/tg/Station 13

I was reading wikipedia last night at 1am about separation of the powers and the nz govt and it hit me

/tg/station is a parliamentary democracy

headadmins are the legislature, they reign supreme, elected by the population, they establish statutes (policy) and order the executive branch around, they can also dismiss the judiciary entirely (fork)

admins are the executive, they carry out the statutes and enforce the mechanisms of governance, and they serve at the pleasure of the legislature, who has supremacy over them and chooses who takes what position.

coderbus is the judiciary of a common law system, they are elected for life (not popularists), can interpret the legislation (modify code to support policy) and can establish their own precedence and historical weight to previous rulings (code, which can be overridden by new policy)

all serve at the behest of the host (the monarch) who has ultimate power (can dismiss all branches of govt) but does not use any of their reserve powers by constitutional convention(unwritten and uncodified)

This separation of powers ensures a healthy checks and balances system across the game and community.

However, what can we learn from this (from my perspective)?

1) The head admins should say more about game design through statements/policy comments, that we can interpret
I don't get a lot of feedback from them(it's usually post a merge and they're mad or annoyed), and I certainly rarely get any direction about design, which kind of leaves me to have my own thoughts and that gleaned from what people are willing to make PR's about, which isn't the greatest.

If headadmins don't want to carry the additional weight they should establish a group/body of people to provide this insight.

Go home oranges, you're drunk.

board moderators are the lowest form of life in the system

Make sure no Catholic terrorists try to bomb the tg house of commons

oranges wrote:
1) The head admins should say more about game design through statements/policy comments, that we can interpret
I don't get a lot of feedback from them(it's usually post a merge and they're mad or annoyed), and I certainly rarely get any direction about design, which kind of leaves me to have my own thoughts and that gleaned from what people are willing to make PR's about, which isn't the greatest.

If headadmins don't want to carry the additional weight they should establish a group/body of people to provide this insight.

a lot of times, most headmins don't want game design to change/ have no incentive to do so. You've given no direction since the headmins don't consistently check open PRs and often those PRs make their way over through word of mouth. This puts you in a situation where you have all these decisions available to you and, for better or worse, you sometimes make a decision without asking the headmins since they often won't give their opinions about how they feel about some features.

This isn't bad, but frankly headmins aren't involved in code changes since that's how the job description has been for the past few elections. It helped to have a design lead or whatever kor was before, and he was headmin as well so that was useful.

Still, there is no responsibility to design the game and often times headmins become too busy with policy and other bullcrap to give direction to you. The people that elect headmins also want a lot of different things and, honestly, direction is awful for an elected official (unless shit is like REALLY BAD) and doing nothing usually pleases the largest amount of people (albeit not everyone.)


edit: also, my massive hot take: the election really is just a massive popularity contest.

There's nothing at all wrong with that, it makes people who are really good communicators and people who are able to make friendships easily. Still, what is being a headmin then? Why elect someone for a design job? You're electing people to overwatch the community, not design the game. If you want to hire a designer, give them some tenure to make unpopular decisions.

"design" "lead"

>Codebase isn't actually the secret gazillionare with so much money that they have the entire system in their pockets

CitrusGender wrote:

oranges wrote:
1) The head admins should say more about game design through statements/policy comments, that we can interpret
I don't get a lot of feedback from them(it's usually post a merge and they're mad or annoyed), and I certainly rarely get any direction about design, which kind of leaves me to have my own thoughts and that gleaned from what people are willing to make PR's about, which isn't the greatest.

If headadmins don't want to carry the additional weight they should establish a group/body of people to provide this insight.

a lot of times, most headmins don't want game design to change/ have no incentive to do so. You've given no direction since the headmins don't consistently check open PRs and often those PRs make their way over through word of mouth. This puts you in a situation where you have all these decisions available to you and, for better or worse, you sometimes make a decision without asking the headmins since they often won't give their opinions about how they feel about some features.

I wish they would

edit:[/b] also, my massive hot take: the election really is just a massive popularity contest.

There's nothing at all wrong with that, it makes people who are really good communicators and people who are able to make friendships easily. Still, what is being a headmin then? Why elect someone for a design job? You're electing people to overwatch the community, not design the game. If you want to hire a designer, give them some tenure to make unpopular decisions.

only one of them, and I disagree that they're elected to overwatch the community, they're elected to change it, look at every platform, it's either a platform of some change, or keep on the mean.

code solutions are the best solutions.
let's talk more about code oranges!

