If we never bring back The Leagues, then I will remain the all-time Premier League champion, so I vote against that.

I've played maybe ~10 games of Diplomacy this year. I think I've been involved in almost that many games of mafia this year.

I've definitely played more Dip than mafia.

me too thanks

So have I; mostly because of a load of live games back in January but hey.

meh, I'll be around for a while.

How hard would it be to add a classic variant like "Fog of war" or "build anywhere"?

Like realistically not condescendingly

I looked at the list of purchasable bonuses that captain meme posted and thought it was satirical, so scanned the five pages of posts, and see an Almighty Mod confirming it's real, and indicating it will apply to all games.

Yes I am an old fuddy duddy.. but the idea that other players can purchase the sorts of advantages described, I regard as heretical horror...I certainly would not want to play in games where such things can occur. I was going to make the suggestion that changes do not axiomatically mean you will gain new members and keep existing members
The purchasable advantages is a good example
Let's take the example of another player being able to read your orders ahead of the move..how is this in any way fair ? Will the player whose orders have been compromised be given any indication that another player has been given access to his orders ?

If "features" like this are introduced I strongly suggest that there should be two classes of games..those with "features" and those without.. so players can choose to be cannon fodder for the wealthy, or choose to play in games where ability, experience, etc determine your fate, but all players play on a "level playing field"

I hear you, MM. Sadly, my days of playing here are pretty much over if there's no way to play in a game where people don't have access to using a bonus.

Captainmeme's post is satirical. We won't be raising funds that way just yet.

I am so bewildered that people would actually fall for meme's trolling, that I am rendered speechless.

You're an idiot if you thought that bo_sox was being serious. How would you even go about implementing viewing all the players' orders when not everyone might have even saved their orders yet? Even if it were possible, ATC certainly wouldn't be able to make all those changes based on the rate of new features being added to this site (not complaining).

It was more bo being a mod and confirming what meme said. I also don't spend countless hours playing Mafia with him so I have no fucking clue what his personality is like.

Enough of hearing from the silly little mods. Where's big Z? He should speak. I have spoken with him before and I know he wants this to be the best Dip site. There's really no reason that can't happen. I know he wants it to remain free, again no reason that can't happen. Let's raise some one time funds and get some dev help and push forward. Maybe we should call the site "AAAWebdip.net" then we would be first in google search.

SEO isn't alphabetical.

There's a bit of a moral issue on telling ATC "thanks for all the unpaid volunteer work you've done over the years but we're going to get someone else and actually pay them to help here too".

Not to mention that hiring a dev costs a hell of a lot more than hosting fees. I believe there have been a couple of donation drives in the past for server migrations but even things like that are very small fish compared to paying someone to do a pretty major job for a while.

Who said ATC can't be compensated too

Then that begs the question. Does this site want to be the best or not? You can't have it both ways.

Paying for two developers makes the second paragraph even more apt. We don't have a big budget here precisely because we don't monetise; nor do we ever plan to.

That's why I suggested a one time pledge drive.

Who knows? Maybe the mods aren't letting on about all they know. When was the last time anyone heard from Zultar? That's right, a long time ago. Maybe Zultar was assassinated, and bo_sox and the other mods are now running the site and secretly working on its monetization. Maybe they'll even find a way to log in to Zultar's account and make his account post the decision to make each game cost $2.

We'd be looking at a four figure there. It's not really something we can expect from our userbase.

Four digit figure*

Also, free is great for why I do here, but being the best will never be attainable.

Can anyone here ballpark what a dev would cost to get the majority of the work done, and the time it might take. Not my area of expertise.

Is that 2k....9k?

Estimating time is also not my area of expertise; but a freelance PHP developer charges between £25-35 *per hour* on average here. And they'd have to spend a lot of time first familiarising themselves with the current code before being able to make changes. That is a lot of hours.

you said 4 figure #, im trying to figure out what that could be.........it has to have been talked about in your secret mod chat room

you are also calculating in sterling.....Aussie dollars are MUCH cheaper

ATC can give better time estimations than I can.

Aussie dollars are cheaper but I expect that Aussie PHP developers probably charge about the same as British PHP developers once the exchange rate has kicked in. I don't believe our economy is that much better than theirs.