This thread is meant to gather ideas and suggestions for this area of NationStates, as well as to serve as a public tracker of their progress.
Rules of the Thread
- You must post in good faith.
- Read and follow the instructions before submitting your ideas and suggestions
- Keep discussion about a suggestion in that suggestion's dedicated thread
Domain of Responsibility
My purview includes pretty much anything on the technical side of things, i.e. those things that are relevant to script authors. This includes:
- The API
- The Daily Data Dumps
- The HTML site directly, insofar as it relates to programmatic access to it (i.e. scraping, keybinds, etc.)
- Documentation for all of the above
Note that this does not include specific features for the game that would be accessible by the API; for example, if you have a suggestion on how the API handles the existing feature set of telegrams, it belongs here, but if you have a suggestion on expanding what telegrams can do for your script, it belongs in the Gameside Communications Development thread.
How to submit Ideas and Suggestions
To submit an idea or suggestion, first think about it a bit and make sure it's a good suggestion. Here are some things you should consider:
- Does it solve my use-case adequately?
- Does it solve other possible use-cases as well?
- Why can't I already do this in another way?
- Is there an equivalent suggestion in this thread already?
- Does my suggestion fit into the big picture with the goals listed below?
Having done that, it's time to make a new thread, in this forum. That thread should include, in decreasing order of importance:
- The "why": An explanation of what you want to do with this once implemented (for example, "I want my autologin tool to show nation mottos in its overview list). This is the most important item, and the only necessary one.
- The "what": An explanation of your idea or suggestion (for example "I want to query the motto of a nation")
- The "how": If you want, and if relevant, you can add a suggestion for how this might look on the technical side (for example, "The URL parameter q=motto could signify that the motto is returned for the given nation."
Your target audience with this post is somebody that is tech-literate and familiar with use of the site, but not necessarily intimately familar with your specific niche of the game that this applies to. You should try to reflect that in your post.
Once your thread is posted, post a link to your new thread in this thread, with a short one-sentence description.
Feel free to offer multiple suggestions in your thread, so long as they're related (for example, "I want both motto and flag URL for a nation" can be in the same suggestion, but "I want to query regions for their nation count and nations for the flag" is best split up into two threads.
Goals
- Minimize use of the HTML site as a scripting interface, and bolster the API instead.
- Improve documentation so that everybody knows what to do with few ambiguities.
- Still allow for content scripts, user scripts, etc. to improve the UX of the site.
