Re: [s-d] Proposal: Remove Revision Numbers

[Daniel Lepage <dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Do we have any programmers with free time in the game? Ideally, we'd  
make a B Nomic Advanced Technologies Subcommittee (BATS) that would  
be in charge of A) finding the right technologies for running the  
game, and B) writing new programs to handle whatever we can't get  
from existing packages.

The ideal way to run a nomic, IMHO, would be on a "generalized" wiki  
(gwiki?). In a gwiki, "pages" would be more than just blocks of text:  
each page would have some number of subfields, which may be blocks of  
text, timestamps, author notes, etc. There would be different types  
of pages from different types of documents - a "proposal" page would  
have different fields than a "rule" page, for example - and various  
features could work with only a particular class of document.

Each rule would be a page, each proposal would be a page, each player  
would have a page, etc. Revision numbers would be easy to view, and  
we could very easily add special views that, for example, show the  
current versions of all rules, show all modifications of a proposal,  
find all rules whose timestamp falls during nweek 210, etc. The tools  
for editing pages would also know about the nature of the pages, and  
so would automatically take care of fields that players don't  
control, like filling in the "author" field for a proposal or  
assigning unique numbers to new rules.

As far as I know, nothing like this exists. I started trying to  
design one long ago, but it basically amounts to writing a whole wiki  
package, and as such is a monumental programming effort. I was trying  
to cut down on that by building off of MoinMoin, using MoinMoin's  
text processor to handle wiki-style page markup, MoinMoin's login  
system to handle player identities, and so forth, but it still proved  
to be far too much for me to do alone.

If we had a team of programmers, though, I'll bet this could be done.

Other programs that BATS could put together might include
  * A more advanced email-based dice-rolling engine
  * A grid-based tracking system for running subgames like The Grid  
of old
  * Convenient scripts for people like Triller who would like to  
easily get a list of the rules that have changed since the last time  
e printed them

Anyway, this is mostly idle speculation - I don't have any free time  
right now, so I'd be useless on such a team. But it would be pretty  
sweet.

-- 
Wonko

On Nov 26, 2006, at 5:48 PM, Peter Cooper Jr. wrote:

> "Mark Walsh" <flutesultan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>> As far as I can tell, now the Rules are all on a single page,
>> and to maintain a hardcopy, I need to reprint the entire
>> ruleset even if only a single rule is changed.
>>
>> Is it convenient to provide individual rules on their
>> own unique pages, such that they can be printed out
>> singly? I would save a tree if I could.
>
> I just threw everything on a single page, as I haven't delved into
> MediaWiki enough to figure out how to separate them and include them
> all automatically like we had on the earlier wiki. Really, at this
> point, I'm not seeing why we went to MediaWiki over whatever we had
> before. If someone wants to set it up and/or show me how to do it, I'd
> be happy to change it into something similar to what we had before.
>
> -- 
> Peter C.
> _______________________________________________
> spoon-discuss mailing list
> spoon-discuss@xxxxxxxxx
> http://lists.ellipsis.cx/mailman/listinfo/spoon-discuss

Daniel Lepage
dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx



_______________________________________________
spoon-discuss mailing list
spoon-discuss@xxxxxxxxx
http://lists.ellipsis.cx/mailman/listinfo/spoon-discuss