Greetings, everyone.
I have decided to introduce a major change to the TourneyBot moderator (=Tourney Director) system. As I'm sure you're aware, until this change only trusted individuals who applied for the position via email were appointed as TDs.
From now on, however, everyone with a FIBS experience of at least 1000 is able to create and hold their own tourneys.To appoint yourself as a Tourney Director, tell TourneyBot
add moderator. The bot will check your experience and add your name to the list of Tourney Directors. Please make sure to check the
Command Reference and familiarize yourself with TourneyBot before doing so. Also, consider yourself warned - being a TD requires a lot more work and dealing with unpleasant situations than you can imagine before becoming one. Make sure you are ready for this responsibility. You can see a list of current TDs by telling TourneyBot
moderators. To remove yourself from the list, tell the bot
remove moderator.
Since I do not doubt that this is going to be an unpopular change with a portion of FIBS population (most notably the old TDs), I will try to explain the reasoning behind these changes here:
1. When TourneyBot was first created, it made a lot of sense to only trust a couple of reputable Fibsters with it. It was a new thing, I didn't know how it would be accepted, there was a concern of abuse and probably a couple of hundreds other reasons, most of which are still valid today. However, since then tourneys have become a big part of the FIBS community and everyday FIBS life. Whereas before all Fibsters were created equal, TourneyBot essentially split them in two groups - those who could host tourneys and those who couldn't. While I never thought this would be a bid deal, I was apparently mistaken. Being a TD became somewhat of a prestigous thing for reasons that escape me. It's hard work and a lot of whining, but not really much satisfaction, or at least I doubt enough to compensate for it. The 1000 exp requirement is there to ensure that not every newbie has access to the bot moderation, but rather the people who have invested some time into FIBS and are likely familiar with the bot.
2. One of the things that amazed me the most about the TD group was the fact that the worst TDs were probably those who considered themselves the pinnacle of the Improve FIBS movement and whatnot. Several of them apparently only wanted a TD status because they felt like it belonged to them for all the good they had done for FIBS during the years. But they would rarely hold any tourneys, preferring instead to devote their time to useless bickering on this board, whining about don, complaining about other TDs, whining about don, complaining about MadMatt not making enough rules, complaining about MadMatt making too many rules, whining about don, insulting everyone who disagreed with them and whining about don. On the other hand, it was also amazing that those I had concerns about before appointing them as TDs mostly proved to be great at being TDs. I was concerned that they wouldn't be able to handle the technical aspect of TourneyBot, as well as the social implications of being a TD within the FIBS community. But to my surprise, they were the best of it, because they became TDs out of love of holding tourneys and playing in them. Looks like I'm not the best judge to determine who should be a TD, so I'm letting the community determine that from now on - if you don't think someone is good at being a TD, you can choose not to enter that person's tourney and maybe just start your own instead.
3. I sensed a danger of TourneyBot becoming a too-exclusive thing, in the sense of who can hold tourneys and also in who can enter them. There was a bit of a gang mentality among certain TDs in the end - let's ban other TDs who don't agree with us from our closed forum, I want the bot to support a personalized list of enemies so I can exclude all of them from playing in my tourneys etc. This change should do away with that.
4. I do not have the time, nor the will to "support" the TD group. By support I mean to look at who's suitable for being a TD, who's abusing their TD powers, who's active and who's not, to resolve complaints about users and other TDs etc. By letting the community regulate that itself, it relieves me of a huge burden.
5. It gives more people the chance to become TDs and contribute to FIBS in a positive way.
I don't know if this is going to work. While solving a handful, there are infinitely many problems that this change introduces anew. If it is abused too much, I will simply pull the plug on the project as far as I'm concerned (of course, it's Open Source, so there's always a chance someone else might take it up). If it proves out to be a great thing, I will most likely get the motivation to make further improvements back. It's a social experiment of a sorts.
I made some changes to the bot to accomodate for this new system. For one thing, only the admin is now able to ban people globally (as in from any kind of TourneyBot tourney). Only the owners of a tourney type can create tourneys of that type (so only Kari, houtx and gogogiz are able to create Fridays3 tourneys now). You can ban whover you like from your own tourneys, as always. To prevent spamming and scripting abuse and weighing down too heavily on our bandwidth, you are only allowed to send one command to the bot every 2 seconds. A single TD can only hold 6 tourneys per day. These numbers are likely to change as I see how it will be (ab)used. Note that a day is considered a day according to the GMT timezone (so between 00:00 GMT and 23:59 GMT).
All of you may not like this change, some of you might hate it. There is always a possibility of starting your own tourney bot on FIBS, if you are one of those control freaks that feel the need to have everything on FIBS under their control. But just to put myself in the clear here, I cannot and will not provide technical support for your bot, nor can I take any responsibility for your bot in any sense. You are on your own. I made the code open in hope to spur further innovation and useful additions to the FIBS community, to incite other developers to help out with the project and to ensure that the bot did not disappear if something happened to me. I did not do it for every dissatisfied Fibster to have the option of operating their tourney bot, though I do not particularly care if you do as long as you don't bother me with it. Also note that all of the current TDs will keep their TD status, regardless of their experience. (Unless they remove themselves, of course.)
I have not tested the changes too much. Please report any bugs you might encounter as soon as possible. I will update the web page documentation to reflect the changes in the upcoming days.
I'm sure I forgot some things, so watch this thread for updates.
Cheers,
