Aurelia Notresvace wrote: 11 Oct 2022, 14:40

Opeila Winters wrote: 11 Oct 2022, 14:25 @Aurelia Notresvace
No one stops anyone from posting such a thing themself (for themselves or for others to sign up to). This is nothing that has to be staff run, if you or anyone else wants to do it, go ahead! I think that could be interesting.

The only thing is that yas, those characters would need to be in first year age to be able to be taken by players.

*unless they were inpc

Oh, yes that's right.

@Sirin Liu you are not wrong. It is a bit of work to edit people's trunks, but there is a reason we are doing it.
I think this needs a bit of background information:

1) The Game Master our "neutral ground" basically. We change the poster of the trunks to this account so the students don't have access to them anymore and then edit the trunks when an update form comes in.

2) There is a whole team working on trunk updates and we work as fast as we can. We are people with real lives, so we don't always get to those updates immediately, but we do our best. If you are waiting for an update for longer than 14 days, you can reach out to either Elaine Pendrast or Béatrice Lydursdattir, it shouldn't take that long and rarely ever does.

As for coding- we have standardized trunks and those are the only codes that may be used. There shouldn't be any fancy coding in trunks.

3) Why are we doing this? You mentioned it yourself, to prevent cheating. It would be great to have all of this be based on trust, but unfortunately the internet doesn't work based on trust.

So unlocking trunks for everyone to edit would be a lot more work to us. There are several hundred active accounts and we can't memorize all their stats and keep them in check constantly. We don't get notifications when someone edits their trunk, we would constantly have to check them and we will undoubtedly miss things, because we are only human and stats, not to mention spells and potions- us prefects can't see other people's report cards- are a lot to keep track of.

It is already hard to keep track of people sneaking things into their backstory that wouldn't be approved, but the difference here is that sneaking unapproved storyparts into their ency is something they do at their own risk. If they are caught, they'll have a lot to explain and change and edit and might end up with a big plothole.

Someone cheating with their stats and spells could easily result in unfair results in sportgames and affect whole teams, which would surely take the fun out of it for many. For me it certainly would.

Yup I agree with Opeila about how she explained things. I like how the Game Master is in charge of trunks so that no one can go in and edit stats, abilities and other things. It's more fair and less work for the staff. Because there are so many people who want to change their stats on a daily basis, mostly because they mess up in the beginning. And if players could edit their trunk themselves, they'd instantly change their stats and no one would ever know because since there's no notification, staff would have to go through every single post on the site on a daily basis to check every single player's trunk. That's a whole lot of work that could be avoided if the game master was the only one who could edit the trunks. So I do like this system as it prevents cheating from players regarding changing their stats, abilities etc... there's only 2 issues I have with it.

1) When getting your update approved (back in the past) sometimes it takes a very long time for your update to go through. I'm not saying initially. I mean if you get your update approved right off the bat it doesn't tend to take long at all, like Opeila said it usually takes less than 14 days. However, if your update doesn't get approved right away and it says 'pending' it usually tends to take a long time (longer than it probably should), at least in my experience. I'm not sure why that is, maybe since it says 'pending' people tend to forget about it? Eventually, yes it does get updated but it takes a long time. So imo if you guys wanted to make things better, maybe keep track of the pending updates better and not forget about them? I know you guys have lives and everything, but maybe add a date under the pending ones and make sure you check back on them within 14 days and not forget them!

2) Trunk coding. We use only the standardized codes for trunks now but I see some people every now and then who have different fancy codes, this is mostly because the staff haven't seen them and therefore haven't asked them to change it yet. But yeah, it makes me annoyed a little if I see a code being used in a trunk that I've been told can't be used but I see other people using it.

Other than these 2 details, I'm happy and content with everything!

Also don't forget, with the new trunk code update [x] We can't have items as part of our trunk codes anymore. Explained in prev link.

Some people still having fancy coding is because it used to be allowed. Changing it is a step by step thing here, whenever we spot someone with fancy coding asking for updates, we ask them to change it before we approve.

If you have a pending update post one thing that can be done to accelerate this- and I'm not directing this at anyone personally but I have worked with a few cases that got dragged out- is communicate to the mod who asked for a change when you have completed it.
Yes, there are many updates coming in and one can easily end up being forgotten- we really don't mean to. If a mod still takes unreasonably long (14 days+) you can absolutely poke someone.

I think the main problem with communicating to the mod who asked for a change is that they don't tend to write who is the person who asked for a change. There's no name, at least not in my experience. I had to actually owl someone to see who was the one in charge of my application (this was actually related to my rare talent Parselmouth) because I couldn't figure out who had asked me for the change. All I saw was a note that I had to change this or that but I didn't know who to ask. I found out later when a staff member checked for me. So it's a little confusing at times, especially for new people.

However, compared to the vast other rp sites out there and HP sites, HiO is by far the best one and the one that has pulled together through everything and it deserves the highest praise!

Thank you for your feedback, Kim, I have passed it on to the team.

Clark William Baird-Carter wrote: 11 Oct 2022, 15:42 Also don't forget, with the new trunk code update [x] We can't have items as part of our trunk codes anymore. Explained in prev link.

You can have that list, just not in your Game Master controlled post. I moved Colin's list of items to the post about his wand and collection of stuff. More appropriate there anyway, given Prof Iwasaki's explanation.

To add to the mention of "pending" in any Index area: this means that the staff is talking about your application/edit/update for some reason or another. It's nothing bad, necessarily, just that there needs to be a discussion going on behind the scenes. As Opeila said, staff have real lives. We've had discussions where the team didn't agree, where rules had to be changed, where the Index team members had other obligations at the time and needed time to get back to it later.

You as a player do not need to do anything if your post is marked as "pending". If there is anything you need to do, edit, clarify, etc. you will be contacted either through a note under your post or an owl. We leave this pending notice so you know that we are discussing something.

i was writing a draft in a 'snowflake' forum. my laptop started to get hot. viewtopic.php?p=551317#p551317 my 70-80 wpm typing also became laggy. suggestion to have the option of snowflakes turned off or the absence of snowflakes while writing replies?

my laptop might just be weak anyway. it usually only does this when im on a gif hunt through tumblr.