Very sorry about this one, guys.
For reasons that I'm currently unsure of, the database decided to eat itself. I'm giving it something like 40/40/20 "hacker", "postgres bug", or "host glitch".
The site currently has two different backup methods. The manual backup triggers whenever I do a site update; the last site update was on 1/31. The automatic backup is supposed to be daily, and I check it once in a while to make sure it's working. It's been working literally ever since before the main Motte site was launched . . . and it broke on 2/4. Good timing, thanks, system.
In theory, the quality-contribution system captured all reported quality contributions during this time. I'll try to retrieve those. Any opinions on whether I should just go ahead and repost them, or whether I should send them to the person so they can repost them?
I do have a dump of a bunch of text snippets that are all that was left of the database. If you remember some phrases you used I might be able to retrieve parts of lost posts. That said, someone's tried this with a few posts and got 0/2, so absolutely no promises here. Feel free to ask though! If you want to take data recovery more seriously, make a copy of your browser cache, which can then be pored over to find people's posts. I'm not totally sure how important this is, but I bet at least a few people will be sad to lose effortposts they made.
I've fixed the backup issue and set up better monitoring so it will yell at me if it fails again. I've also temporarily increased backup frequency to hourly, just in case there's some serious stability issue right now that I'm not aware of. The good news is that this shouldn't happen again, at least with as much lost data. But that doesn't really fix this one.
Apologies again.
This too shall pass.
This is essentially a followup to the last meta post.
Big scary updates are done and seem to be fine, but our volunteers have been going absolutely mad with minor updates. Which is great! We have a bunch of people contributing tons of valuable tweaks and fixes and improvements to the codebase, thank you, I literally could not do this without you.
I'm just gonna repost this again because it worked the last time:
Are you a software developer? Do you want to help? We can pretty much always use people who want to get their hands dirty with our ridiculous list of stuff to work on. The codebase is in Python, and while I'm not gonna claim it's the cleanest thing ever, it's also not the worst and we are absolutely up for refactoring and improvements. Hop over to our discord server and join in. (This is also a good place to report issues, especially if part of the issue is "I can't make comments anymore.")
Are you somewhat experienced in Python but have never worked on a big codebase? Come help anyway! We'll point you at some easy stuff.
Are you not experienced in Python whatsoever? We can always use testers, to be honest, and if you want to learn Python, go do a tutorial, once you know the basics, come join us and work on stuff.
(if you're experienced in, like, any other language, you'll have no trouble)
Rules Changes
Thank you for discussion on the rule proposals! Here's what we ended up with.
Courtesy: Keep to a single account
We strongly discourage people from making alt accounts without good reason, and in the absence of a good reason, we consider alt accounts to be bannable on sight. Alt accounts are almost exclusively used for mod evasion purposes and very rarely used for any purpose that helps the community; it makes moderation more difficult and it makes conversation more difficult.
If you do feel you need an alt account (most commonly, if you're a well-established user who wants to post something that can't be linked to their public persona), please ask the mods.
If you don't want the mods to know about it either, be aware that there's a good chance we'll find out about it anyway.
Content: Post on multiple subjects
We occasionally have trouble with people who turn into single-issue posters, posting and commenting only on a single subject. We'd like to discourage this. If you find yourself posting constantly on a single subject, please make an effort to post on other subjects as well.
This doesn't mean you need to write megaposts! This can be as simple as going to the Friday Fun Thread once in a while and posting a few paragraphs about whatever video game you last played. But this community is fundamentally for people, and if a poster is acting more like a propaganda-bot than a person, we're going to start looking at them suspiciously.
This rule is going to be applied with delicacy; if I can find not-low-effort comments about three different subjects within your last two weeks or two pages of comments, you're likely fine.
These are still prototypes, if you have objections they can still be changed, without objections they'll get added to the Official Rules probably in a week or so.
Private Profiles
Again, thank you for discussion! I refined the planned system a bit (original plans: "remove private profiles".) The current system is that private profiles are available to established users or on request. We're leaving "established" intentionally vague, but it's basically a measure of how much you've been contributing. If the system considers you established, the checkbox will be in your settings; if the system doesn't consider you established, it'll be there, but grayed out and have a link to contact us.
(This is using roughly the same standard as our filtering system, but with much bigger numbers.)
We've also grandfathered in everyone who had a private profile, even those who don't meet the bar. This was definitely a carefully-considered decision! It has nothing to do with me not wanting to write the SQL query to revert profiles.
That said, if you're a newbie account that gets yourself banned, don't be surprised if a mod also resets your private flag.
Long Comments
A while back there was a meta post where I proposed relaxing the comment character limit. I came up with a proposal, people on the dev discord convinced me to relax it even further, then it just sorta sat there and moldered in the Issues queue for a bit because it wasn't the priority. Then I wrote an effortpost and said "shucks, this is over the limit! Okay, I'm going to just go and implement that long-comment request now so I can post my megapost for the good of the community. Aaaaand also so I can post my megapost."
Then one of our volunteers, without any knowledge whatsoever of the above decision, sniped it out from under me and implemented it, like, two days before I was going to sit down and do it.
Anyway, it's in now! The new limit is . . .
