Announcements should only be posted by moderators

by **wulfheart** » Mon Dec 18, 2023 8:33 am

Esquire Bertissimmo wrote: ↑
Mon Dec 11, 2023 7:48 pm
(the alternative being randomly matching with the hordes on backstabbr, never playing the same person twice, etc.)

Is backstabbr that popular?

by **kestasjk** » Sun Dec 17, 2023 7:22 am

Esquire Bertissimmo wrote: ↑
Tue Dec 12, 2023 4:46 pm
Thanks so much for all of the clarifications kestasjk!

I was wrong about the existence of Discord-based games -- turns out the one thing I was looking had a Game Master who was manually adjudicating orders 0.0

I'm curious whether this webDip Discord is the official one: https://discord.gg/Q6PtSZc

Yep no worries, I am optimistic for the future of the online hobby and webDip but progress is never as quick as you hope.

I'd say the Discord CaptainMeme runs is the most official, as he's a mod here, but we've not started an actual official Discord. I would possibly encourage people to use a general online Diplomacy Discord rather than a webDip specific one, as I feel it'll be more active / interesting, and allow more comingling of people between sites and build a larger community across all sites rather than lots of small communities between sites. (But no strong preference that's up to others)

edit: This is the Discord I usually go to, I didn't realise there was another: https://discord.gg/Pb86j9wj Not ideal that there's two just for webDip, and that one hasn't been active since 2019.

by **Esquire Bertissimmo** » Tue Dec 12, 2023 4:46 pm

Thanks so much for all of the clarifications kestasjk!

I was wrong about the existence of Discord-based games -- turns out the one thing I was looking had a Game Master who was manually adjudicating orders 0.0

I'm curious whether this webDip Discord is the official one: https://discord.gg/Q6PtSZc

by **learnedSloth** » Tue Dec 12, 2023 4:02 pm

I like the asynchronous nature of bulletin boards, and that phpBB doesn't try to addict users.

by **kestasjk** » Tue Dec 12, 2023 3:40 am

Esquire Bertissimmo wrote: ↑
Mon Dec 11, 2023 7:48 pm
This all raises super interesting questions about what WebDip should be and who it is for.

I love the old-fashioned early 2000s feel of the forum. I find it extremely refreshing in 2023. It definitely isn't the sort of thing that grows a community all on its own. But it's something unique that keeps me on the site during periods where I'm less active in actual games.

Yep agreed; as above the forum isn't going anywhere and I also enjoy the mid 2000s nostalgic feel.

WebDip could probably grow its player base by taking the backstabbr approach, but it seems like there's other risks to going down this path. Once we're all on Discord, why wouldn't we just play a Discord-enabled version of the game? Being too successful there might mean cannibalizing web-based games.

Well we've had a Discord for people to chat/organize for a long time and it hasn't cannabilized web-based games, it helps people organize games and exist across multiple platforms.
Interested to hear about Discord as a platform for people to play Diplomacy on directly; I thought it was just about hosting community chats / organizing games?

To me it's about focusing on what your platform does best: Discord can't be as good at hosting Diplomacy games with the UI/bots/variants/etc. webDiplomacy can't be as good as hosting a community/chat hosting area with channels, mods, notifications, mobile clients, integrations/commands/bots.

Also isolated communities for webDip,vDip,Backstabbr,PlayDip,etc are bad for everyone: Ideally there'd be a larger unified online Diplomacy community and people would use the platform that's best at whatever they want to do.

Also, I wonder how much market share WebDip could ever realistically take from Backstabbr and other established competitors, some of which are already years ahead in critical areas such as mobile development.

I want a bigger WebDip community because I think this is a fun website doing something unique and interesting. If WebDip were just a clone of other successful Diplomacy implementations, then at a certain point I would no longer be a WebDip booster - I'd have no reason to preference the site over other implementations. If I were very interested in faster games I'd just switch to the many existing Discord implementations. If I were interested in a better mobile experience, I'd just go to Backstabbr.

