[Sug] modify announcements - Earth Empires Forum

BobbyATA

Member
2385

Aug 8th 2013, 11:48:36

I only realized game play changes were made the other day thanks to an offhand remark from Xin on primary talk. THe problem is that there are new posts on announcements all the time b/c people are just replying to old threads so I never know when new/important threads are introduced. I'd suggest having announcements be admin only and then having separate discussion threads for each announcement in B&S.

This way it is clear when there are new announcements. This is important for non 1A players who don't have a clan to rely on for the heads up.

Xinhuan

Member
3728

Aug 8th 2013, 11:58:27

Or you can click on every link so the browser marks the links as "visited" and displays it in a different colour. A new post in that thread causes the link to change, and it becomes unvisited.

Atryn

Member
2149

Aug 8th 2013, 12:06:55

It would be nice if there was an actual single location for Release Notes... discussion could still occur on the forums but the Release Notes could be the authoritative history over time.

elvesrus

Member
5060

Aug 8th 2013, 12:22:19

there is that blog link up top that hasn't been used in 3 years

Originally posted by crest23:

Elves is a douche on every server.

Grady

Member
107

Aug 8th 2013, 12:35:41

I would like to add that the recent announcement topics names are overly generic. Topic names like:

"Changes for upcoming resets"
"Immediate Changes & Rolling Changes"

are pretty meaningless and difficult to be tracked later. Especially when posts are sorted by last reply dates.

BobbyATA

Member
2385

Aug 8th 2013, 12:40:05

agree w/ Grady.

qzjul

Administrator
Game Development
10,264

Aug 8th 2013, 20:32:23

fair enough on both points; what would you suggest for naming Grady?

Finally did the signature thing.

blid

Member

EE Patron
9319

Aug 8th 2013, 21:22:28

New announcements could be sticky/locked on all forums, and then discussion can take place on announcement forum.

For new names, just add the dates. Aug '13 changes for upcoming reset

Originally posted by Mr. Titanium:

Watch your mouth boy, I have never been accused of cheating on any server nor deleted before you just did right there.

Grady

Member
107

Aug 8th 2013, 22:36:25

Thanks qz. I would suggest giving the topics a version number, so we could at least tell which changes come first. Dates are ok but not as easily compared.

Then if the bulk of the update is centered around particular topics, add them to the thread name.

e.g.
Ver3.1 Updates to Attacks and Building Cost

qzjul

Administrator
Game Development
10,264

Aug 8th 2013, 22:37:37

hm interesting idea; i like it :)

Finally did the signature thing.

qzjul

Administrator
Game Development
10,264

Aug 8th 2013, 22:42:18

i could go back and try to give them version numbers heh... that'd take a bit...

Finally did the signature thing.

BobbyATA

Member
2385

Aug 9th 2013, 2:11:03

Thanks qz!

locket

Member
6176

Aug 9th 2013, 8:02:44

Some games have had a link to changes on the main page with a date beside them

Xinhuan

Member
3728

Aug 9th 2013, 8:43:52

I think adding a date to the announcement is sufficient:

[6 Aug 2013] Changes for upcoming resets
[6 Apr 2013] Immediate Changes & Rolling Changes
[27 Jul 2013] Minor change to authentication & captcha

qzjul

Administrator
Game Development
10,264

Aug 9th 2013, 16:59:19

Originally posted by locket:

Some games have had a link to changes on the main page with a date beside them

We kindof have that with the blog, but it's annoying to use the blog; we'll see if I can modify announcements to be in that sort of format perhaps

Finally did the signature thing.

Obvious

Member
117

Aug 11th 2013, 13:50:54

This raises the question why not a trouble ticket tracker of some kind?

Also fairly surprised that there is no private source control manager, why not?

These are all things that for a day spent in research and deployment could improve efficiency and ease of management for the lifetime of the project. The components are all free and your time and effort will be repaid quickly.

qzjul

Administrator
Game Development
10,264

Aug 11th 2013, 13:58:59

We had a ticket system, but nobody used it, as using B&S was simpler apparently....

We use git for source control, hosted on the EE server =/ That's why there aren't really "versions"; we started on SVN, so there were commit numbers, but now it's just hashes

we have our own numbers for the large changes, as you'll note in server details, "changeset 10"; this is the 10th major changeset excluding the larger feature changes which are often server specific

Finally did the signature thing.

Obvious

Member
117

Aug 11th 2013, 14:52:44

Originally posted by qzjul:

We use git for source control, hosted on the EE server =/ That's why there aren't really "versions"; we started on SVN, so there were commit numbers, but now it's just hashes

Well true without the ticket tracker you are left with tasty hashes and no easily automatic way to keep version.

What you can do though is a txt file that is part of the source and use a post-merge hook to increment it.
This way you are pulling what ever is centralized and adding to it and pushing it back. As is anyone else.

Also I never remember a ticket tracker? Was it internal only or just not advertised well?

P.S. Only issue is that everyone has to use the hook.

qzjul

Administrator
Game Development
10,264

Aug 11th 2013, 21:10:14

the ticket tracker was trac, with SVN; but we'd abandoned it long before we moved to git...

It was mostly internal, we had initial ideas of getting a moderator to transfer stuff from B&S to the ticket system, but that just never happened =/ going through B&S was easier; I *have* definitely considered customizing the B&S forum to be a pseudo-ticket-system, for convenience, but haven't gotten to that (also I'm working on upgrading the forums anyway, don't want to fork my dev process that much)

Finally did the signature thing.

Obvious

Member
117

Aug 12th 2013, 7:54:51

Yeah, I think that would help a lot with organization.
Comments could still take place but you would have the extra fields available to organize and run meaningful queries.

I miss the days of SVN and meaningful revision numbers. Moving to GIT is why I built my own tracker so I could have meaningful versions again.

Xinhuan

Member
3728

Aug 12th 2013, 8:17:27

You could use Mercurial (which is very close to git). Every commit comes with both a revision number (like SVN) and a hash (like git).

Obvious

Member
117

Aug 12th 2013, 9:09:05

hg is where I wanted to go. It has pretty much the same feature set and as you said revision numbers. I also find the windows gui client better and it has modules for the IDEs I use for free.

Securing it was a nightmare though and in the end I played with git and found the server side stuff easier. The silly part is I still ended up writing an apache module for git.

When I get more time I am going back to play with hg.

blid

Member

EE Patron
9319

Aug 12th 2013, 14:24:47

It's not hard to edit some thread titles with dates, I wonder if this will ever happen

Originally posted by Mr. Titanium:

Watch your mouth boy, I have never been accused of cheating on any server nor deleted before you just did right there.

qzjul

Administrator
Game Development
10,264

Aug 12th 2013, 16:44:35

the revision numbers was what i thought would take some time, esp for the older ones....

I'm working on the forums currently using the new game framework i'd worked on all last year + pang's new UI, so we'll see about it at some point then

Finally did the signature thing.

Xinhuan

Member
3728

Aug 12th 2013, 16:53:53

The revision numbers aren't necessary. 99% of EE doesn't even know what changesets are.

blid

Member

EE Patron
9319

Aug 12th 2013, 17:01:55

Yeah just throw dates into the titles of the first few game change threads you see

Changes for upcoming resets
Immediate Changes & Rolling Changes
Minor change to authentication & captcha

takes all of 10 seconds. If you find it easy enough you can do all of them in under 5 minutes probably

Originally posted by Mr. Titanium:

Watch your mouth boy, I have never been accused of cheating on any server nor deleted before you just did right there.