Utopia Developers’ Update 5th August
Wednesday rolls around so quickly, latest from Brian and Sean below. Comments as usual on the forums :)
Hi everyone,
This will be a short post, since there weren’t many actual questions asked since last week (though there sure was a lot of excitement). So, I’m going to provide an update on progress, try to clear up the censorgate scandal, and then answer the one direct question I could find.
Over the last week we’ve managed to get the bug count on the alpha down nearly to 0, and if all goes well we should have an update to the alpha server deployed this evening, and invites sent out to a 50 - 100 of the registered testers. There are 220 people registered for testing right now, and we hope to have them all invited onto the server within the next week.
There was some confusion as well about our roles versus Roisin’s. Let me confirm again that Brian and I are working on the new code, and that Roisin is still responsible for running the old code. She will remain in charge of that until the old code has completely replaced the new code (when we start a new WoL age on the new code).
Regarding the censor button scandal, hopefully I can clear it all up here. The idea of the censor button was originally borrowed from a different piece of forum software, which supported censoring instead of deleting. The rationale seemed sound - it limits the power of the moderator, making it impossible to delete posts without a trace (the worst form of censorship). Instead, it called a spade a spade (i.e., called deleting “censoring”), and made it clear to users when it was going on. We copied the feature without too much deliberation, on the basis that the community might like it because they are anti-censorship. Wow, were we wrong. Well, now we have removed it from the game on the basis that there was no point having both a censor button and a delete button. The censor button has been replaced with a delete button. When something is deleted it is gone for good, and the post is removed entirely from the thread.
In other forum-related news, threads are now sortable by subject, last post time, reply count and post count (default is by last post time). We also hope to have a feature to edit or delete one’s own posts available shortly as well. Combined with rich text formatting, these are significant feature improvements over the current forum, and we hope that people will enjoy them.
So, leaving censorship behind us hopefully, I found just one direct question in the thread (that was actually directed at us):
Ezzerland: Can you guarantee us that this age will last the exact allotted time you have give us and that if it cannot you will be prepared (or Roisin will) to end the age on time and restart another?
No, we’re not willing to give you that guarantee. We can guarantee you that we are being entirely open and honest with the community, and we can guarantee that we believe that this age will end on time and that we believe the new code will be ready. But if one of us is hit by lightening and the other by a bus, then there might be a problem. If only one of us was to get killed in a freak accident, then the other might have to make a choice about whether to delay the next age by a week, or restart and delay new code by months. That would be a tough decision, but hopefully we won’t have to make it.
Bottom line is that the new code should be ready with time to spare.
–Sean
[Brian: Looks like we have individual personalities now. If I get struck by lightning I want the code to be cremated with me.]