So the central question is: who is WebDip for? My gut feeling is that this site serves a different segment of players than other Diplomacy implementations. If I had to guess, the community skews towards players who are older, are nostalgic for how the internet was, and who prefer a smallish player base (the alternative being randomly matching with the hordes on backstabbr, never playing the same person twice, etc.). If WebDip exists to fill this niche, then it may forever be handicapped in its ability to grow. But if WebDip evolves and no longer fills this niche, is it even WebDip anymore?

Yep that's a fair take, but hooking in more into other social platforms doesn't mean the existing interface/community goes away: If new users come onboard to this site but were using a different interface/are part of a larger external community I think it would add to the site.
Bear in mind the vast majority of players on this site don't ever come to the forum; they're not part of the webDip community, but the online Diplomacy community, and that's where the growth is.
Doesn't mean no more webDip community, just that the platform has a broader appeal / more users.

Also we do have some things going for us:
- stability (less than backstabbr but more than others),
- variant support,
- bot development,
- instant no-account start/drop gunboat bot games on play.webdiplomacy.net,
- moderately active development,
- sandboxes,
- a mobile-friendly point and click board UI,
- no freemium / ads,
- open source / easily forkable.

Plus an API that allows anyone to develop a new UI that can run on the existing system, either on a fork or against webdiplomacy.net directly: Once a few gaps like user creation, game searching, and game joining are added to the API someone could e.g. write an app for iPhone say, and this new app wouldn't start off empty with another new community, but be able to build on webDip players, games, AI, mods, variants, etc.
This (if it plays out) means more players for this platform, fewer isolated communities, interfaces made and maintained by experts on that platform. More competition between user interfaces, less competition between different communities/platforms.

So I don't see webDip as giving a familiar retirement home to us old fogies (and the analytics don't bear that out). I think it's where some of the most interesting dev is happening.

tl;dr: It's not that we want to try and be more like other sites or disable anything here: But the online Diplomacy community (esp new players) will get more and more centred around modern social platforms that are best at hosting communities, and less fragmented across lots of platforms with legacy community features.
A more unified larger community is good for the hobby, means one community across many platforms, and players can go to whichever platform / interface is best for what they're interested in at the time.

by **kestasjk** » Tue Dec 12, 2023 1:49 am

CaptainFritz28 wrote: ↑
Mon Dec 11, 2023 4:13 pm
I'm an oddball on my generation, but as a high schooler I will note that I greatly prefer an on-site forum to discord or reddit. I don't think it needs much if any changing, but I do urge you not to remove any of it in favor of some "nuetral" social media platform.

Yep I like having our own forum too, it's not going anywhere, but I don't think it's going to grow the community here or that it's where things are going. People over the last decade have migrated to Reddit / Discord, that's where online gaming communities tend to end up these days and with those kind of trends you've got to roll with it / embrace it or get left behind. (Luckily it kind of takes care of itself, but we could embrace it more and try to integrate the site in a bit.)

But yeah not to worry; like with the old map even as newer functions come online the forum will stay.

by **Esquire Bertissimmo** » Mon Dec 11, 2023 7:48 pm

kestasjk wrote: ↑
Sat Dec 09, 2023 8:56 am
Regarding your specific thoughts on the forum; based on stats I looked at a while ago, and the trends I see on various sites, I do think built-in forums are a bit of a 2000s/2010s thing that is becoming increasingly old fashioned. I don't think any amount of effort put into the forum would really revitalize it; I think simplifying it, some nice new features etc might improve things a bit, but I think the future is Reddit/Discord.

For Diplomacy in particular the community is split across so many sites; I think the best approach is to focus on being the best site to play Diplomacy on, let the community exist on a platform neutral place like Reddit / Discord, and make it easy to link accounts here to accounts on social platforms / integrate in with them.
We'll never be as good at hosting a community as those sites, so let's focus on Diplomacy and leave that to them. (I think backstabbr took this approach, minus the linking/integration, and it worked well for them.)

