Merit

[AF]

A lot of the issues with people going sour were all utterly preventable, and had internal politics and unfairness at their cause, such as:

- Person A is caught red handed doing terrible things and exploiting protocols, people in power simply deny that person could do such a thing and the case is defacto closed
- Multipage threads whose only purpose was to troll and poke fun at were seen by head moderators and it was deemed no problem was present
- Project and Community leads deciding not to take the lead and make a decision because they waited for a consensus that would never come

All totally preventable, all happening over years like clockwork, none of which would be helped by a merit system. Right now anybody who's active but chooses not to post in the forums is at a major disadvantage in a system like this, and it by its very definition, seeks to identify an elite group that we've decided to name "contributors". We're meant to be an open community anybody can contribute to.

The real solution is getting stuff done and producing stuff we can talk about that isn't just meta-discussion. Most other problems can be solved by communicating the decision process more and increased transparency

This merit code is interesting, but I don't see it being used here no matter how it's tweaked. It isn't an implementation problem, it's the fundamental concept itself, and putting barriers to entry up at a time when we need to bring more people in is unhealthy

[FLOZi]

I think a single boolean is insufficient to convey to outsiders whehter someone is worth listening to or not.

I hope it isn't big headed to suggest I would rapidly gain 'Merit'; Does this mean I should be listened to if I post about the AI interface? I often find myself writing disclaimers.

To pick a sometimes divisive character, Forb would likely gain 'Merit' before too long. When it comes to Mapping or Evo this makes sense; Does it mean he should be listened to when talking about lobby protocols?

I propose the following new smilies (resized appropriately):

:salt:

As in "Take this with a pinch of salt". Allows a user to indicate that they think this is the case but are commenting as a layman or from a possibly outdated perspective.



As in "You can take that to the bank". Allows a user to indicate that they are confident they know what they are talking about.

Pros:

• More fine-grained indication (per post!) if a user is a trustworthy source on a particular topic
• Minimum fuss to implement

Cons:

• Relies on self-moderation of usage
• Relies on accurate self-evaluation of knowledge

[AF]

If we turn it on its head, we're actually discussing who to ignore, something I doubt will end well

[hokomoko]

putting barriers to entry up at a time when we need to bring more people in is unhealthy

+1

[gajop]

There are many issues with the proposed system such as: merit inflation over time, lack of preciseness (one usually has expertise in only some fields, and it's not easy to specify which), closed circle system (it reminds me of academia - where everyone's citing papers of their pals and it's very hard to enter), inherent complexity which makes it hard for newcomes to understand what it means (and they're definitely the target audience to VIEW it, the vets already know who's who), and so on.

The biggest issue is what Silentwings said (repeated).

I also don't understand what problem merit is trying to solve.

Until you find it's raison d'être I think we'd just be wasting time improving a system that's trying to solve an unknown problem.

[Silentwings]

But I was very directly involved in the ZK split. It was me that ...

Ah, now I understand much better where you're coming from.

I'm here to evaluate every alternative proposal and I'm willing to put my code where my mouth is.

I know, I wish I could think of a good one... I'll think a bit more. I'm glad that its triggered work on the forum/website, though.

[Jools]

Well, the obvious benefit with a merit system would be that it flattens the organisation, thus connecting players to gamedevs and enginedevs better. This is one thing many people want.

A flatter organisation is more natural with how we work anyway; now there are many unconnected clusters that do not know what the rest are doing, connecting these would speed up the development a lot I believe.

The problem we have is that we are falling apart.

[abma]

one of the main reasons why server was split was that contributions wasn't handled transparently. the server was overfunded and on the server was a lot private stuff running which produced money, too. the private stuff used >50% of resources of the server and one of the private thing caused lobby server crashes and disconnects. also the server wasn't configured probably (no raid1 configured, but it was propaganda that it is). also the contributions still aren't transparently, i.e. costs for 2014 aren't explained there: http://zero-k.info/Contributions

also see https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K-Inf ... issues/421

in short: a single individual had to much power which is pretty bad for such a project. to not make the same mistake again imo donations and server administration shouldn't be handled by the same person.

