crazy idea: add a /suggest command in-game. pipe contents to this subforum

[Mumberthrax]

Hardly anybody uses this subforum. Lots of ideas for improvements get discussed in global chat over the course of a revision. How many of those ideas actually get to the desk of the people who could make them happen?

 

People are lazy. Who wants to go through the trouble of logging into a website and make a post for something that should already be on the server? Not a large fraction of people - and that's ok.

 

So give these creative/brilliant/lazy gamers an easy way to give you, the admins, feedback in-game.

 

Example: "/suggest please allow players to modreq fire spread in owned regions"

 

this gets piped into a database, some script posts it to this suggestions forum, maybe the forum specific to the server the command was run in. The post can contain the username of the person suggesting it, a timestamp, etc. and the user gets a link to it. If they want to elaborate or clarify, they can post a response.

 

Extra fancy but not required: give the user the option to receive notifications in-game if they get a response on the forums.

 

Abuse of the command would be treated like we handle any other abuse of nerd services.

[Guest Former Staff]

While I do like this idea and think that it would be helpful, SirTacoface and I are looking to move forward with a suggestion that was contributed at the more recent P community meeting.

 

We'll be looking into some form of regular community surveys for anyone to contribute to. This way we can be a little more proactive with seeking ideas and suggestions. Not entirely sure who submitted this as a question during the meeting but credit goes to them, that masked knight.

[schererererer]

I actually like mumber's /suggest idea a lot - while periodic surveys are useful for gathering information on trends and support for ideas, they can be imposing in a mundane way to people who only wish to share a single thought. A simple command would parallel /modreq in function and gather ideas from a wider variety of people, particularly those who would pass over a more thorough survery. /suggest submissions would not be as useful for judging popularity of ideas as surveys - perhaps combining the two would be a benefit? If /suggest pipes to this subforum, the only downside would be an increased need for moderation (which we have in abundance).

[Guest]

It doesn't sound like a terrible idea, but given the fact you're restricted to such a small number of characters in a command (and given the fact you very routinely have to expand your /modreq into more than one request), having it be an in-game command packaged together might make not make a difference in the end.

 

I like Barlimore's survey idea though since it'd let people who don't really like hashing ideas out on the forum still suggest them.

[Mumberthrax]

just found this: https://github.com/NerdNu/nerdCH/blob/master/LocalPackages/SuggestionBox/commands.msa

 

Looks like a lot of the work is already done.

[Mumberthrax]

So I guess all that's really needed is a convenient way to push the suggestions from that commandhelper persistence database that /suggestion-box is using to the forums or the subreddit or something. I did a little bit of poking around and it looks like the forum software has an API, but I'm not sure how it works yet. https://community.invisionpower.com/4guides/developing-plugins-and-applications/rest-api/

 

This seems to be for version 4 of the forum software, so it might not be useful for the version nerd is using.

 

Commandhelper has the ability to sent data through http easily enough if its more convenient to use the suggestion script itself rather than some external script. http://wiki.sk89q.com/wiki/CommandHelper/Staged/API/http_request#Description

 

There's also the reddit API if you want to go that route. suggestions could be piped into a subreddit pretty easily with just a few lines of CH. could be done upon creation of the suggestion, or upon approval by an admin. May want to do something like /r/ideasformcpublic or /r/mcpublicsuggestions or something rather than the regular sub. I like the forums idea best, but I'm having a hard time finding documentation on API stuff for version 3.4.5.

 

So yeah, this seems very feasible to me as a noob programmer. If you want I can try and cook up a version to shove stuff into a subreddit if the techs are busy with other things.

[Mumberthrax]

you know, just even having a command to dump the suggestions into a pastebin thing would be good. so the server admins/mods can see what's been suggested. there's some CH code in the /book stuff that could probably be just copy-pasted and tweaked a little for doing that.

[Mumberthrax]

I've been derping with CH lately. went ahead and wrote a command to dump the suggestions into chat for admins. /suggestion-box-list

 

https://github.com/NerdNu/nerdCH/pull/29

 

Just need a techadmin to review and merge the pull request and copy the updated file to the servers for it to be live.

[Mumberthrax]

I forgot to comment here. /suggestion-box (and /suggestion-box-remove, /suggestion-box-abuser) has been active on nerd ever since slide wrote it, but after the latest staff meeting challenger merged my previously mentioned pull request and /suggestion-box-list is now available to any admin.

 

This command basically just dumps all the suggestions made with /suggestion-box into the chatbox for the admin to view. The suggestions are grouped by the user who created them. The usernames are not visible, they are hashed into a long string of letters and numbers. Slide wrote the suggestion-box command originally so that issuing it is not logged by the server, so it *should* be pretty darned anonymous if players prefer that.

 

So if server administrators wish for players to use this feedback feature for those one-off suggestions players may come up with while in-game, it now has basic functionality. :)