Euan Reid's View of 2012

Technical Support - the name in and of itself conjures up thoughts of arcane technowizardry, but really it's less complicated than it sounds. Tech Support's tasks can be broken down into two halves - maintenance and development.

Maintenance is the more time-consuming, but less glamorous, of the two. Changing user titles, updating permissions for RPEs, fixing lost passwords, and generally keeping the site going. This year, Phoenix has moved to generally having pictures and content ratings on RPE descriptions - these have been fairly simple, but somewhat time consuming. Tech Support has been responsible for their upload and implementation. Looking to 2013, the automatic emailing and member pruning system has recently been discovered to have ceased working at some point - fixing that will be a high priority on the maintenance list (thanks are due to Silent Hunter for finding this issue).

Moving on, we have the exciting part of the Tech Support remit - development. There are two main parts to the development agenda. Firstly, and most obviously, the Phoenix posting system. I realize I've been lax in updating the thread about it, but progress has been fairly steady (whilst I've had bouts of no internet, being online isn't a requirement for coding) - we now have a mostly functional core, although it's still undergoing testing. Secondly, we have additional features for the current site. The aforementioned email system was implemented this year, whilst next year we hope to cover two items to start with - one, the standing suggestion of adding badges to show what sims a member is SL and/or GM of, and two, the recently suggested LOA status indicator. Both these will hopefully be coming soon.

Written by Technicial Coordinator Euan Reid - originally in issue #4 of The Burning Phoenix.

The main forum is back up and running

I am pleased to announce that our main forum is back up and running. While we did lose the posts from 19 March to 2 April, everything else appears to be functional.

I'll be moving over my sims ASAP.

New front page

I've created a new Mark 2 Holding Page for Phoenix Roleplaying - this now has links to the blog and our temporary forum.

Phoenix rises from the ashes!

Phoenix is back on the old address! It's only a holding page at the moment, but it should be fully back in the next couple of days.

Ash sent this message by email to Phoenix members and has given me permission to post it here.

Hi all,

Euan and I caught up and covered a lot of ground. He's away at a wedding this weekend, but has already made the first steps on the road to the Phoenix rising from the ashes once again. He's getting started on the real nuts and bolts on Monday and aims to bring us a sitrep and action plan then. Meanwhile, the group Jason assembled now includes Euan as well and has started in on emailing one another sentences including strings of letters like 'SQL' nd 'BigTable' which I'm not tech-savy enough to understand. :-)

But we now have a phoenix.roleplaying google account, which Euan is putting the forum's app engine stuff down on, the details of which can be passed on from TC to TC. He's also putting together a holder page asap, and we'll announce the URL as soon as it's ready. It looks like we don't need to find a host that charges, as google is likely reliable and provides a very good service for free. So those of you who were willing to donate now won't have to, unless you'd like to donate towards advertising costs. I may need to look into legal issues around that, however, before we go ahead, so keep your wallets in your pockets for now!

So, on Monday or soon thereafter, expect updates on how soon the renewed site will be available to post on.

Shalom,

Ash

We'll keep you up to date.

Major technical difficulties

Phoenix is currently experiencing some major technical issues - we hope to sort these out soon.

Site back up again

The site appears to be back up again.

Site down again

Phoenix has gone down again. I will update you with any further information.

Downtime over

The move to a new host is complete; the site is back up. There may be further downtime over the next 48 hours.

Site currently down

Phoenix RP is currently down to our domain servers switching over to a new host. We should be back up shortly.

RSS Feeds

If you want to make sure that you never miss a post in your sims, you could do a lot worse than use Phoenix's handy RSS feeds in whatever reader you use, be it Outlook, Google Reader or whatever. Situated at the top of each forum and thread, you can choose between being notified of new topics or of every single post that appears.

There may be a few hours delay in the posts arriving, but I find this a valuable service for broadly monitoring the plots in the sims I take part in.

Hopefully this will stay in Phoenix 2.0.

Euan Reid outlines Phoenix 2.0

Euan Reid, longstanding tech expert and general all-round good egg, has set out a rough plan for the full version of Phoenix Roleplaying.

It's still very rough and subject to change. A key tenet though, in the graphical sense, will be the option to either view posts as a conventional forum, or in the PARS-esque style many of us are used to from our days at a certain RPing site.


Suggestions can be made here.

Sim descriptions

Euan's adding descriptions to some of the forums to tell you a bit more about the sims.

Great work!

MARS vote declared null and void in dramatic day

In a day of dramatic twists, Chris and Daniel may have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

The 24 hours began at around 10pm London time yesterday, when Chris and Daniel posted their email correspondence with Ash; he had heavily criticised their behaviour over the affair. They thought that he was threatening to publish and acted pre-emptively. The emails included a statement that they would have preferred Ash to make the decision himself:

"If you could give a straight answer as the admin of your club, instead of putting it to vote, we could've gotten this done sooner, democracy doesn't always work and it isn't always the answer."

This caused several supporters to change their votes, the first being Silent Hunter who was on the site at that time.

Early this morning, Robert Longtin, Election Coordinator, decided that the two had changed the terms enough and did not want to run the vote every time, so issued the following ruling:

As Election Coordinator, given that the terms of the lease to be voted on have changed, I hereby declare this vote NULL AND VOID until such time that new terms are settled upon for a new vote. Any terms to be decided are to be processed by Robert Longtin - the Election Coordinator - to be put to a vote. Once the terms are decided, they are to be made available in full to all members and put to a vote.
Once a vote is opened, the terms of all items within a vote are considered legally binding for the purposes of a vote and if at any time changes to the terms are to be made, then the Election Coordinator is required to nullify and void any votes prior to the changes being made on any votes relying on the pending changes.
Once new terms are decided, votes dependent on those changes may be reopened for the same length of time given to the previous vote(s), starting with the date on which the vote(s) are reopened.

Ash later ended the vote and removed the poll: the "result" was 8-14-2, although two of those first votes were by Chris and Dan, who wished them to be discounted. With 22 out of 46 members participating, this was nearly a 50% turnout.

The state of play is now as follows: Ash and Euan will take to negotiate terms with Dan and Chris. If these are agreed, it will go to a vote.

It's been a very interesting 24 hours.

Chris Wilkinson and Daniel Taylor may resign as MARS seems headed for defeat

Chris Wilkinson and Daniel Taylor this morning stated they were considering leaving Phoenix Roleplaying. Their stated reason was that the polling results so far showed a majority against using MARS and so they were not needed.

There are still nine days in the vote and Deborah Leighton Plom, GM & Facebook Coordinator called their departure "premature".

Robert Longtin raised the possibility of no option getting a majority; plans are being discussed at present.

The vote currently stands as follows:

Accept the MARS lease	4	(25.00%)
Decline the lease and develop our own system	9	(56.25%)
Accept the lease on a temporary basis while commencing work on our own	3	(18.75%)

Edit: On further clarification, both players still have accounts and have not made their decision final, so I have edited the headline.

MARS lease vote

In a surprising twist, Chris Wilkinson and Daniel Taylor have asked Euan Reid and the Tech Support Team to halt development on MARS, Phoenix's planned posting system. Instead, they wish to develop it themselves. The options would be a free licence for general use or paying a lease fee for full control of the code.

General Coordinator Ash Leighton Plom has put the matter to a vote, with three options:

1. Accept the lease
2. Develop our own system
3. Accept the lease temporarily while developing our own system

The vote will run for 13 more days and is available in the Tech Support forum; it currently stands 1-3-0.