Not saying the forum isn't important and a good place to discuss site-specific stuff.. But I don't think it's how you grow a community in 2023.

This all raises super interesting questions about what WebDip should be and who it is for.

I love the old-fashioned early 2000s feel of the forum. I find it extremely refreshing in 2023. It definitely isn't the sort of thing that grows a community all on its own. But it's something unique that keeps me on the site during periods where I'm less active in actual games.

WebDip could probably grow its player base by taking the backstabbr approach, but it seems like there's other risks to going down this path. Once we're all on Discord, why wouldn't we just play a Discord-enabled version of the game? Being too successful there might mean cannibalizing web-based games.

Also, I wonder how much market share WebDip could ever realistically take from Backstabbr and other established competitors, some of which are already years ahead in critical areas such as mobile development.

I want a bigger WebDip community because I think this is a fun website doing something unique and interesting. If WebDip were just a clone of other successful Diplomacy implementations, then at a certain point I would no longer be a WebDip booster - I'd have no reason to preference the site over other implementations. If I were very interested in faster games I'd just switch to the many existing Discord implementations. If I were interested in a better mobile experience, I'd just go to Backstabbr.

So the central question is: who is WebDip for? My gut feeling is that this site serves a different segment of players than other Diplomacy implementations. If I had to guess, the community skews towards players who are older, are nostalgic for how the internet was, and who prefer a smallish player base (the alternative being randomly matching with the hordes on backstabbr, never playing the same person twice, etc.). If WebDip exists to fill this niche, then it may forever be handicapped in its ability to grow. But if WebDip evolves and no longer fills this niche, is it even WebDip anymore?

by **CaptainFritz28** » Mon Dec 11, 2023 4:13 pm

kestasjk wrote: ↑
Sat Dec 09, 2023 8:56 am
Regarding your specific thoughts on the forum; based on stats I looked at a while ago, and the trends I see on various sites, I do think built-in forums are a bit of a 2000s/2010s thing that is becoming increasingly old fashioned. I don't think any amount of effort put into the forum would really revitalize it; I think simplifying it, some nice new features etc might improve things a bit, but I think the future is Reddit/Discord.

For Diplomacy in particular the community is split across so many sites; I think the best approach is to focus on being the best site to play Diplomacy on, let the community exist on a platform neutral place like Reddit / Discord, and make it easy to link accounts here to accounts on social platforms / integrate in with them.
We'll never be as good at hosting a community as those sites, so let's focus on Diplomacy and leave that to them. (I think backstabbr took this approach, minus the linking/integration, and it worked well for them.)

Not saying the forum isn't important and a good place to discuss site-specific stuff.. But I don't think it's how you grow a community in 2023.

I'm an oddball on my generation, but as a high schooler I will note that I greatly prefer an on-site forum to discord or reddit. I don't think it needs much if any changing, but I do urge you not to remove any of it in favor of some "nuetral" social media platform.

by **kestasjk** » Sat Dec 09, 2023 8:56 am

Marlinspike wrote: ↑
Fri Dec 01, 2023 10:05 pm
I guess it comes down to whether or not the purpose of the forum is to support WebDip gameplay and grow the community of Diplomacy players. I would argue that this forum is distracted/distracting from that purpose in a variety of ways.

Personally, I prefer this platform and think it’s a shame that there is so much distraction. The forum *could* be a valuable tool for the development and growth of the WebDip community, but there seems to be a lack of capacity to make it so.

Fixing this Announcement sub forum is trivial. How about fixing the Mentor program?

I see so much potential and opportunity here at WebDip, yet, here we are.

BTW - I first joined WebDip back in 2014, then dropped out. Now I’m back and I’m totally hooked on playing ai/bot and really like the improved interface. I want to get more involved in the community, but…

Welcome back. Thanks for pointing out the announcement thing, I've removed the start new post permission for users for this forum.

