Communications (Gameside) Tech development thread

[Katganistan]

As you probably know by now, we're looking for ideas to improve communications tools that players use. Primarily, my sphere of influence will be managing ideas related to Gameside communications -- RMBs, telegrams, and dispatches.

What we are looking for are ideas for making your communications with region mates and others easier or more appealing. I can't promise that any or all of the ideas you guys have would be feasible, but we would like to see what it is that the player base might want to see in their Regional Message Boards, telegrams, and dispatches.

I'll ask that people be succinct about what they consider to be flawed in the current system, and in their proposed change/solution.

I'd prefer if this thread not become a discussion for all of the proposed changes and additions but rather an index. Make a thread for discussing your idea in detail, and post the link to it below.

List of proposals in no particular order:

• Blocking new nations posting on the rmbs for the first fifteen minutes. This seems to be pretty unpopular.
  
• Allowing Regional Officers to mute/unmute players on the rmb three times a day
  
• Custom [columns] and [nextcol] tags added into dispatches
  
• self-assigned nation tags
  
• exempt staff from needing to spend stamps to communicate with other staff members
  
• a group thread or chat ability in a region?
• gameside "foe" button for rmbs
• TG search thread feature for players, Global Chat on RMB
• RMBs as their own mini-forums
• Prompt telegrams to be sent to main nation
• Recruitment page instead of Recruitment Telegrams
• Using stamps to speed up API mass telegrams

[Drew Durrnil]

Allow ROs with the communications ability to mute and unmute a player (maximum of three mutes per day). These mutes will prevent a nation from posting on the RMB much like site mods can temporarily lock an RMB or issue RMB bans to offending players.

[Picairn]

Can custom [columns] and [nextcol] tags be added into dispatches so that columns of text can be created without using the complicated mess of [table=plain] and [td][tr] tags? I'm going off on this example: http://nbbc.sourceforge.net/readme.php?page=bbc_col

I imagine that this can be useful and convenient to create large column menus with rows of items or text, like newspaper columns.

[Pogaria]

I'm not sure this needs a separate discussion thread, but can NS staff members be exempt from the telegram stamps requirement when sending a TG to other staff members?

For example, if I wanted to send a TG to all of the other Issues Editors, I would have to pay for it.

Yes, I could send multiple TGs, but that becomes a problem when people send replies, since recipients won't be able to see the replies to the other TGs that they didn't receive.

I'm aware that Discord exists - I use it myself - but not everyone checks it regularly (or at all). Furthermore, relying upon a third-party site for basic group communications seems somewhat unwieldy.

[Davelands]

Someone pointed out that a post I made in the Moderation Technical Development Thread would better belong here.

I wouldn't mind seeing self-assigned nation tags like you have in a region. It would be easier to send TGs to "all roleplay nations in region Xxxx"
Yes, I know that it wouldn't be perfect since not all nations would use tags, but it would be nice to be able to send out interest-specific telegrams both in your region and outside it.

[Katganistan]

I'm not sure this needs a separate discussion thread, but can NS staff members be exempt from the telegram stamps requirement when sending a TG to other staff members?

For example, if I wanted to send a TG to all of the other Issues Editors, I would have to pay for it.

Yes, I could send multiple TGs, but that becomes a problem when people send replies, since recipients won't be able to see the replies to the other TGs that they didn't receive.

I'm aware that Discord exists - I use it myself - but not everyone checks it regularly (or at all). Furthermore, relying upon a third-party site for basic group communications seems somewhat unwieldy.

Maybe instead of exempting staffers, some kind of way to communicate with a small group like a group thread or group chat?

[Great Algerstonia]

Imo there should be a gameside personal mute button to avoid yourself from having to see other people's posts. Anyone muted will have their posts be completely invisible- not like the rmb suppression feature which lets you still view

ROs should be exempt from muting

This will help by not having to see posts from spammers and posts from people you don't like

[Lenlyvit]

I'm just curious, but is this still being worked on? It seemed like a great idea back when [v] made it up, so it'd be great to see it again. Also, I remember seeing [v] post somewhere in technical about possibly turning RMBs into their own little forums. Is this something that can still be done?

