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No, and Also Go Away: Part II

PREAMBLE. Whereas RRS 5. and its subsections were written in 2019 with the intent of providing enfranchisement and government participation to nations which have been banned from the World Assembly, as the Region's founder had been in the past,

Recognising that the statute has never been used in this capacity,

Perceiving that the many World Assembly Exemptions granted by the Regional Council fall into two categories -- Delegates reigning outside of the Region, and Residents wishing to undertake military operations as a component of a foreign power,

Reflecting that it is difficult or impossible to carry out foreign commitments while remaining impartial to the Region, and that foreign interference, influence, and subterfuge invites more negative consequences and hardship to the region than the opportunities it grants,

Believing the truly invested will commit their efforts to the Region when it becomes an interest and not a resource,

Abolishes RRS 5. and its subsections, and decrements the Refugia Revised statutes by one thereafter.

Authored by: Refuge Isle
Seconded by:

[If you are linking to files or images under the old URL schema (.cc or .network), they will stop working at the end of the year, or an indeterminate period of time afterwards.]

We are now half-way through the twelve month long transition of domains.

Notable:

All sites that except for the wiki now warn users that the site is moving.

All automated email services (lost password, account confirmation, etc) are now sent from .ca addresses.

Archive's email service is working apparently for the first time in four years?

It is, once again, a good time to remind everyone about the domain moves. If you are linking to files or images under the old URL schema (.cc or .network), they will stop working at the end of the year, or an indeterminate period of time afterwards.

OwO

OwoowowowowoO

That concludes today's announcement.

[Demonstrations]

Untitled Development Journal 37
Greetings,

I thought I would write a quick note about several smaller-scale updates I've done over the last week. Firstly, Eyebeast and Tart have been given some subtle updates, including:

• More compact headers and footers.
• Buttons that are supposed to help mobile navigation now only show up on devices the site thinks are mobile-shaped.
• Discord embeds are slightly nicer.
• Eyebeast now has a new icon/logo, a new background, and other CSS that (I think) is slightly nicer to look at.
• Eyebeast region names are now hyperlinks, and we track the new tags that NationStates added (frontier, colony, embassy collector)
• Tart has been updated to talk about governor mechanics instead of founder mechanics.

Demonstrations

    Recruiter   

Dot has been given some patch updates too, we are now on version 3.9.4:

• Dot is now available on Discord's App Directory.
• familiar's pulls have been improved (we're running ipod shuffles and not "true random" to up the diversity), and individual familiar moods are now slightly milder.
• Fixed a bug where an operator would roll an impossible familiar.
• Fixed a bug where give wouldn't correctly report that a transfer succeeded.
• Fixed a bug when calling info via context menu on a user that was no longer in the server.
• Fixed a bug where info said everyone was a bot.

More notable changes:

Refuge staff members now have the ability to manually run Nightly outside of its cron cycle. Sometimes NationStates takes a long time to update. When it does, our server pulls a data dump at midnight (PDT), only to find that NationStates still has the data from the previous day. This causes a lot of sites and services to show old data, even if it looks like things updated. If you or someone else notices that Nightly's data is out of date, locate a CalRef staff member and they can run the script again.

The WAs command is being retired and its abilities are being rolled into a new button in region. So you can use the region command to pull a region, and click the new "Residents" button, which will spawn a menu that you can use to get a telegram and table output of all nations, WA-only nations, or non-WA nations. WAs will be deleted entirely in 3.10.

When it comes to recruitment, I've reworked the recruiter command to have a lot better structure on my end, and also given it the ability to let a server admin set what regions they want to exclude from telegram recruitment. You can use the new Set Excluded Regions button to remove nations which were founded in regions you are disinclined or treaty-obligated not to recruit from. When using the pop-up that this button creates, you can enter a region name or NationStates URL. When entering more than one region, separate your entries with commas or linebreaks.

Finally, the new method of setting a recruitment template is to just drop the template directly into the option field. So /recruit %TEMPLATE-29351171% is all you need.

That's all I can think of for now. Byeee~

CalRef II: The Jefferson County Fairgrounds
CalRef II: THEDAY
CalRef II: The Rapture's Pre-Chorus
CalRef II: The Literary Translation of Nodding Your Head for Fifteen Minutes
CalRef II: THE GREAT PURGE
CalRef II: Saint Mary, Mother of God, Mother of This Fine Sidewalk
CalRef II: Binge on God, Clerge to the Masses
CalRef II: Taking the Elevator to the Gym in Your House

I have seen the potatoes true power, I am at their mercy. We will sing songs of their righteousness. We shall cook with them. Pleasant and succulent potatoes, placed lovingly upon my desk with the light gleaming off of its robust exterior. I raise my hands into the sky and cry out Its divine name. A flash of light overwhelms me. The potet, I exclaim in shock and awe, it has been transformed into a bowl of hashbrowns. By the one, the two, the three, the four, the five, the six, the seven! We will never know their gifts. The potatoes lay there in the bowl now, perfectly ripe for the taking. My mind transcends in wonderment at the possibilities. Energy fills my body as the excitement channels through me. I would run, but running has been banned; it is unseemly. So I wiggle my arms left and right as a display of my profound approval and satisfaction at the gift of food in starchy potato form. Praise the sun.

