Unless I'm very much mistaken (and most of these comments have come from me) then its not known yet sorry.
Last time I asked him, Kestas said that he'd hoped to have it released by now, but more things had crept into the build. In updating some elements you have to change the structure of others, which makes it easier to make other changes. For example, private messages are to be added when before they were going to wait another release or so.
Also, the more that is added in one go the better, as invariably a new release will lead to a period of difficulty as people adapt to the changes. Thus by making more changes at a time this should happen once rather than many times.
I'll ask Kestas if he has any idea how much longer debugging will take

Yup I cant really say when it'll be done. It is definitely getting close to the end of the release now, at the point where Ive stopped taking things apart and it has started coming back together, but as fig says a lot more got pulled into this release than I thought

I've already e-mailed this to Mark, but for everyone elses benefit this is a done and todo list for the next release:

Implemented: E-mail validation, reset password, change e-mail, private messaging, better mod tools, forum and game listings pagination, game listings search, updated FAQ, being able to use multiple tabs without problems, Plura manual opt-out, random country balancing, notifications and home page, better user profile stats, more effective mod tools, page widening and other CSS changes, user civil disorder tracking, XML map interface, and more customizable game searching.

Still to do is the home page with a summary of game and forum updates for your account, a new game panel, visual votes for draws and pauses, an option to allow 7 players or nothing, and perhaps orders auto-update and point and click map (depending on zach and fig which are handling those two respectively)

wow....its like...chocolate covered coding with cherries on top

Thanks for the update!

That all looks so amazing.

In "better user profile stats," does that mean the stats will show what country you played as? Just curious.

sshhhh...you dont want to know exactly what you are getting for christmas do you???

nice stuff !

im not liking the sound of a point and click map though

The point and click map and auto-updates would be great for stopping miss orders, I'd think.

Is the 'user civil disorder tracking' retroactive? In other words, will we all start out with zero CDs? Or has the system kept track this whole time, but you just don't display it yet?

Personally, I don't like the click-map interface...

It will not be retro-active, because, as I understand it, there has not been any tracking of CD in the database.

I'm no-where near done on the map. It won't require boxing everything up like playdip did, so we'll still have a decent shame.
What I envisage is that you'll go on the board page and you'll be able to enter your orders as you do currently as well. However, if you want you'll be able to enable point&click orders and input through that.
As part of this I hope to add in pre-vis of your orders. IE: The map will be able to show the orders you've entered.
Also, map will have a number of other features, such as the ability to change the colour scheme to suit your viewing (such as more extreme colours as some want) and the ability to show/hide different things (units,names,moves,supports,failed orders etc).
Anyway, sadly that will be some time as for now I've had to put coding to one side and deal with my education!

Oh please please bump the color scheme to the front of the line. If I mistake an Italian unit for an Austrian one more time.... There are very few things in life that give me an active reminder than I'm colorblind (normally, you don't know what you can't see, so I am not reminded that I am colorblind) besides Diplomacy.

Just a message of great thanks to Kestas, Figles, etc... You guys put in a ton of time for no money, and the players reap the benefits. I just wanted to make sure I say "Thanks!" and I'm sure everyone else who plays feels the same way!

Hey DJ, I'm so with you there. Especially font colors. I can't tell when it's E or F talking in global chat because they look so similar to my poor colorblind eyes.

yeah cheers lads

Well, I'll see how my work-load goes over Easter Dingle.
I've got a lot of important exams coming up, but if I ignore the work on the interface I should be able to get the colour scheme stuff sorted pretty quickly, and infact now I think about it I might be able to slip a simplified version into the next release.

Awesome! These are all exciting changes! I haven't played in a while, because life got pretty busy for a while (and will continue to be for at least another 3 weeks or so), but I'm excited to play again with the new features!

Sounds fantastic. Just one thing, how would random country balancing work?

One question Kestas: would the Plura manual opt-out mean less money for you to keep the site running?

It sounded like there would be some weighting to the randomness based on previous countries a player had played recently or all time or something.

I just came up with something, sorry if it's too late, but: How about a deadline opt-out, like they have on playdiplomacy? You know, "don't process deadlines" on certain holidays?

What is plura manual opt-out?

Thanks for doing all this guys. ;]

"Especially font colors." Agreed! I can't tell any of the countries in the Global chat. Its why I've never played the 'Global Press' games. I don't know if different font colors will ever be good enough, but just putting the country name before the text: '10:01PM England: Die France Die.'

So, should we expect this update in a couple months, or in a year?

We all need a reminder to donate.

Ginsberg...
you cant rush perfection

> In "better user profile stats," does that mean the stats will show
> what country you played as?
Not at the moment, there are any number of stats you could choose to show so it's hard to decide

> Is the 'user civil disorder tracking' retroactive?
It'll get some but not all, the reason for the feature is that evidence of past CDs are sometimes erased when a new member joins

> Sounds fantastic. Just one thing, how would random country
> balancing work?
Everyone starts off by having a 1/7 chance of getting any country. Every time they play as a certain country their chance of being that country is halfed. When it's time to choose a new country a random number between 0 and 1 is chosen, and each country's chance is subtracted until the number is less than the next country's chance. The order in which players are selected depends on which country has the largest deviation in their chances; the largest goes first (this way those with the largest imbalances will get balanced out the quickest)

> would the Plura manual opt-out mean less money for you to
> keep the site running?
It should still be fine, most people dont notice it. Since the last 2-year payment a few weeks ago we're back in the red but thanks to donors like MadMarx and others, and the people who run Plura, by the time the next payment comes up we should have already made it even with a Plura opt-out, and that makes this place a lot nicer to run

> How about a deadline opt-out, like they have on playdiplomacy?
Why not expand on what you think would be good and how it should work and post it to forum.phpdiplomacy.net?

> So, should we expect this update in a couple months, or in a
> year?
Closer to a couple of months than a year, but Ive never been glad I gave myself a deadline so I won't here

Would it be possible to change the order history page to be compatible with more usual order formats (I would love to cut & paste into jDip, but that would need rephrasing of orders and adding the retreat-build phase). Anyway, great work done and to do.

That wouldn't be a bad idea.
Something that will be added already is a feature that will allow you to get the game data for any turn. This will be used for the new map-rendering, and I don't see why it couldn't very simply be used to write to jDip. Indeed, once I've finished the map off very securely it wouldn't be hard to write a little translator that could import/export the currently viewed map to jDip. Still, that's a very long way off at the moment