Re: [s-d] What news?

["Daniel Peter Lepage" <dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> On Mon, 2006-06-12 at 11:06 -0400, Daniel Peter Lepage wrote:
>> > Just curious as to the status.
>> > There hasn't been much active interest, but
>> > I've got copies of the Wikis in my purview.
>> > Additionally, I could scan my hardcopy of the
>> > ruleset and OCR it to Wiki if need be.
>>
>> Sorry for my extended silence. I have some backed up wiki data, but it's
>> a
>> few months old. I haven't been paying much attention to the game lately,
>> and by the looks of it neither has anyone else.
>>
>> I would still like to play if there's interest, but I no longer have
>> enough time to maintain the website. In fact, I haven't had time for a
>> while now, I've just been lucky that there hasn't been much need.
>>
>> So before anyone spends time trying to restore the website, I suppose we
>> need to ask two questions.
>> 1) Who still wants to play? Two isn't really enough, so if it's just
>> Triller and I, then the game is pretty much over.
>> 2) Who wants to handle administration? I can help with getting the old
>> setup running again on a new machine, but after that someone else will
>> have to handle the coding side of the nomic. If we have enough
>> interested
>> people, it would be worthwhile to set up a team of programmers, instead
>> of
>> just having one - that way if one person has to stop, there will already
>> be others to step in.
>>
>
> Well now that school is out I have time again so I may be able to help
> some. Unfortunately I'm about reliable as the weather so consider
> yourself to have 2.5 people. Also a entire restart may be considered. It
> would probably be a good way to get some action assuming you can get
> enough people to play.

Ok, 2.5 people is enough to start, at least.

I agree that resetting the rules would be a good idea. We should, however,
reset them in such a way as to keep the core elements from the current
rules, which means we need to look at a copy of the current rules.

We also need a better administrative interface. The wiki was useful, but
editing individual pages for all the rules was too time-consuming. Can
anyone recommend an existing piece of software for this? It needs to be
able to do the following:

1) It must store Rules and present them to users through a web browser.
2) It must let us sort the Rules into groups and subgroups, for Rulebooks
and Sections.
3) It must be easy to create, destroy, and modify Rules, as well as to
move Rules between sections and between books, all using a web inteface.
4) It should be easy to modify the definition of a Rule, for example to
add new fields and set defaults across existing rules.
5) It should allow some form of history, so that we can view old versions
of te rules.

The wiki satisfies 1, 2, & 5 to a reasonable extent. However, the
interface is not geared towards batch changes, so editing many rules
because of a proposal is difficult to do. Moreover, it stores all rules as
plain text, meaning that we can't search or index by other fields, nor can
we add fields. An example of a field we might add is the Chutzpah that we
once had - each rule had a numerical Chutzpah that determined its
precedence over other rules. This would be very difficult to do on the
wiki, and in fact adding Chutzpah to every rule would require manually
changing every single rule page.

So, does anyone know of a good program that can do all of the above? I
expect some sort of web-based database interface would be just right,
although maybe there are blog engines or wiki clones with similar
properties.

-- 
Wonko


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