Perhaps the headmins (specifically nerv) frustration about the codebase aka oranges was biased since the few times they did try and flex their administrative might, it was on controversial matters that oranges disagreed with them on. You can’t exactly blame them, with “separation of server and codebase is absolute” being thrown in their face often. Still, they themselves do nothing about it because I’ve seen hulk on github once, nerv rarely, and wubli never.

The point of this post? Idk, observations I guess.

everyone knows the codebase is the more influental branch

you got 3 gamers to argue with each other on rules leading to nothing changing

but orange man is going on their wild ride

this is also the reason head admins should not also be maintainers

nervere man agrees that its very obvious with how fast the code is changing and how stagnant the rules are. It leads to some tension and conflict that makes QoL worse for everyone

Y'know I live in america and democracy and all that. But maybe we need a Head-Maintainer or something. So we're not trying to play two different style of "game" at once.

That or make maintainers a vote as well to slow them the fug down

ha ha what if we callled them a head coder

Are people actually complaining that there's too many changes? Changes they don't like, sure, but I've always heard that rapid development was a core strength of ours. New stuff is fun, changes to the meta are fun, having to relearn the game is fun, etc.

MSO's headmin pick should be abolished and, instead, coders should vote between them for a coder headmin.

The coder headmin's job should be less focused on directly making rules changes and more about both communicating the coder intentions to the other 2 headmins as well as helping establish the rules groundwork needed due to upcoming code changes.

If abolishing MSO's headmin pick isn't possible (which is likely. I am still a ssethtider, I don't know the deeper politics as well) then a coder liaison position should be established with the above responsibilities.

I actually like oranges despite calling him bad approximately every 5 seconds but he is not the most approachable man in the world. A link between oranges and the headmins would work best. Preferably someone who is close to oranges and shares his vision.

I think running on a platform of change is silly and usually doesn't even pan out. I ran on a platform of "shit's good as is, I want to stay the course" and got elected, I think people just make all these promises so they can have something to talk about and kill time with. Lord knows almost no one reads the forums, and even I (an idiot who does read the forums) have zero fucking patience for the twenty eight motherfucking candidate debate threads and however many dozen candidate threads this election has.

Maybe doing nothing could be expected policywise but it'd really be the end of this game if the rules continued to stay stagnant while the code changed.

All this escalation is gonna wear down on us once this harsher medbay plan gets finalized.

So what you're saying is that we should elect Plapatin so that he can be the senate parliament.

Parliament just got shut down, this is a dictatorship now

so MSO's the queen of /tg/station?

Arathian wrote:MSO's headmin pick should be abolished and, instead, coders should vote between them for a coder headmin.

The coder headmin's job should be less focused on directly making rules changes and more about both communicating the coder intentions to the other 2 headmins as well as helping establish the rules groundwork needed due to upcoming code changes.

If abolishing MSO's headmin pick isn't possible (which is likely. I am still a ssethtider, I don't know the deeper politics as well) then a coder liaison position should be established with the above responsibilities.

I actually like oranges despite calling him bad approximately every 5 seconds but he is not the most approachable man in the world. A link between oranges and the headmins would work best. Preferably someone who is close to oranges and shares his vision.

we used to do this and my term had a headmin who was also a maintainer, surprise surprise that was one of the only real cases of outright corruption that we had as he flew a bunch of testmerges to fuck over other peoples changes and push his own. it's shit

How do we bug fix maintainer-headmin corruption

IkeTG wrote:so MSO's the queen of /tg/station?

And his weed is the corgis.

Arathian wrote:MSO's headmin pick should be abolished and, instead, coders should vote between them for a coder headmin.

The coder headmin's job should be less focused on directly making rules changes and more about both communicating the coder intentions to the other 2 headmins as well as helping establish the rules groundwork needed due to upcoming code changes.

If abolishing MSO's headmin pick isn't possible (which is likely. I am still a ssethtider, I don't know the deeper politics as well) then a coder liaison position should be established with the above responsibilities.

I actually like oranges despite calling him bad approximately every 5 seconds but he is not the most approachable man in the world. A link between oranges and the headmins would work best. Preferably someone who is close to oranges and shares his vision.

the maintainers used to have a vote, but they would pick the same person every time, so hg had like a 2-3 year term

How dare you forget Aranclano's very serious vote ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Technically that was the host vote, but SoS just gave it to coderbus every time.

COMMUNISM DETECTED