[PicassoCT]

Merit ich?
I-Merit?

Can somone sum up the discussion on merit?

[FLOZi]

one of the main reasons why server was split was that contributions wasn't handled transparently. the server was overfunded and on the server was a lot private stuff running which produced money, too. the private stuff used >50% of resources of the server and one of the private thing caused lobby server crashes and disconnects. also the server wasn't configured probably (no raid1 configured, but it was propaganda that it is). also the contributions still aren't transparently, i.e. costs for 2014 aren't explained there: http://zero-k.info/Contributions

also see https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K-Inf ... issues/421

in short: a single individual had to much power which is pretty bad for such a project. to not make the same mistake again imo donations and server administration shouldn't be handled by the same person.

I agree with this 100% (often worried about the concentration of power in hands of licho before, and iirc aired those views publicly) but I don't see how merit as proposed resolves it in the slightest.

[smoth]

Salty in the gaming world has a different context flozi.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=salty

[FLOZi]

Salty in the gaming world has a different context flozi.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=salty

I have literally never heard it in that context.

[smoth]

It still gets used been around a while

[gajop]

Salty in the gaming world has a different context flozi.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=salty

Hey, as long as it's not a surprise no one will mind.

[Jools]

Let's get this discussion back to topic...

I think the summary would be something like this:

Power is concentrated with a few individuals, which many people do not consider sustainable. Introducing a merit concept would share some of that power among several different people, which are semi-democratically chosen, instead of being directly appointed. Basically, the more people you share the power/control between, the more different points of views are taken into account when taking important decisions, and the less vulnerable the management becomes to personal biases. Think of it as not laying all eggs in one basket.

Now we have in principle 2 admins and 4-10 moderators (depending how you count active ones), but the degree of freedom is much less. We also have many cases where the same moderator is i) involved in the discussion ii) reporting it and iii) the one dealing penalties for it. Ok, this is in principle not related to the control hierarchy but flattening it would surely help.

[FLOZi]

Introducing a merit concept would share some of that power among several different people

How?

These people are not made admins, or even moderators, they are just granted access to a (dead) subforum. That is not distributing power. That has no bearing on abmas (informed, key and far more important than the majority of fluff in this thread) point about monetary donations and server access.


To address your snide aside;

Historically moderator appointments are nominated by the public in a transparent and democratic fashion, then the current moderator team elects from the the nominations. I'm not aware of the moderator team ever vetoing a choice made publicly by the forum.

[Jools]

There is no snide, I just tried to report as objectively as I can my impression of the status quo. We all have our own biases so it's impossible to be 100% objective.

More about the nominations: I've never seen any nomination discussion at all, they are to my knowledge made public ex-post. Furthermore, there is no limit on how long someone can be moderator and there is no information about by whom one was appointed.

Granted, monetary issues are more important but equal access (by games) to the forum and to making news releases is also something that most other open source projects with a shared engine would have.

Of course moderators aren't representatives of their respective games, but they often act that way (read first paragraph again).

[smoth]

You are acting like there is an actual powerbase. I can promise you Jools, they come down on people like myself and forb all the time for our flaws in both attitude and temperament, you are not special, please drop the victim complex. Any power that people like flozi have is given, I have not seen flozi abuse any trust the community has given him. In the past years before you started crying about injustice everywhere we had real corruption where the LLC guy ran rampant the forum was a flame war with tons of posts getting deleted outright instead of archived(which would have been better in retrospect clearly) and communities actively trolling anything that was no their favorite project.

The forums have come a long way before you woke up into this newfound paranoia which grips you so powerfully.

[PicassoCT]

You can get away with basically everything if you contribute to the allmende :)

I can tell having got away with everything (including by now Ex-Moderators as raping monsters ingame :) )

There is freedom of speach if you run out of ideas to provoke. And i getting close at times..

[Forboding Angel]

FWIW, regarding power/responsibility structure, imo jools makes some good points.

That said, I don't have any decent ideas on how to make the current situation better.