[s-d] Re: Webmaster's Poll

[pete+bnomic@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Peter Cooper Jr.)]

"Daniel Peter Lepage" <dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> So, imagine that I were to rewrite some of the scripts surrounding the
> Ministry of Change. What features would be most useful?
>
> Specifically, how important are the following features:
>
(note: I've reordered this list slightly to comment on it in different
groupings)

>  * Remembering previous revisions of current proposals
>  * Providing diff-style comparisons of prop revisions

Especially when a revision is first submitted, having a "diff" somehow
can be very helpful. But going back and seeing older versions doesn't
seem *that* useful, although you never know when you might want to.
If possible, it might be need to use the wiki's built-in history and
diff-ing features... Maybe props should just be pages... and then when
editing them, we could see the formatting and such, too. However, I
have no idea how feasible that is to set up.

>  * Remembering previous revisions of historical proposals
>  * Submitting prop/voting info via email

Those doesn't seem that particularly useful.

>  * Searching current or historical proposals
>  * Viewing all proposals from a given time period

That could be nice. When implementing the changes from the previous
nweek, it'd be nice to see the text of "all props that passed from the
previous nweek", and I could see it being interesting to do more
complicated searches, to see how things were on a particular nweek, or
going back to look up some older proposal that you know someone once
did, but now would be perfect to adapt, or something.

>  * Handling things like the Legislator of the Nweek and the Big Rubber
> Stamp through the voting web forms

I don't know if you need to handle those kinds of things explicitly,
but giving the Minister of Change to give arbitrary changes to the
final totals in order to handle such things might be a nice addition.

>  * Periodically emailing out the text of props, votes, etc.

I think I'd prefer it to email out a link to the voting page and list
of active props page at the start of the voting period. There's no
reason a minister would need to do that manually.

>  * Loading pages quickly (The PropIndex page is an example of *not*
> loading quickly)

Well, it doesn't seem *that* bad, particularly for searches like that
where it wouldn't happen that often. But much longer than that starts
to get annoying.

>  * Easy transfer of Ministerial Power

It seemed easy enough for you to transfer the power to me, when I
first took over the position when you went on vacation shortly after I
arrived at the game.

>  * Any other features you can think of

A scripting language for changes to the rules, so that passed props
can just be executed automatically. (I'm half-joking here, but it
seems kind of silly that most of what I do every nweek is copying
stuff from a prop and pasting it into a rule.) Maybe just hyperlinks
to the affected rules would be a good start.

-- 
Peter C.
"The chocolate chip cookie shall be the official cookie of the
commonwealth."
		-- Mass. General Law, Chapter 2, Section 42.
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