[Flanderlion]

Better handling of TG conversations - e.g. should be like text messages have evolved to, where you open messages and you see the whole conversation between you. Group TGs especially are pretty terrible.

Also TG searching. (thread with admin reply: viewtopic.php?p=32337119#p32337119)

In the long run, associations that players control so that offsite forums can move onsite - as ideally the entire game would be located on nationstates rather than being partially here and partially offsite. But that I think is a long run thing as there are space issues etc. associated with moving more chats onsite.

Global Chat - mentioned elsewhere as part of the Annex/Democracy idea, but an 'association' open to all players that essentially gives all players access to a RMB/chat that is active at all times.

Edit 1: Added TG search thread link. Most other ones are in my signature.

[Merni]

This has obviously been suggested many times before, but making the WACC "resolution passed" telegrams use notices instead (so they could be blocked with the notice subscriptions settings) or making it possible to block those telegrams would be a welcome addition.

Quoting from my earlier OP:

Problems
It was pointed out that this might make people complain about GA stat effects after turning off WA notices. However, this already happens even with the telegram system, with people who aren't aware that WA resolutions have stat effects. Whether they get a notification or not will be irrelevant for such players. If they do know that WA resolutions have stat effects, then they should be aware that turning off WA notices will not alert them to possible GA stat effects.

It was also pointed out that "the ones about being ejected are also from the World Assembly something-or-other, aren't they? Those shouldn't be blocked." This was in relation to a suggestion of being able to block the WACC as a telegram sender altogether. I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to make WA "resolution passed" telegrams use notices instead while keeping other automated system telegrams as such.

[Sedgistan]

This has obviously been suggested many times before, but making the WACC "resolution passed" telegrams use notices instead (so they could be blocked with the notice subscriptions settings) or making it possible to block those telegrams would be a welcome addition.

Before Development Managers became a thing, I raised this with Violet - it was considered, but she put it on hold as it relates to notifications, which may need to be overhauled as part of the long-term forum replacement that's been mentioned before.

[Merni]

This has obviously been suggested many times before, but making the WACC "resolution passed" telegrams use notices instead (so they could be blocked with the notice subscriptions settings) or making it possible to block those telegrams would be a welcome addition.

Before Development Managers became a thing, I raised this with Violet - it was considered, but she put it on hold as it relates to notifications, which may need to be overhauled as part of the long-term forum replacement that's been mentioned before.

This has nothing to do with the forums. Perhaps as a stop-gap solution just blocking the telegrams could be possible rather than making them notices, if the latter is too difficult or a waste of time.

[Trotterdam]

Allow deleting telegrams from your sent folder.

[Frisbeeteria]

Allow deleting telegrams from your sent folder.

I don't think that's going to be allowed. Telegrams reside only in one place: your Sent folder. Every other instance is simply a link back to that telegram. Deleting them would break conversations, prevent mods from acting on abusive telegrams, and probably other things I'm not thinking of. In the initial coding of telegrams, [v] could have put them in some central respository ... but she didn't. Fixing it now would be a pretty major deal, I would think.

[Trotterdam]

Allow deleting telegrams from your sent folder.

I don't think that's going to be allowed. Telegrams reside only in one place: your Sent folder. Every other instance is simply a link back to that telegram. Deleting them would break conversations, prevent mods from acting on abusive telegrams, and probably other things I'm not thinking of. In the initial coding of telegrams, [v] could have put them in some central respository ... but she didn't. Fixing it now would be a pretty major deal, I would think.

Well, maybe it's not easy to implement and/or won't be getting done anytime soon, but that applies to a lot of the things being suggested in these threads. I thought much of the point of these new development management threads was to help us keep track of to-do lists for things that would be worth considering in the future even if they're not done immediately.

