Peace offering
Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2013 9:02 pm
The discussion thread on the reinstatement policy got more heated than it should have. As is plainly apparent, I feel strongly about making it as easy as possible for retired duelists to come back and duel at rank. Tass and Lem did a much better job than I as to explaining why, but in a nutshell I think it occasionally leads to those duelists sticking around for a while and that such a result would be very good for us.
That said, I ran astray on a couple grounds. Obviously there's no vindictiveness on Apple or Norah's part towards inactive folks, moreover they are trying to do their best for the sport. I think we have mildly different visions there (though only mildly), but I never meant to imply either of them would purposefully harm things around here. On the contrary, I think the recent events being sponsored have drummed up interest and participation and they deserve a lot of credit for that.
The second area was a bit of ignorance on my part. I honestly had no idea standings keepers were limited to paging back and forth on the standings archive to find when someone might have last dueled. If I was forced to interact with things using only that tool set I imagine I'd find the process to be a bloody pain in the ass as well. For me it takes literally seconds and so I just didn't comprehend why a reinstatement was a hassle.
So... as a bit of a peace offering, I wrote a search tool that will assist this process at least a little bit. I can't give you your own server with shell access and command line tools that I would use, but this web interface will take a duelists name and search all the recorded standings for them, giving you back the line of text that matched and a link to the file they were found in. The text output isn't always pretty; it's a lot of html or xml code, but the search term will be highlighted so you can pick it out more easily and the link is right there so you can jump into the file and see the rendered version. This combined with the retired list I supplied the other day should help at least a little.
DoS Standings Search Tool
There are DoF and DoM versions as well, since the code is reusable. Jake also has inserted links to these tools on the DZ standings interface:
DoF Standings Search Tool
DoM Standings Search Tool
As always, let me know if there are changes I can make that will make these more useful. As to the other thing, I hope our future interactions will be more conversational.
~Kal
That said, I ran astray on a couple grounds. Obviously there's no vindictiveness on Apple or Norah's part towards inactive folks, moreover they are trying to do their best for the sport. I think we have mildly different visions there (though only mildly), but I never meant to imply either of them would purposefully harm things around here. On the contrary, I think the recent events being sponsored have drummed up interest and participation and they deserve a lot of credit for that.
The second area was a bit of ignorance on my part. I honestly had no idea standings keepers were limited to paging back and forth on the standings archive to find when someone might have last dueled. If I was forced to interact with things using only that tool set I imagine I'd find the process to be a bloody pain in the ass as well. For me it takes literally seconds and so I just didn't comprehend why a reinstatement was a hassle.
So... as a bit of a peace offering, I wrote a search tool that will assist this process at least a little bit. I can't give you your own server with shell access and command line tools that I would use, but this web interface will take a duelists name and search all the recorded standings for them, giving you back the line of text that matched and a link to the file they were found in. The text output isn't always pretty; it's a lot of html or xml code, but the search term will be highlighted so you can pick it out more easily and the link is right there so you can jump into the file and see the rendered version. This combined with the retired list I supplied the other day should help at least a little.
DoS Standings Search Tool
There are DoF and DoM versions as well, since the code is reusable. Jake also has inserted links to these tools on the DZ standings interface:
DoF Standings Search Tool
DoM Standings Search Tool
As always, let me know if there are changes I can make that will make these more useful. As to the other thing, I hope our future interactions will be more conversational.
~Kal