Definitely agree there's unrealized potential in the site. As I wrote you via e-mail in ~2012 I considered this site to be feature complete; after variants and translation support I thought the site had everything it needed so I dropped away and left it.

Since then there are Diplomacy playing AI is available, detecting and handling cheaters isn't as simple as people have got more savvy about VPNs etc, mobile compatibility is more important, authentication / account management can be tied to Google/Facebook/Apple/Microsoft/etc, the expectations for a decent web UI is different, and site communities are less centered around site web forums and more loose around Discord / Reddit.
So now there's a lot to do, but I have a lot less time than even 10 years ago..

But I am chipping away at it.. This year we got the mod forum in, suspicion / relationship declaring is mostly done, modernized cheater data collection/processing, getting the mod request backlog/list under control, sandbox games, live/continuous backups, cloudfare/CDN, and getting full-press AI running (if not yet fully stablized/optimized).
That's not too bad for 1-4 days of dev time every 4-6 weeks.

The analytics are also surprisingly good, better than I would've expected; there's a lot to do but we're headed in the right direction. (I think the playdiplomacy.com hack likely helped our numbers last month, though I do feel bad for Dippy and the team there.)

Depending on what happens at my day job next year I'm hoping to take some extended time off at some point so that I can get the site back to the feature-complete state I considered it in back in 2012.
Would be great to have it at a point I consider feature complete again, and have a team of mods that can easily manage the site without a major time commitment, by webDip's 20th birthday in December 2025.

After that I'd start a project to try and tie together the scattered Diplomacy community by making it easy to play games across sites.
In the process it'd provide an API so if someone wants to make a great phone/tablet/AR/desktop/web Diplomacy app they don't have to start a new community/backend, but can focus on the UI and launch with an active community.. But that's a long way away.

Regarding your specific thoughts on the forum; based on stats I looked at a while ago, and the trends I see on various sites, I do think built-in forums are a bit of a 2000s/2010s thing that is becoming increasingly old fashioned. I don't think any amount of effort put into the forum would really revitalize it; I think simplifying it, some nice new features etc might improve things a bit, but I think the future is Reddit/Discord.

For Diplomacy in particular the community is split across so many sites; I think the best approach is to focus on being the best site to play Diplomacy on, let the community exist on a platform neutral place like Reddit / Discord, and make it easy to link accounts here to accounts on social platforms / integrate in with them.
We'll never be as good at hosting a community as those sites, so let's focus on Diplomacy and leave that to them. (I think backstabbr took this approach, minus the linking/integration, and it worked well for them.)

Not saying the forum isn't important and a good place to discuss site-specific stuff.. But I don't think it's how you grow a community in 2023.

by **Marlinspike** » Sat Dec 02, 2023 2:02 pm

Bug report submitted here: https://webdiplomacy.net/contrib/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=5004

by **Marlinspike** » Sat Dec 02, 2023 1:45 pm

I just noticed the description of this sub forum is “ Site announcements from the moderator team go here.” That makes this issue a bug, not a feature! I’ll submit a report.

I couldn’t remember my old username before I created this account. I’ll disclose the relationship and promise not to use the old account.

by **JECE** » Sat Dec 02, 2023 5:10 am

Marlinspike wrote: ↑
Fri Dec 01, 2023 10:05 pm
BTW - I first joined WebDip back in 2014, then dropped out. Now I’m back and I’m totally hooked on playing ai/bot and really like the improved interface. I want to get more involved in the community, but…

You really should be using your old account, not this one. There is still a strict "No Multi-Accounting" rule. Ask the mods for help to regain access to your old account.

If you like what webDip was like in 2014, you should check out vDiplomacy.

by **Aristocrat** » Fri Dec 01, 2023 11:38 pm

There are people who want to support (with forum moderation, game moderation, etc.). The lack of action is on the site admin side getting those new people onboarded AFAIK.

by **CaptainFritz28** » Fri Dec 01, 2023 10:41 pm

True. It can be distracting. But to a certain extent, I think that that is part of its purpose. It is meant to be different from the rest of the site. But I think what you will notice if you stick around longer is that people do ask questions on the "Diplomacy Advice" and "Diplomacy Strategy" subforums, and they get answered. That and other things like it seem to fulfill the supporting the community role. Changing the announcements subforum, I don't think, will really affect that.