Anyway, I think it's reasonable that once the sender and all recipients have deleted a telegram, that telegram should be completely removed from the system (for privacy reasons). Players who want to report a telegram they received for rules violations should know not to delete the alleged rulebreaking telegram until a moderator has had a look at it.

Even without that, though, there would be organizational benefits to be able to trim my sent folder down to things I might actually be interested in referring back to later, rather than any random thing I once said. For this purpose, it would be sufficient to keep the current telegram filing system the same, but update the user-visible "sent" folder to work like every other folder and merely contain links to the underlying filing system, rather than being the underlying filing system. Without the aforementioned "true deletion" feature, this could lead to "orphan" telegrams that continue to be retained in the system despite no longer being visible to anyone except the moderators (if that), wasting a very small amount of disk space, but is that really worse than wasting people's actual telegram pages with posts they don't care about?

[Frisbeeteria]

Players who want to report a telegram they received for rules violations should know not to delete the alleged rulebreaking telegram until a moderator has had a look at it.

You're an old-timer who remembers when that used to be a thing. It never worked. Most players reported stuff then deleted it. We had no way to retrieve it, which is why the new system is set up like it is.

there would be organizational benefits

I understand and even agree. What we could do is rename the archival folder from "Sent" to "TGall" or something like that, and then create a new database column called Sent which gave you the rights to delete the pointer links. I have never worked with our database at that level, so I don't have any idea how many ways that could break things. I imagine it would be a lot. We can still put it on the To Do list.

(for privacy reasons)

We have to balance that against "the needs of the site" and even "law enforcement requests" and maybe even other stuff I know nothing about. All of those are above my pay grade. Your suggestion is noted, though.

[Trotterdam]

You're an old-timer who remembers when that used to be a thing. It never worked. Most players reported stuff then deleted it. We had no way to retrieve it, which is why the new system is set up like it is.

And here I remember one time that I had to send a second GHR to remind the moderators to delete the telegram once they're done judging it because the instructions warned me against doing so myself...

I want to be surprised at this lack of common sense, but I really can't.

Still, there are ways to resolve this. The moderation code could be designed to recognize the "Telegram ID:#___" text that's automatically included when reporting a telegram, and count that as a "link" to the telegram that prevents it from being deleted until a moderator flags the GHR as resolved.

[Katganistan]

Imo there should be a gameside personal mute button to avoid yourself from having to see other people's posts. Anyone muted will have their posts be completely invisible- not like the rmb suppression feature which lets you still view

ROs should be exempt from muting

This will help by not having to see posts from spammers and posts from people you don't like

I think ROs should still be able to mute people, but I think having a "foe" feature you can turn on for rmbs is a great idea.

[Phyr]

Prompt Nations to TG Main Nation - Give users an option in settings to put a generic message above the telegram box on their nation to please telegram *Input* instead of this nation. (Details in link)

[Kazaman]

I would like to discuss the possibility of making mass telegrams cost influence, scaling with the size of the audience somehow, or maybe by type of telegram.

[Heidgaudr]

Revamping Regional Recruitment - eliminating recruitment telegrams in favor of a new recruitment page. The welcome telegram the game automatically sends to new nations could point them to the new page.

[Katganistan]

I would like to discuss the possibility of making mass telegrams cost influence, scaling with the size of the audience somehow, or maybe by type of telegram.

Can you elaborate on why this would be advantageous?

[Merni]

Could we have nested quotes in RMBs? Currently when you quote a message that has a quote within it, the inner quote gets deleted while the rest of the message is displayed in the outer quote. This contrasts with the forums, where you can have quotes that quote other quotes, like this:

This is a message that quotes:

this one and

this one

and has some text outside too.

Whereas on an RMB the two inner quotes would be removed.

I would also like to see external links on RMBs. For some reason you can do external links with the URL tag in WFEs and Dispatches, but not RMB messages.

[Phyr]

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=506944 - Allow ROs to Pin Messages on the RMB

[Flanderlion]

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=506956 - allow usage of stamps to send out API TGs faster.