Long term health of mafiascum

[Muffin]

Everyone here dismissing "web 2.0" as a fad need to go do some reading. Some of these design trends are very functional. PHPbb is notorious for having terrible design. Look at all the extraneous cruft on the page. "Who is online" and "Administrative team" links. Three separate links to UCP, Inbox, and "view my posts" which really should all be on a sub-page or in a collapsing menu. The FAQ link is actually a link to "rarely asked questions". There's a text-size widget when every modern browser has a zoom function built in.

Now compare to something like a blog post on medium.com which emphasizes the content: https://medium.com/@timo.loescher/my-ex ... e3df46dcad

It's easy to read. It's simple and there are no extraneous UI elements. The elements that are present deserve to be there.

I feel like if sitechat is gonna have a mafiabot in it, we might as well create our own irc server and put a bot there.
Also if the site skin structure is being redesigned, it would be cool to have an index page announcing games in signup.

i sort of agree that an irc thing would be better since it would enable direct use without requiring navigation to ms.net
but we'd need to integrate that into the site as well ofc

Agree. The site chat just doesn't really feel solid, and teeny little tabs at the bottom of the screen make for pretty bad UX in my opinion. It really only serves to clutter up the page, and IRC has the advantage of being usable from multiple platforms (including mobile) without requiring you to keep your browser open. I've been using IRC since the 90s, and it's an excellent protocol with many many many excellent clients available on every major computing platform. If an IRC server happens I will gladly help set it up and run it.

[Muffin]

i sort of agree that an irc thing would be better since it would enable direct use without requiring navigation to ms.net
but we'd need to integrate that into the site as well ofc

Forcing navigation to MS.net is the point.

Isn't building a healthy community the point? Pageviews themselves are not really an important metric, and quite frankly it's just a really poor user experience to have to keep a browser tab open if you want to stay on chat IMHO. IRC is similarly much more suited to chat-mafia than the current iteration of site chat. It has better and more finely-grained permissions when users make their own channels, and using eggdrops or services it can be easily extended by regular users on a per-channel basis without requiring MS.net developer time.

Seems like a no-brainer to me, actually.

[Muffin]

How so it seems pretty straight forward. Just implement common forum mechanics into chat mafia. Obviously different times and such.

+1

It would not be super hard to make a syntax where players can define new roles and have a bot run the game and handle voting/deadlines automatically. For Normal games in particular it wouldn't necessarily require a human moderator at all.

[Muffin]

It's not about page views. It's about those communities -not- being MS. Any sub community like that turns into its own thing given time.

1. Only because they do not come under the current definition of MS. If the definition of what constitutes MS changed to include chat mafia, then they would be part of it.
   
2. It wouldn't necessarily be a sub community. It's easy to integrate IRC into a web page for those who like to do it from in-browser, and the web clients are reasonably full-featured.

Honestly this just sounds like "Not-Invented-Here" Syndrome.

[Muffin]

When the current chat was made, it was a conscious decision to make our own protocol rather than adapt an existing one.

Okay, and I understand that you or others might not want to part with the code you spent time on.

But

if

chat-mafia is going to become a thing here, then it seems much better from the user's perspective, and by that I mean better for the community and its health, to use a chat that doesn't depend on

1. You having enough time to develop the thing to the point that it's usable for chat mafia
   
2. You having enough time to fix inevitable bugs in a timely manner
   
3. Having a browser always open

and is extensible, scalable, etc.

Having an "official mafiascum.net IRC server" would not take serious server resources. You're looking at less than a thousand users, and it would certainly require less server time than constant database writes/fetches when live games are run on the forum. You can make it irc.mafiascum.net and it would be super official, and definitely "part of MS".

[Muffin]

Me and kison put the chat together in like a week. I don't have a strong attachment to it if there is a better option. I disagree with your solution being a better option. I'm not being biased by my work investment in my code because we considered the option before the code was written.

The bulk of the work required would be in things like a mafia bot, which would be needed independent of the platform.
Cosmetic changes aren't going to take a serious amount of work if that's where issues primarily lay with the current chat.

Assuming a mafia bot can't be found in some open source repository, I will help write one. The site chat needs more than cosmetic changes to be usable for mafia games IMHO.

[Muffin]

Chat-based games are a Wild West. Standardizing them to match our ideas of Normal games would require tremendous debate.

?

How so it seems pretty straight forward. Just implement common forum mechanics into chat mafia. Obviously different times and such.

We implement common forum mechanics: the computer only ends phases on majority, implements normal roles as we know them; everyone agrees to NAR or some other universal night action resolution; we use the chat we have now with minor modifications; etc. etc. (Already, we're doing things differently from most F2F and many IRC players we'd want to attract.)

What happens when players disconnect? Do we punish the account, or inflict a waiting penalty, or assume a good faith wifi problem and do nothing?

Do we enable a private message or whisper system? Do we ban private messages in play and trust users not to cheat? Do we change the chat so that users can't privately message each other? If someone threatens me via PM on site, I can report the PM; how do we enforce our site rules on chat?

How do we make games? Do we have a queue, or do hosts make games to which players join, or can players join in private first and then join a game? Do hosts make setups and then post them, or is there a fixed list, or do players haggle about the setup while they're in sign-ups? ('Host' as in the first player in the room since the computer handles admin.)

Since forum games are kept on the wiki, do we need ranks for chat games? Do we treat them casually, without records? Is system more like IRC or epicmafia? Surely we don't keep logs of every chat game? How else do we incentivize proper play?

We'll all disagree. Someone (mith et al.) has to decide. All other chat mafia sites scaled poorly and attracted allcaps trolls and griefers. It would take great effort to make something that attracts new, quality users, or else isn't only an IRC for the players we already have.

Most of these seem like secondary concerns. If using IRC, anyone could run a game any way they wanted. All you need is channel operator status.

[Muffin]

Also if we're getting an irc server make sure a post # restriction (Mafia Goon status will be enough) so the spambot doesn't spam up the irc chat.

Depending on which ircd is used you can require all registrations to be verified, restrict channels based on certain criteria, etc.

[Muffin]

Also if we're getting an irc server make sure a post # restriction (Mafia Goon status will be enough) so the spambot doesn't spam up the irc chat.

Depending on which ircd is used you can require all registrations to be verified, restrict channels based on certain criteria, etc.

He's assuming IRC access would be via forum accounts, which is an accurate assumption. He just also understands that sometimes spam bots get past our forum registration.

Yes, I understood both his assumptions. Not sure what your point is.

[Muffin]

Ah, I see. My mistake. I wasn't suggesting manual approval, I see now I should have worded it more clearly.

[Muffin]

Xylbot is mediocre at best, from a UI/UX perspective. Plus as I recall the owner won't give out the source.