I do agree, though, that the mentor-novice program should be reinstated. I also think moderation needs better and more frequent checks. There are some things to be fixed on this site, certainly, but I don't think restricting all access to announcement posting is one of them.

by **Yonni** » Fri Dec 01, 2023 10:40 pm

Be the change you want to see in the world, Marlinspike. I'm sure they're welcome your support.

by **Marlinspike** » Fri Dec 01, 2023 10:05 pm

I guess it comes down to whether or not the purpose of the forum is to support WebDip gameplay and grow the community of Diplomacy players. I would argue that this forum is distracted/distracting from that purpose in a variety of ways.

Personally, I prefer this platform and think it’s a shame that there is so much distraction. The forum *could* be a valuable tool for the development and growth of the WebDip community, but there seems to be a lack of capacity to make it so.

Fixing this Announcement sub forum is trivial. How about fixing the Mentor program?

I see so much potential and opportunity here at WebDip, yet, here we are.

BTW - I first joined WebDip back in 2014, then dropped out. Now I’m back and I’m totally hooked on playing ai/bot and really like the improved interface. I want to get more involved in the community, but…

by **CaptainFritz28** » Fri Dec 01, 2023 4:30 pm

Fair points. I suppose if no one else thinks it an issue, it isn't really an issue. If an announcement is made by the mods, people will see it. If they don't, then it wasn't important enough for the mods to put it on the front page of the site, in which case it wasn't all too important to the average WebDipper in the first place.

And to Marlin, Bert raises a good point. If discussing PP sauce cups doesn't attract you to the forum... perhaps you'd better stick with just playing Diplomacy on here. On the other hand, you could add your voice to the cacophony of opinions that is the politics subforum, or just bring up your own topics (as you have been, which I commend you for).

by **Esquire Bertissimmo** » Fri Dec 01, 2023 4:14 pm

CaptainFritz28 wrote: ↑
Fri Dec 01, 2023 4:01 pm
Perhaps, and I think this is what Marlin is getting at, there should be a forum where announcements go and can't be responded to, keeping them in chronological order and restricted to the mods. Meanwhile, each announcement would also be posted here, allowing for discussion. All it would take is the creation of a new forum with the ability to post restricted to mods (called "Announcements"), the changing of the name of this forum (to "Announcement Discussion") and a copy and paste of each announcement posted by the mods in one to the other.

The old fogeys, who are *the* core constituency on WebDip, are happy with the imperfections. There seems to be extremely limited development time. And besides, I'm struggling to think of a recent official announcement that would need highlighting in this way.

Moreover, I think the PP Sauce discussion is fun and it serves as a fairly representative introduction to what this forum is like

by **CaptainFritz28** » Fri Dec 01, 2023 4:01 pm

Perhaps, and I think this is what Marlin is getting at, there should be a forum where announcements go and can't be responded to, keeping them in chronological order and restricted to the mods. Meanwhile, each announcement would also be posted here, allowing for discussion. All it would take is the creation of a new forum with the ability to post restricted to mods (called "Announcements"), the changing of the name of this forum (to "Announcement Discussion") and a copy and paste of each announcement posted by the mods in one to the other.

by **Octavious** » Fri Dec 01, 2023 3:40 pm

Jamiet99uk wrote: ↑
Fri Dec 01, 2023 9:28 am

Marlinspike wrote: ↑
Thu Nov 30, 2023 4:00 pm
Only moderators should be authorized to post announcements and the comments should be closed to keep it clean. Discussion about announcements should take place in a forum. This keeps announcements in chronological order.
Who put you in charge?

Awfully bossy and opinionated for a new player.

Indeed he is. Impressive stuff

Announcements should only be posted by moderators

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