Re: RMB Overhaul - Cooldowns, time in office, etc.

[Rhaza]

This change is not on the agenda - apologies, myself or Aav should have updated you on this earlier.

Violet has a forum replacement ready to the point it will imminently progress to the staff testing phase. This includes an RMB overhaul that allows regions to have sub-forums and threads, rather than all their conversation in one public RMB that every regional member can post in (though there will continue to be a main "regional message board" that any regional member can post on). Regions will have the ability to control who can view/post in those sub-forums, e.g. limit it to members only, WA members, or even a curated list ("approved citizens").

We view this as providing a balance between the competing views on this matter; it allows regions communication areas they can effectively gatekeep, while also retaining a public chat area all can participate in.

I was advised I could make a thread on this here since there isn't one on the broader change. My understanding is that this RMB overhaul will allow the Governor, WA Delegate, and maybe regional officers (?) to compartmentalize and regular their RMB, including with varied levels of access.

I presume part of this change is to encourage more regions on NationStates to... well, do things on NationStates. That's great. I wanted to ask some questions about how this will operate.

First, will there be a required amount of time in office to create these sub-categories, or to destroy them? Basically my thought is that it would suck if you make a meticulous list and complex regional forum system on-site, and it gets bulldozed because you got tag-raided or delegate-bumped. Obviously if your region gets conquered it makes sense that the occupiers would get to exercise a lot of control over it, but I feel like there should be some degree of cooldown for changes to these settings like with border control or regional telegrams.

Second, will there be an archival function to prevent their entire loss/destruction, be it internal or externally sourced?

[Gangodhay]

I also would like to know how this change would affect the magnetism of regions, and whether there would be a new system of calculating magnetism.

[Mad Jack Is Rejected]

Ultimately this RMB Overhaul won't be all that useful. NS's servers are incredibly bad at staying online and outages seem to be happening with increasing frequency. Adding yet more bloat, with some "you can have this for extra moderation options that won't actually solve your problems" thrown on top, won't make these changes all that useful, at least for us in TRR.

[Libertarians]

I love it, letting conversations be more organized will be a big help to the casual player that will never join an offsite forum or chat. If this gets up and working, there would likely be several communities where you could participate deeply in regional affairs without putting yourself in often creepy situations. I personally applaud this effort - this is a huge step forwards for user safety.

[Flanderlion]

I love it, letting conversations be more organized will be a big help to the casual player that will never join an offsite forum or chat. If this gets up and working, there would likely be several communities where you could participate deeply in regional affairs without putting yourself in often creepy situations. I personally applaud this effort - this is a huge step forwards for user safety.

This. Like, at least on site NS provides some level of protection, while countless offsite communities that's not the case. GPers/offsite chat users will obviously look at it from their (valid) perspective, but they're less the target audience of this.

[Sedgistan]

I'm limited in what I can detail at present, because "it will imminently progress to the staff testing phase" did not happen when anticipated. It's a Violet-led project, and she's currently the only one with detailed knowledge of the current ins-and-outs of it. Various non-NS reasons have limited her development time in recent months, but she now has a free period of time ahead, during which Accounts is the #1 priority, and the Forum replacement (with accompanying regional message boards revamp) will be progressing too.

First, will there be a required amount of time in office to create these sub-categories, or to destroy them? Basically my thought is that it would suck if you make a meticulous list and complex regional forum system on-site, and it gets bulldozed because you got tag-raided or delegate-bumped. Obviously if your region gets conquered it makes sense that the occupiers would get to exercise a lot of control over it, but I feel like there should be some degree of cooldown for changes to these settings like with border control or regional telegrams.

Second, will there be an archival function to prevent their entire loss/destruction, be it internal or externally sourced?

This is a very reasonable concern, and it's one I would encourage players to share their suggestions on. I would prefer to have "soft" archiving and post suppression tools rather than allowing hard perma-deletion of content. That should allow any changes during a blip in regional governance to be reversed, though things like setting up structure and authorisation lists may be time-consuming.

I also would like to know how this change would affect the magnetism of regions, and whether there would be a new system of calculating magnetism.

That hasn't been considered, but I guess we'd look at the latest post of any sort in the region, even if it's not on the public primary message board.

---

As Flanderlion says, this is never going to replace the sophistication and customisation that many larger regions achieve with offsite forums, but for more casual regions it should significantly enhance the ways in which regions can communicate and organise, and it should still be useful for those larger regions to engage their more casual players.

[Unibot III]

I think this is great news (I’ve proposed it myself a few times). It’ll be helpful in keeping more political activity in NS itself, in a more organized way than Discord, especially as offsite forums and websites have grown out of favour. You can’t *really* run a legislature out of Discord, so the demise of the forum has driven the downward trend for institutional activity overall.

I do think that the launch of the ‘in-game forum’ would be a perfect time to beef up the regional poll system’s functionality so you’re presenting users with one holistic ‘toolkit’ for replacing an offsite forum. If users can vote for representatives in-game and have formal discussions and vet legislation on-site, that largely takes care of their region’s needs.

My thought for forum destruction would be to do it like embassy creations — the user marks a post to be destroyed and there’s a countdown till its destroyed. There probably should be tarballs maintained as a backup for forums and RMBs for regions that are destroyed (if there isn’t already for RMBs - I remember there was a lot of discussion about backing up RMBs a while ago.)

[East Chimore]

This is a very reasonable concern, and it's one I would encourage players to share their suggestions on. I would prefer to have "soft" archiving and post suppression tools rather than allowing hard perma-deletion of content. That should allow any changes during a blip in regional governance to be reversed, though things like setting up structure and authorisation lists may be time-consuming.

I think that it should be a similar timeframe that Border Control RO timers are on - after 26 hours in office, a Delegate may do these soft archivings and forum structuring(suppression should remain immediately available, though). I also am strongly of the mind that the forums also not be entirely lost like RMBs currently are when a region CTEs. An "ancient forum" of a region's name could still be viewable, much like refounded nations (and afaik their dispatches) are still findable in the graveyard.

[Libertarians]

I personally think sub-forums and threads should not be able to be deleted, and if a post is made in a thread it should remain there. I would just give officers the ability to lock or unlock them (preventing future posts). That makes abusing it similar to what we've had in the past - manual clicking for locks and manual clicking for unlocks replacing manual clicking for suppressing and unsuppressing. I'd also strongly suggest mods make it clear scripting these actions is not kosher. It took mods a long time to finally address tools the suppressed thousands of posts automatically, so if given the ability there are raiders that will ruin forums just to be an annoyance.

I also think the ability to limit views is good, I would keep with that suggestion. But, there are going to be moral crusaders who think this will limit their ability to report users with alternate ways of thinking to moderators. If regions ideologically to the right of Marx start having most their conversations in sub-forums for WA Residents only then its going to be fewer eyes obsessively policing each post as there is currently. Has any thought gone in to the moderation consequences of having posts with far fewer audiences?

[Army of Revolutions]

I personally believe that it should be like RMB suppression where any RO with Communication authority can choose to archive any sub-forums from public view with a similar cooldown on archiving sub-forums to RMB suppression. The archived sub-forums wouldn't be deleted until they are archived for a set amount of time (1 week, 2 weeks, idk) sorta like how with an email works