Sanctioned Userscripts

Before the morpeko thread was closed I wanted to make a similar comment to what I’m doing here(I may have actually responded but I can’t remember). What’s happening here is bordering on the level of anger and indignation that got the morpeko thread shut down. Niet is trying to give you a solution as well as a greater potential for other QOL boosts and the last 70 posts or so have basically been attacking him for doing something nice. I understand the frustration that comes with waiting, but Niet is the only(or one of the only) people running a site this big. You’re going to have wait times. He’s often sarcastic, but I can’t remember any times where he’s been actually rude where it wasn’t previously instigated by users. He’s bordered on condescension sometimes, and maybe that could change, but again he didn’t start the fight. The way some people have treated mods on this site(especially Garthic, I feel because he tries to be nice and ends up getting walked on) is upsetting. I’m pretty sure they can’t legally fight back as much as they deserve to. Imagine you were at a store you frequented, and the manager told the shoppers that he was making at least a temporary solution to an issue you’d brought up. Imagine going up to the manager in person and saying the things you say here in response to his efforts. It’s perhaps a bit of an unneeded analogy but with the way some of you have acted, I feel like you forget that moderators are human and not just words on a screen. Moodawdaw’s point of “treat others the way you want to be treated” is what I’m getting at. From what I’ve seen Niet isn’t starting the fight. He tends to get more sardonic after he’s experienced anger from users. Treat him decently, and you’ll get a better response from him.

I thought that the fact that this was a temporary solution was only elaborated on after the heat was turned on by users? If not, that's my fault I have issues with my memory and if I ever make a mistake I'll own up to that.

Thank you for the quick answer! That does make sense. I am still a bit confused, for the same reason Colorful brought up. I don't quite understand why volunteer art/moderation is on the table, but programming is not? If, for example, one (or more) users who were competent in programming approached you and offered their services free of charge, just to help out on the site, from the kindness of their hearts, would you take their offer? I know ideally you would want to pay everyone their fair share. But as you said, even if it's unfair, you wouldn't turn away from that kindness. Is this kindness exclusive to art/moderation? Is there something intrinsic to programming that changes this approach? Or is it simply the lack of interested/competent volunteers for programming? I'm sure if you made a post asking for volunteers, much like the moderation/art staff posts, there would be at least a few users that would be willing to help. Though, again, I'm very willing to accept this might be a case of me not knowing enough about programming to know it isn't possible. ;w; i really hope i dont come off as willfully obtuse

Valid Criticism and worries being brought up =/= ""Attacks"

@Gumshoe We wouldn't turn away a person on that principle, no. Like I said, just because I feel it's unfair doesn't mean the help would be turned down - it would be greatly appreciated and we'd do what we could to give something back to that person (or people), same as we do for everyone else who helps us. We've just not had anyone offer such a thing with an appropriate skill-set (to my knowledge) and Niet's not been comfortable to ask for such assistance, his reasoning being that when an artist makes an art piece, that's a closed thing - the quality of that art piece doesn't affect the integrity of everything else. With code, one mistake and everything can fall apart (at the moment). Collaborative efforts a whole 'nother beast. He is working on having version control but it wasn't built with it. To touch on-topic of the thread, that's why he's also happy to support userscripts - they're self-contained things and won't break anything if they should happen to fail somewhere along the line. Niet's also said that he detests his own (old) code and wouldn't wish it upon anyone else, let alone himself. Though this is more a jokey point than anything serious.

Mmmm you put one semi colon in the wrong place and watch everything break. That's happened to me more times than I can imagine, and i completely understand why he doesn't want others to help for that reason. Old code, the code of PF1? Or the code we can see with view source? Because if pf1, I didnt' see that code. But the code we can see with view source...mmm I can see what he means.

The code you see is compiled/minified so naturally it's not human-readable. But even the PHP source is... not great. Mostly because my skills have gotten a lot better than they were years ago. Also PHP itself has gone from 5.3 to 8.0 in that time. Lots of changes and improvements, which I haven't been able to integrate into PFQ, which is consequently still just barely running on PHP 7.1, which is a bit of an "oof".

---

Going off on a bit of a tangent here, there's an idea I've been toying with that I kinda want to try, if you guys are interested. We're definitely getting off-topic here but this is the most communication we've had in months so let's not stifle it! I want to try streaming my development work. I have no idea if it'll be any good - I certainly wouldn't be able to interact very much with viewers when I'm "in the zone" working, but I dunno, it seems like it could be fun. Thoughts? Another potential idea would be to have a bit more of a "closed beta" than just showing my moderators stuff I'm working on. By that I mean inviting a few select users to actually join the dev version of the new game and actually get to experience it and provide feedback while it's being worked on. I dunno. Or possibly a special Discord channel for it so anyone can see what's being done? The latter would include things I'm working on for the current PFQ as well. All of this would be next year, by the way. I'm going to my parents' in like a week for Christmas/New Year and their internet isn't the best XD [EDIT] I'm off to bed; it's late XD Might be on my phone but don't expect much more from me tonight :)

it would be pretty cool to watch you coding, niet :0 edit: i do think it might be unfair to only allow certain users (discord/beta) to watch though.

Would this closed beta be kinda like the thing you did back when PF1 was announced to close? Like some select users got like,, tickets(??) or a code(??) to join PFQ and basically beta test the site before it opened to the public? I know I'd definitely be interested in a chance to beta test if you decide to make this a thing :>

Streaming the developmental side sounds interesting, I'd like to see that myself, honestly. As someone who had gotten into PFQ early from PF1, I'd definitely take interest in a 'closed beta' of sorts to test things out.