ATTN: FFRevolution

[TC_Halogen]

Re: ATTN: FFRevolution

Any posts from here on out deserve to be removed if it doesn't talk about the main topic that this thread was meant for. It's a serious discussion that we all need to take seriously.

I'm going to wait for a higher level staff member to respond to this, because honestly -- I'm really having to restrain myself from posting. I don't even believe that you think this is a serious discussion, and it's quite easy for me to come to that conclusion given that the posts within the scope of this thread are nonsensical, juvenile, and to be quite frank, hypocritical.

If you have some legitimate input that you want to see from staff, you need to be considerably more valiant in your effort given that you're the person who opened up this thread of discussion and have been otherwise feeding it with otherwise irrelevant points.

I mentioned this before in a post I made that has since been deleted: staff is likely more than willing to address your points, but you're going to have to be substantially more convincing in leading this charge, because there are users who are way more informed than you are that could more easily make points like these.

[yo man im awesome]

Re: ATTN: FFRevolution

It would actually be nice if the administration would say like, you know, anything in here. 99% of staff have now looked in this thread, likely laughed, and then left.

edit: Respond to like, cornman or Fission, not so much Zenith

[psychoangel691]

Re: ATTN: FFRevolution

It would actually be nice if the administration would say like, you know, anything in here. 99% of staff have now looked in this thread, likely laughed, and then left.

edit: Respond to like, cornman or Fission, not so much Zenith

No one looked, laughed and just left. There's been discussion going on. Beyond that I really can't address anything but I didn't want people to think that it's just totally brushed off.

[Crazyjayde]

Re: ATTN: FFRevolution

You claim that throwing people at the problem isn't going to fix it

Now allow me to walk out of this thread unharmed.

[gold stinger]

Re: ATTN: FFRevolution

Requesting the thread to be moved to FFR General because it has to do with FFR in General and the people who run it. It also doesn't really fit the atmosphere that chit chat has to offer it as you can probably see it almost caused a drama war.

[yo man im awesome]

Re: ATTN: FFRevolution

No one looked, laughed and just left. There's been discussion going on. Beyond that I really can't address anything but I didn't want people to think that it's just totally brushed off.

well that was a bit of an exaggeration towards the lack of posting, and I imagine they're just trying to figure something out to post to us, but really, the only acknowledgement we've had so far is them looking at the thread.

[psychoangel691]

Re: ATTN: FFRevolution

Requesting the thread to be moved to FFR General because it has to do with FFR in General and the people who run it. It also doesn't really fit the atmosphere that chit chat has to offer it as you can probably see it almost caused a drama war.

Done

[yo man im awesome]

Re: ATTN: FFRevolution

well that was a bit of an exaggeration towards the lack of posting, and I imagine they're just trying to figure something out to post to us, but really, the only acknowledgement we've had so far is them looking at the thread.

to expand what I mean a little bit:

These threads die often, especially when administration doesn't actually say anything, because it ends up being the same people yelling the same things at each other, with nothing new being gained. Typically it's only when administration actually steps into the thread and lets us in on what's going on that things get resolved.

Which also leads back to transparency.

[Fission]

Re: ATTN: FFRevolution

how much work would it be and how much time would it take to get everything into a suitable state?

From my understanding of the current state of the codebase (I haven't seen any actual code, just have a general idea of what it might look like), it is going to take a long while. It will probably be months at the minimum, but it will be worth it in the end because the technical debt required to add new functionality will be much lower.

Continuing down the path of adding new features without performing this restructuring is just going to make it increasingly more difficult for developers to create a mental model of the FFR website.

I assume it's a lot on both accounts, and that's a fair bit to ask of people when they have to work on a strictly volunteer basis, not to mention that the people who are capable and willing to put in that amount of work are young and going through school or have jobs and careers to worry about.

It is a lot to ask and I don't expect much, but this is why I am trying to convey how imperative it is to lower the floor to contributing.

If donations or some sort of crowdfunding project can provide the incentive for people to get the work done then I'd be willing to pitch in to help out.

Supposing this was a project on Github and I am using Github terminology here. To extend this idea, bounties could be "assigned" to certain features. When they are fully merged into the main development branch, the appropriate developers responsible for opening the pull requests can be rewarded accordingly. This is similar to what Facebook is already doing, except they award bounties for bugs and security vulnerabilities discovered instead of new features.

