thatrainbowcity | (no subject)

(no subject)

Hello one more time, Polychromatic!

Voting on our gamewide poll is closed.

The majority of votes were in favor of moving Polychromatic to Dreamwidth.

Therefore, Polychromatic will be moving from Livejournal to Dreamwidth.

And the mods agree that, given Livejournal's recent difficulties and potential future changes, this will be the best course of action for the game.

The move will be taking place on Sunday, January 15. On that day, posting will officially move from LJ to DW.

Furthermore, we are waiving activity requirements for January because of this move.

However, because this is such a change, we have decided to revisit a topic of discussion--namely, should Polychromatic operate in a community-based or a journal-based posting format?

There are pros and cons to each format--journal-based posting allows one to keep one's own content even after leaving a game, but community-based posting eliminates the need for an add/remove list, &c. Please give both sides due consideration and vote in the following poll. We would like you to decide as regards this change. The majority will rule in this poll as in the other.

This poll is open until Friday, January 13th.

[Poll #1809839]

As before, while we would prefer you to use this poll, you may also contact us by email (polychromatic.mods@gmail.com) with your response if LJ is giving you difficulties of any sort.

A few more things:

→ Please join [poly_chromatic], [tampered], [poly_tldr], and [thatrainbowcity] with your character journal(s). These will be our main communities on DW. (Alas, the name "polychromatic" was already taken by a personal journal! How can this be? Also! if the mods of

poly_crack would like to set up a crack comm for Poly on DW, please do. That's all up to you, but spread the word if you create one!)

→ This poll is still on-going, but you may go ahead and post in your DW journal if you would like, but please be aware that some players may only be checking LJ. We certainly encourage crossposting from DW to LJ for the time being. We know the game is kind of on hold while the move is going on. We are working on importing our communities and getting everything set up as we'd like. Moving is something of a gradual process, but we would like to have at least the basics completed by the 15th.

→ We recommend that everyone use poly_chromatic's members list for the time being to keep up with any character posts that may be made on DW. Once this poll closes, we will either rebuild the add/remove list or open poly_chromatic for posting with character journals (and we will be using [thatrainbowcity] for mod posts and announcements). Please be aware that if the game stays journal-based, it may take a day or two for us to rebuild the add/remove list and you may have to use the member list for a little while after January 15th.

→ If you are going to be using a journal on DW with a different username than the one you have now, please reply to the first comment in this post with both your old and your new usernames. Please do not reply if your journal name is the same on both sites.

→ Please comment to the new [Taken List] with your character(s). This will be a fresh start and will help us to update the Taken List.

→ Please bear with us while we work on making these changes. We will do our best to get everything up and running as soon as possible.

We will also be making another post here in POLYchromatic and mirrored on the Dreamwidth equivalent (poly_chromatic) with the results of the poll, what those results will mean, and a few final notes and suggestions before the 15th.

Thank you, POLYchromatic! We'll see you on the other side!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

In other words, the game runs like a comm-based game, with posts and comments on the main community, but players may copy their posts to the character's journal along with a link to the comm for a reference to the comments.

This is an interesting idea, though I think some of the idea behind the hybrid model was so that players could keep the comments as well as the posts in the same place on a character's journal that the player controls--so they'd have this record even if they were to drop the character.

But don't character journals have a higher chance of being deleted/locked (when they join other games) over actual communities/community posts? I mean, if the goal was to keep all the comments in one place and have a record of it for future CR/reference then keeping everything in the comm should be the right answer...

If people wanted to, they could have posts in their character journals to keep track of existing posts in the communities.

I initially thought a hybrid would be a great compromise, imo, but the more I think about it... any hybrids are just terrible. Let's just stick to one format. Keeping both takes away some feature or another that makes each one great and it just seems... redundant in the end.

By the way, cam we actually have a chart on the main post that lists the pros and cons of community-based and journal-based format?

I wouldn't say they have a higher chance, not really. Besides, if someone is looking to detract from anyone's archives by deleting a journal, who's to say that they won't select the easy ticky option that deletes all posted entries and comments? Then everything is gone, no matter if it's journal or community. Plus there's the "chance" of the comm being deleted, threads being deleted, etc etc etc, particularly if we're basing this sort of statistic on a chance of wank. It's pretty even across the board as far as equal chance of deletion no matter the source. I've had both happen to me pretty equally, at least!

I think in the end all we can boil it down to is personal preferences as far as gaming! :)

Edited 2012-01-12 05:10 (UTC)

*nodnods* I guess, in the end, if a person wants to have their posts/comments disappear, they can do it anyway...!

I don't mind either options... just... no hybrid...

Yeah, exactly :) A lot of the updates that's happened over the years at both LJ and DW has allowed for full and total control over a person's journal entries and comments, so if someone really doesn't want to share anything they have been posted previously, it's very easy to simply wipe a slate clean!

orz at this point I'd just like to get back to playing at polychromatic over at DW so everyone can come back to life, no matter what we choose /)_(\

Actually, your information is incorrect. Deleting a journal on Dreamwidth doesn't give you the option to delete your comments and entries in communities.