. . . a little more complicated.
The new limit is 50,000 characters if you don't want to be filtered. Are you okay with your comment being filtered as if you were a new user? Well, good news, the new limit is 500,000 characters. Yes, this is literally enough to post an entire novel, albeit a short one, as long as you're OK with the mods seeing it before the rest of the userbase does.
This is experimental; if it gets abused, don't be surprised if this gets changed.
This is now a general-purpose feedback post. Let me know how things are going!
There's a pretty big set of changes coming down the pipe. These shouldn't have much impact on users - it's all internal bookkeeping - but there's a lot of it, and if there's bugs, it might cause issues. Let me know if anything weird happens! Weird, in this case, is probably "comments you can see that you think you shouldn't be able to", or "comments you can't see that you think you should be able to", or anything else strange that goes on. As an example, at one point in development reply notifications stopped working. So keep your eyes out for that. I'm probably pushing this in a day or two, I just wanted to warn people first.
EDIT: PUSH COMPLETE, let me know if anything goes wrong
Are you a software developer? Do you want to help? We can pretty much always use people who want to get their hands dirty with our ridiculous list of stuff to work on. The codebase is in Python, and while I'm not gonna claim it's the cleanest thing ever, it's also not the worst and we are absolutely up for refactoring and improvements. Hop over to our discord server and join in. (This is also a good place to report issues, especially if part of the issue is "I can't make comments anymore.")
Are you somewhat experienced in Python but have never worked on a big codebase? Come help anyway! We'll point you at some easy stuff.
Are you not experienced in Python whatsoever? We can always use testers, to be honest, and if you want to learn Python, go do a tutorial, once you know the basics, come join us and work on stuff.
(if you're experienced in, like, any other language, you'll have no trouble)
Alt Accounts: Let's talk about 'em. We are consistently having trouble with people making alt accounts to avoid bans, which is against the rules, or making alt accounts to respond to their own stuff, which isn't technically against the rules, and so forth. I'm considering a general note in the rules that alt accounts are strongly discouraged, but if you feel the need for an alt, contact us; we're probably okay with it if there's a good reason. (Example: We've had a few people ask to make effortposts that aren't associated with their main account for various reasons. We're fine with this.) If you want to avoid talking to us about it, it probably isn't a good reason.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is not set in stone.
Single-Issue Posting: Similarly, we're having trouble with people who want to post about one specific topic. "But wait, Zorba, why is that a problem" well, check out the Foundation:
The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.
If someone's posting about one subject, repeatedly, over and over, then it isn't really a discussion that's being had, it's prosletyzing. I acknowledge there's some value lost in removing this kind of behavior, but I think there's a lot of value lost in having it; letting the community be dominated by this behavior seems to lead to Bad Outcomes.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is also not set in stone.
Private Profiles: When we picked up the codebase, it included functionality for private profiles, which prevents users from seeing your profile. I probably would have removed this if I'd had a lot more development time, but I didn't. So it exists.
I'm thinking of removing it anyway, though. I'm not sure if it provides significant benefit; I think there's a good argument that anything posted on the site is, in some sense, fair game to be looked over.
On the other hand . . . removing it certainly does encourage ad hominem arguments, doesn't it? Ad hominems are kind of useless and crappy and poison discourse. We don't want people to be arguing about the other person's previously-stated beliefs all the time, we want people to be responding to recent comments, in general.
But on the gripping hand . . .
. . . well, I just went to get a list of the ten most prolific users with hidden profiles. One of them has a few quality contributions! (Thanks!) Two of them are neutral. And seven of them have repeated antagonism, with many of those getting banned or permabanned.
If there's a tool mostly used by people who are fucking with the community, maybe that's a good argument for removing the tool.
On the, uh, other gripping hand, keep in mind that private profiles don't even work against the admins. We can see right through them (accompanied by a note that says "this profile is private"). So this feature change isn't for the sake of us, it's for the sake of you. Is that worth it? I dunno.
Feedback wanted! Again!
The Volunteer System is actually working and doing useful stuff at this point. It doesn't yet have write access, so to speak, all it's doing is providing info to the mods. But it's providing useful info. Fun fact: some of our absolute most reliable and trustworthy volunteers don't comment. In some cases "much", in some cases "at all". Keep it up, lurkers! This is useful! I seriously encourage everyone to click that banner once a day and spend a few minutes at it. Or even just bookmark the page and mash the bookmark once in a while - I've personally got it on my bookmark bar.
The big refactor mentioned at the top is actually for the sake of improving the volunteer system, this is part of what will let it turn into write access and let us solve stuff like filtered-comments-in-limbo, while taking a lot of load off the mods' backs and maybe even making our moderation more consistent. As a sort of ironic counterpart to this, it also means that the bar might show up less often.
At some point I want to set up better incentives for long-time volunteers, but that takes a lot of code effort. Asking people to volunteer more often doesn't, so that's what I'm doing.
(Feedback wanted on this also.)
I want your feedback on things, as if that wasn't clear. These threads basically behave like a big metadiscussion thread, so . . . what's your thoughts on this whole adventure? How's it going? Want some tweaks? Found a bug? Let me know! I don't promise to agree but I promise to listen.