fact that it's left up to chance is just icing on the cake.

Perhaps a rule that excludes regions with minimal activity in their Regional Happenings and RMB could be easy to implement? Idk though, I'm no developer.

[Sorianora]

I still think it could be revamped at the least. To clean it up and not feature regions with no activity.

I think that's a fair request but keeping the randomness in play for the Featured Region function is what makes it so nice. No man-hours spent perusing the list, no bias, the the fact that it's left up to chance is just icing on the cake.

Perhaps a rule that excludes regions with minimal activity in their Regional Happenings and RMB could be easy to implement? Idk though, I'm no developer.

It would exclude regions labelled puppet storage, or regions without a post in 100 days, and regions with less than 3 members.

[Islands of Great Britain]

So I’ve been noticing that recently the featured region has been a completely dead place with recent posts being from over 2 years ago! This is a real problem! The featured region is supposed to help new players find a good region to reside in. So featuring a puppet storage, meme region, or completely dead region is pointless! I propose that nationstates team has one or two real people look over the top 500 or so regions for nations. After looking through they should choose a region to be featured each day. This could be beneficial for new members to find a new home and it could help dying regions get back on their feet!

Tell me what you think!

First of all, yes. Second of all, you have a point here.

[Awesomeland012345]

Not to be rude, but I don't think many people actually care about the featured regions except for the people who travel around and congratulate the featured regions and people who are new and aren't bored with them yet. As for excluding regions tagged 'puppet storage', it gives card farmers and others who use puppets some recognition. Obviously, though, I'm biased because I farm cards. And regions with less than 3 members might just be developing regions. The chances are, puppet storages and regions with few members are usually not interesting or good. But there are other regions such as The Secret Order that contain very active and prominent members, but that do not have RMB posts. It's a bit difficult for the code to tell which regions are active or not.

[Islands of Great Britain]

So I’ve been noticing that recently the featured region has been a completely dead place with recent posts being from over 2 years ago! This is a real problem! The featured region is supposed to help new players find a good region to reside in. So featuring a puppet storage, meme region, or completely dead region is pointless! I propose that nationstates team has one or two real people look over the top 500 or so regions for nations. After looking through they should choose a region to be featured each day. This could be beneficial for new members to find a new home and it could help dying regions get back on their feet!

Tell me what you think!

First of all, yes. Second of all, you have a point here.

And my reigon is almost empty, so I HAD to make it a puppet region. Free to join, though!

[Reploid Productions]

The featured region is supposed to help new players find a good region to reside in.

Not... really? Literally all "Featured Region" is for is to spotlight a randomly selected region from the pool of regions that meet the requirements.

Things like "region size" or even RMB activity are not a very good measure of a region's active/inactive status, especially given how many regions do a lot of their social business offsite in places like Discord. A slower RMB might just be a region with players who put a lot of effort into lengthy roleplaying posts, a faster RMB could just be a bunch of people posting a ton of borderline spammy shitposts with their buddies. Putting an "activity" requirement on the system won't help toward only featuring "active" regions, it would just encourage people to post a bunch of garbage to try and get featured.

And as my colleague already pointed out, there is no way we're going to take a perfectly functional automated system and make it a manual one. There is no way our volunteer team is going to be able to sort through the more than 20,000 regions in the game every single day by a set update deadline just to pick which region we think deserves to be featured.

At the moment, this appears to be a solution looking for a problem.

[Omniabstracta]

It would exclude regions labelled puppet storage, or regions without a post in 100 days, and regions with less than 3 members.

In addition to what RP said about post activity being a bad metric, a region needs a minimum of five nations to be featured already under the current system.

[Luna Amore]

I think that's a fair request but keeping the randomness in play for the Featured Region function is what makes it so nice. No man-hours spent perusing the list, no bias, the the fact that it's left up to chance is just icing on the cake.

Perhaps a rule that excludes regions with minimal activity in their Regional Happenings and RMB could be easy to implement? Idk though, I'm no developer.

It would exclude regions labelled puppet storage, or regions without a post in 100 days, and regions with less than 3 members.

Right now the requirements are 5 or more nations and no regional password.

Puppet storage regions are self applied, so I'm not sure how well that would filter. ~350 regions are puppet storage tagged and meet the population requirements. It wouldn't remove all that many from the featured pool and founders could remove the tag to re-enter if they want.

[An Anonymous Nation]

There is a simple solution to this problem. Just remove the featured region feature entirely. Usually it leads to small inactive regions getting raided and only bring new nations for a day only for them to leave to the next featured region. It’s a useless feature

[The Dream of Kirby]

There is a simple solution to this problem. Just remove the featured region feature entirely. Usually it leads to small inactive regions getting raided and only bring new nations for a day only for them to leave to the next featured region. It’s a useless feature

Oh... that probably won’t happen...

[Sorianora]

Not to be rude, but I don't think many people actually care about the featured regions except for the people who travel around and congratulate the featured regions and people who are new and aren't bored with them yet. As for excluding regions tagged 'puppet storage', it gives card farmers and others who use puppets some recognition. Obviously, though, I'm biased because I farm cards. And regions with less than 3 members might just be developing regions. The chances are, puppet storages and regions with few members are usually not interesting or good. But there are other regions such as The Secret Order that contain very active and prominent members, but that do not have RMB posts. It's a bit difficult for the code to tell which regions are active or not.

When I first started playing NS 3 years ago (not on this account) I joined the featured region
Bcuz i thought that it was a region the site recommended to me. I stayed there a couple days but it was super inactive and left for a pacific.

[An Anonymous Nation]

There is a simple solution to this problem. Just remove the featured region feature entirely. Usually it leads to small inactive regions getting raided and only bring new nations for a day only for them to leave to the next featured region. It’s a useless feature

Oh... that probably won’t happen...

What if the featured region became a feeder region for a day? So the inactive regions getting featured pretty much get repopulated

[Luna Amore]

Oh... that probably won’t happen...

What if the featured region became a feeder region for a day? So the inactive regions getting featured pretty much get repopulated

Dropping new nations into random boondocks every day would be a weird intro to the game. The Pacifics serve as nice active hubs for new nations.

[Baloo Kingdom]

Oh... that probably won’t happen...

What if the featured region became a feeder region for a day? So the inactive regions getting featured pretty much get repopulated

That would be...interesting indeed

[Sorianora]

To sum it up: I didn’t think this would actually be considered an it’s just something I can up with and decided to write down. I didn’t think it would get any attention much less moderators actually seeing it. But I do think minor changes to the system would be nice. But I do understand if that’s not possible. I am no developer that’s for sure.-Sorianora, Idiot, Basketball player, Co-founder of Bluecrown Keep

[Comfed]

Perhaps the requirement could be switched to 5 WA nations, as someone could easily found a region and then move 4 puppets in.

[Doge Land]

Oh... that probably won’t happen...

What if the featured region became a feeder region for a day? So the inactive regions getting featured pretty much get repopulated

I would absolutely LOVE to see that for the week of April Fools next year to prank the new nations. Hahaha, that would be hilarious.

[Flanderlion]

Perhaps the requirement could be switched to 5 WA nations, as someone could easily found a region and then move 4 puppets in.

I like this idea. WAs are a far better metric than raw nations.

[Katganistan]

People can choose NOT to join the featured region. It gets everyone who has no password on the region and at least five inhabitants looked at eventually, which might get people to join if it fits their personality.

Clearly some of the ones featured don't fit some folks' personality. It doesn't mean they should be excluded.

[Wink Wonk We Like Stonks]

no, just make sure it's one that is currently active.