NationStates Jolt Archive

I couldn't find these suggestions anywhere and I couldn't find a better place to put them. Thanks for your time, moderators!

It seems like server load could be reduced (and we could get less e-mail we're just going to trash) if, when creating a puppet, we could provide the login and password for another nation that we own whose e-mail address has already been verified. This would reduce the need to verify the e-mail address when creating a puppet for spying, invading, etc. The coding changes would be relatively minimal, only requiring the verification of the login/pass and flagging the nation as verified. It would also add some speed to invasions and defenses.

Second, (and I readily admit that this is by far less likely to be accepted) it would be nice if, near our dossier link was a link for a page where we could log in to other nations that we owned with a single click. Again, it would require being able to provide that information, obviously, but would otherwise perform similarly to our dossier page.

Again, thanks for your time, mods!

Boffing Unicyclists

Sorry, but your assumptions about our coding methods are incorrect. Implementing such a change would require a massive recoding of the game, and is therefore highly improbable.

For both suggestions? I admitted up front that the second suggestion would require a fair bit of coding, let's ignore that one.

I don't understand the difficulty with the verification, though. All it would take to implement is the inclusion of a check box and two fields on the creation page a call to the login verification DB function you've already written and the call to set the verification flag, which you guys have also obviously already written.I don't expect you to have to explain what precisely would make the change difficult, since I have no right to be shown, explained, etc. your code, but is the code really in such a state that this change would take more than half an hour tops?

Thanks for your speedy reply, too.

For both suggestions? I admitted up front that the second suggestion would require a fair bit of coding, let's ignore that one.

I don't understand the difficulty with the verification, though. All it would take to implement is the inclusion of a check box and two fields on the creation page a call to the login verification DB function you've already written and the call to set the verification flag, which you guys have also obviously already written.I don't expect you to have to explain what precisely would make the change difficult, since I have no right to be shown, explained, etc. your code, but is the code really in such a state that this change would take more than half an hour tops?

Thanks for your speedy reply, too.

You assume we have a database? Such luxory . . .

Yes, I see how to do it. Yes, it would take more than half-an-hour. No, I'm not doing it.

Any change of more than fixing a minor typo will automatically take more than an hour. In order to make any change all of the following steps must be done (some reduce to trivial checks, but they must still be done):

Figure out what the actually result should be (this usually takes a bit because there are always edge-cases and questions as to how things should look in the user-interface. So, this also considers design for anything visible by the players.)
Determine whether that is possible, if not, start over.
Figure out how to accomplish it.
Write the code (often one of the quickest parts)
Proof-read the code
Test the code
Get another one of the programmers to proof-read the code
Check in the code
Check with all of the other programmers that there are no important changes pending.
Figure out how to push the code to the website (does the game need to be restarted?)
Find a good time to take down and restart the game if necessary (easily 10 minutes of work by itself, even if the game is only down for 30 seconds)
Deploy the code
Test the changes
Time held to roll-back the changes if something goes wrong.


Every one of those steps is important because with each one you skip, the likelihood that you crash the game or badly mess something up increases. Imagine how bad this would be if we actually had beaurocracy to deal with too.