"Deleting your account makes the entries you've posted, the comments on those entries, and your personal profile invisible to others. It does not delete entries you've posted to communities or comments you've posted in communities or in others' journals."

So deleting a journal would just delete the information on that particular journal, while preserving anything the journal owner posted otherwise.

Then I totally take it back! I thought it was the same as LJ :)

Nope! Luckily they haven't made that change.

(Which I understand people want more control over their journals, comments, etc, but I always sadface when I get linked to a deleted journal.)

A chart would be helpful, but I've found that editing a post that involves a poll will often close the poll unintentionally. So I hesitate to add something like a chart to this post at this time.

How about another post and then a link to this post in that post? To prevent the poll closing...

I think it'll probably help a lot if we could compare and contrast and then, for others, show what we stand to lose if we try and merge them all together.

Yes, that's correct.

As Ai said, I suppose I think it's better because I think there is a greater risk of an individual player deleting or locking their journal cutting off access to the tags than I do of the entire game becoming locked or deleted. Unless I misunderstand the reasoning behind wanting that control which I might.

The hybrid I proposed couldn't really be bad for anyone who favors the comm-based system. It's just a comm game with a suggestion for those who liked the tagging from the journal style to have an option of continuing it with extra work. It isn't more extra work than the original proposal.

Some of the arguments regarding the comm-based system are less about maintaining a gamewide archive and more about the trouble of maintaining an updated friends list and add/remove list. The comm-based system could reduce those problems in particular because members of the game would post to the community (and possibly link to individual journals as well for comments) rather than just to individual journals. One would need to monitor the community rather than maintain an updated friends list. Furthermore, the hybrid posting system would allow players to maintain their individual character journals while still being linked into the game as a whole.

Additionally, as I understand it, some players value control over their own posts and comments in their own journals over access to their comments left in other journals. The concern is more for one's own posts and the replies to it rather than replies made in other posts.

Please do note, though, that the mods are not in favor of any one system over the other. We, too, are weighing the pros and cons of each system. So please take this comment as an explanatory one based on on-going discussions.

/nods

My priorities lie elsewhere personally. I put the same value on my threading whether it happens on my post or someone else's provided it is part of the game. (I put less importance on threading that is in memes, DRs, etc. even if it includes game canon since the result itself does not become game canon.) I see all my playing as part of the whole narrative that is polychromatic and the more accessible that narrative is the more pleased I would be. So the game archive a comm-based experience provides is important to me. Especially with limitations on how far back you can look at a flist.

Whereas I have never maintained a personal flist for this game. I always use the comm's flist and trust it to be up-to-date. I know I wouldn't be able to be in a journal-based game without that feature, so it is critical to me, but it's also solved for my purposes unless this transition would change that in some way.

Also, it is personal experience that makes me concerned for locked and deleted journals. I've come across this several times and many of them were specifically at Poly. I've never had the same problem at a comm game, and I trust the mods here not to lock or delete the comm now or in the future. This doesn't mean those things aren't possible or that they haven't happened to others! It just means from my point of view I believe the other to be more likely. It could be that I'm wrong statistically, but as the great Michael Scott once said, we can not know how many games have been locked or deleted versus journals because there is no wikapedia entry for that.

A lot of the push and pull here comes down to personal preferences and values that aren't right or wrong. They are just different. I wish we, as a game, were more in synch with a choice—any choice. I trust the mod team to be thoughtful in employing whatever decision is made whether I agree with it wholly or not in the end (beginning?) and I hope we can all (is there fife music yet? I ordered fife music for this) come together and build a brighter tomorrow. (Yeah, I went with brighter tomorrow.) But seriously, I think Poly is a great game and I'm happy I've been part of it, and I'm happy all of you have been part of it!

It's not enough for me to simply +1 this but given the pain in the butt LJ is being, it will have to suffice. Haunt, these are all of my feelings. <3

I will feel them out loud for you while you can not! /cling!

If I was arguing for my own personal priority, I'd be vying for journal-based game as I prefer complete control over my own content. However, I understand that this would be unfair to the playerbase. With 30 players wanting the game to go one way, and only 9 more (at the moment) wanting the other way, this issue is undeniably contentious. The poll reflects the varying opinions of a diverse playerbase, and because of this, I believe finding a middle ground is tantamount. A compromise may mean more work for one side (or both sides), but I think it's a small concession.) Whichever option wins, a group of people will be discontented because the margin is so small. Softening this blow somehow would be the fairest option, I think - rather than arguing strictly for an either/or sort of deal.

From what I understand, the main argument for a journal-based community is personal content control, rather than having content scattered piecemeal in a community. The reverse hybrid option still wouldn't fix this problem, as comments would still be on the community post, and thus subjected to the vicissitudes of having a community-wide repository. Deletion of organizational tags wouldn't be a problem (as the player would be tracking his posts), yes, but a community is still subject to the risk of mass deletion. I won't deny that journal deletion isn't a problem. I've lost great threads because of this, but similarly, I could delete all my character's entries if I really wanted to cover up my trail. Moreover, the first game I joined, a community game, lost a great deal of posts because someone hacked into the game and went on a deleting spree. Not to say that this will happen, but just there's always the possibility.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only