[violet] wrote:It applies to all types of telegrams. But we've been looking at recruitment bots more than campaign tools, so please do feel free to provide feedback on what those do /should be permitted to do.
My campaigns (and I know some others) basically operate by collecting dump data, parsing it, getting lists of endorsements from members of a particular region, figuring out who is not endorsing who, compiling that, and making a list of telegram URLs with pre-populated To and Content boxes, one nation at a time with a list of nations they need to endorse. Then whoever wants to from a region can get that list and send personalized, specific campaign telegrams to each and every WA member with a convenient list of fellow WA members to endorse. I don't really see a convenient way to do this process without fillable URLs; otherwise, there would have to be a process like Open the nation page > Scroll to the telegram > HIt send telegram > Copy-paste the template text > Copy-paste the nations name, if you want to > Hit send instead of Copy-paste or click link > Hit send.
I don't see why tools shouldn't be able to do this, especially considering there is no way to do this via the telegram API.
[violet] wrote:I don't quite understand the above
It's a double-edged thing. Manual recruiters cannot compete with the constant, around-the-clock performance of API, and thus will get less spread. However, the API is dreadfully slow and inefficient. 180 seconds is forever for a single telegram to send and that user generally doesn't end up getting it in time.
I think the other big thing is that neither API nor manual can compete with stamps at any level. This nerf feels less like a "we want to level the manual playing field" and more like a "we want to make it harder to not use stamps". The complaint was made that manual recruiters not using these auto-URL systems can't keep up with those who already use them, which is odd because there are some publicly available tools that do this very thing. It's no different than API recruitment; either you go and find it and use it (most of these systems are much simpler than using an API), or you don't.
I guess my point is what is the reason? If it's to help the site handle things, then that doesn't make any sense because, as pointed out before, it's not increasing any load on the site. If it's to help level the playing field, that also doesn't make any sense because the playing field is level if you go and actually look around. If it's to stop card farmers, then surely there's a way to get around it without nuking all URLs. If it's just so that stamps get a higher usage, that sort of makes sense, but I was also told before that stamps don't make the site that much money, so that doesn't make sense. If it's just to make manual more difficult for people to deploy, why? It's hard enough to start and run a community around here with the power imbalance between UCRs and GCRs and the internal power imbalance between UCRs without adding extra red-tape just cause. If there is any reason I'm missing, I think those of us who are against the proposed change would like to hear it.