Orc In A Spacesuit on 20 Oct 2002 05:09:02 -0000


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Re: [spoon-discuss] A Rant.


From: "David E. Smith" <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
I want ways to either offload a good portion of the bookkeeping tasks I
have to deal with to other people (preferably without forcing anyone else
to have to do these marathons), or at least to reduce the amount of time I
have to spend in one sitting. (If I could think of a way to do so fairly,
I'd love something like "every time X new proposals are filed, a new
ballot starts the next day" where X is maybe 15 or 20, as opposed to 40+
for nw24, and 63 (!) for the nweek previous.)

Technical ideas are also welcome. Again, as soon as I can figure out how
to do so safely (i.e. in a fashion that doesn't invite rampant vote
fraud), online voting will be on its way -- that one's trivial to do,
since the database has been doing vote handling for a while -- and maybe
even online proposals.

Well, I have a few ideas.

1. We create another minister, who's task is just to plow through the emails, and either create a simplified summary of tasks for the Admin to go through quickly, or do that and have this minister do some of the actual gruntwork with updating stuff. If this interests you, I volunteer.

2. We get a new GridMin.  That'll be something

3. We make a list of every single possible action players can take (i've been working on one myself), figure out what parameters go with them (a location to move to, text to propose, item to toss and where to toss it), put it all in a database, and make a form that allows people to pick from some drop-down lists and stuff what they do. Then, Dave can look at all the actions, and put a checkmark next to those that are ok. These actions are then processed by scripts, and their effects rendered just through the push of a button.

4. We rewrite the rules so that all the 'end/beginning of nweek' stuff is listed in one rule, easy for Dave to check off.

#1 seems to be the best in my mind, if #2 and #4 are not enough. #3 would definitly benefit from my uber; perhaps if we implement #1, we could integrate #3 in slowly.

But I want something relatively soon; if I can't recover at least a little
bit of my free time, you may need to start looking for a new Admin.

I can't escape the haunting wisdom of Joel's words on the old "A Nomic"
page, under nomic.net's Dead Games archive:

"Though it is clear that I would not have been able to keep A Nomic
running as long as I did without the tools I developed for the task, I now
believe that streamlining the bookkeeping process is merely treating a
symptom of a deeper problem--namely, that no matter how efficient my tools
were, I was still the bottleneck."

Just substitute "B Nomic" for "A Nomic" and put my name in there, and the
words make a lot of sense.

I remember reading that in the archives.  I hope it doesn't end up that way.

Thanks for all you do for us, Dave.

OrcishSpacesuit

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