I haven't fully reasoned through the details in the "rewarding" part, just some thoughts I had.

[_Zenith_]

Re: ATTN: FFRevolution

You want me to take charge in this movement of actually getting my point across? I will.

It's been assured that staff is still here and working hard and valiantly to not only improve FFR but also to keep it up and running. I understand that it's also a hard task to accomplish and that staff is not a silly game. I also understand that people have lives outside of FFR and shit happens such as being sick, having to go out for business trips, whatever happens.

It's a problem when certain members of staff don't deserve to have their titles because they aren't as active as other members on their teams. A lot of backend work or issues aren't necessarily known to the community because staff doesn't release this information out as frequently as desired. Some transparency would be awesome because then if anyone out here in the community has the required skills to help out, they can approach staff and offer to help, even if it's not needed.

Money has been a constant issue with FFR because it's a non-profit organization, and the people who are affected most by this are step-artists and staff. This is a rhythm game and finding permissions are scarce at times but it seems the more elite stepartists have an easier time because they have the experience. Having a form of crowdfunding would benefit the site immensely though some more issues would arise. I'm sure people here and also myself would donate money here and there if it meant the improvement of FFR, whether it be expanding or finally getting a decent lawyer for the legal parts of FFR as blanky mentioned earlier in this thread.

I understand that while fixing issues, more issues will arise, as in most situations. My point with this thread is to have staff sit down and discuss these problems more frequently or actually do things about them (skeptical because this is something I know little about). Let the community know or even qualified members of the community know that these issues need to be taken care of and if they can help staff in any way, then let it happen. Lastly, I personally think any inactive staff member should lose their position (and by inactive I mean like being away with no legitimate reasoning, or not even including input in team chats when they do have the free time).

[hi19hi19]

Re: ATTN: FFRevolution

I don't even believe that you think this is a serious discussion, and it's quite easy for me to come to that conclusion given that the posts within the scope of this thread are nonsensical, juvenile, and to be quite frank, hypocritical.

So much this.
I have to say, as the guy who talks nonstop about increasing transparency, it's really frustrating when my attempts to make serious points about the staff are derailed with irrelevant and contradictory posts from the person who started the discussion in the first place.


My thanks to Fission and Charu for keeping it on-topic and serious, at least. Maybe we should discuss it somewhere else where we won't be interrupted by shitposting or sodium chloride.

Oh wait, that wouldn't be very transparent, would it?

See now why FFR staff doesn't communicate much publicly? It's because of threads like this.

[choof]

Re: ATTN: FFRevolution

why doesn't ffr just hold a live stream where they take questions from people and answer them as honestly as they possibly can

[MinaciousGrace]

Re: ATTN: FFRevolution

ffr is run better than 50% of world governments

not saying its a shining beacon of hope in an otherwise morbid universe but i mean its a flash game from 2004 that's been orphaned repeatedly and there needs to be some management of expectations

[s1rnight]

Re: ATTN: FFRevolution

My thanks to Fission and Charu for keeping it on-topic and serious, at least.

what's your opinion on making ffr open-source? i think it would be a pretty good one, imo

[Fission]

Re: ATTN: FFRevolution

I have no idea how viable this would be, but if the staff knew what they wanted as a finished product and created a step-by-step game plan of what exactly needs to be coded and implemented and in what order then could there be a job posting board of some sort

I have some ideas of my own. I can detail them in this thread as to what exactly they are in technical terms, if that would be appropriate. I'm not so sure it is right now, because first things first.

where calls for help on specific tasks could be posted and people could contribute without having to actually sign on as a full fledged staff member?

Using Github for issue tracking solves this problem for the most part. The repository owners can post open issues and close them as pull requests are made to complete them.

Credits and event tokens as rewards probably wouldn't be enough, but if there was cash up for grabs then maybe people from outside of FFR's pool of capable contributors might be interested?

I'm not sure that a paid bounty is even needed at this point in time to get contributors. Just open sourcing it should be enough I think (it looks good on developer resumes to show github activity!). If it isn't then this idea could be discussed at a later date.