HumanSanity: 81
Emily: 67
Luca: 59
Argo: 30
Kal: 17
Aav: 14
Wasc: 10
FLP: 7
Ziz: 5
Dyll: 5
Fox: 4
Zuk: 2
Catherine: 3
Ruby: 2
Sueloc: 1
Istillian: 1

Chechnyan

Notable edits put up

I guess my thinking is that if they resign, leave, or are destroyed, it would be incumbent on the Arch-Admin to dismiss that nation from the designation and appoint someone else.

Bump.

[At long last, the nightmares can end. And also begin?]

Dot 3.9: Sounds Familiar
At long last, the nightmares can end. And also begin?

Still somehow easier than interacting with the provincial government.

Demonstrations

    Familiar   

Hope everyone enjoyed the warning time, for it has now elapsed. The new reign of terror begins today, and all things previously mentioned are now the state of affairs.

Important things:

• There is no longer any limit on the servers Dot can be in. If you have been wanting to add Dot to your server, you can freely do your thing now.
• There is no loner a minimum human requirement for servers. Whether you have five, nine, etc, people, Dot will remain in any server she is invited to.
• The eyebeast command is retired. (Dot cannot see messages, and so cannot report their changes/deletions)
• Dot is unable to see message text of any message unless you DM her or ping her. This means that you can no longer use "I cast" as a prefix.
• Slash commands are presumed to be the main thing people will use, but you can also use "@Dot" as a new command prefix and that's probably what I'll be doing.
• The documentation is slightly less ass, and now also accurate. I think. And the standard invite now asks for many fewer permissions.

I had planned to release an improved version of the stock market from 2.4, but it's turning out to be markedly more complicated than I anticipated. I will still do this, but I wanted get the server restrictions off and reconcile the command scheme sooner rather than later. It was already finished, I know people had been waiting on it, and there's no sense in delaying them because of economy minigames.

So! You get one new feature today and I'll send in the stocks system when it's ready.

Wait there's a new feature?
Yeah, sure, why not?

This command is a sort of cross between the fortune command, and many other bot's "dailies" payout commands.

It allows you to have a "familiar", or guardian, assigned to you for the day, where a "familiar" is an entity, location, or conceptual idea. That familiar will provide a static payout in planets, according to its innate quality. There are five* quality levels, with the lowest level paying out at 100 planets, while the highest pays out at 1,000.

In addition to the payouts, the familiar also comes with a certain stance or attitude towards you. This attitude is determined by the innate disposition of the particular familiar, the day's global dice roll (is it a good day, bad day, or middling?), and the operator's personal roll. Some familiars are innately hostile, but can be encountered as superfriendly if the stars align, just as the reverse is true as well.

Unfortunately the familiars take a lot longer than fortunes to throw together, so there aren't as many of them. However, with every major update, I plan on installing a pack of 100 new familiars into the system.

This first OG set of 100 familiars is called the Demon Hill pack and I hope you enjoy it.

No minor notes today
I am extremely tired.

[Luca we've been on 3.8.3 for a while]

Dot 3.8.3: Economy II
Luca we've been on 3.8.3 for a while
Quite correct, this is really an "update" of a different kind, and I'm also here to clear out the backlog of my recent improvements and fixes.

But primarily, I'm here to give you guys an update on the immediate future of Dot. If you have had no idea of anything going on, let me bring you up to speed. Dot has grown from being a help in a chat of about 50 people to one of the most widely used bots in NS servers. This is both neat, and extremely inconvenient with regards to the restrictions that Discord puts on me, the developer.

We have been at the server capacity for the last month, and during that time, Dot's verification application has been in limbo. They apparently just threw the verification application (along with everyone else's who applied in February and March) into the garbage after admitting they have no idea where that data went. Then they lost my intent request application, saying that they cannot accept the old form in the application I had submitted twice. But after reapplying for a third time, the dark deed is done. But there are strings, and one of those strings is that message content will be invisible to Dot.

Unfortunate News
Rejoice! There can never be a conspiracy that I'm scanning messages because it's literally impossible unless you ping her or DM her. But the downsides are that:

• The "I cast" command prefix will be dead
• Eyebeast will also be dead.

The first is very sad because "I cast" is iconic and I can't think of any other bot that has something that isn't a passionless punctuation mark as a prefix, but what can you do. The good news is that I have been anticipating this moment ever since Dot's 3.4.3 update back in August, where all commands were converted to hybrid commands. This means you can use them with a prefix or as a slash command.

I'm aware that Discord's slash command system is buggy and bad. When it goes down, through no fault of my own because they fuck something up, no one can use slash commands. I don't think that's too great, especially when some commands might be time-sensitive. Consequently Dot's command prefix will be changing to a ping. So you can do things like "@Dot banish Luca" and it will work the same as "I cast". So if you want to avoid slash commands, you can do that, if you want to use a kinda emergency method to get around slash commands when Discord breaks them, you can do that too.

Obviously Dot will not have the ability to report edited or deleted messages with the eyebeast command, and there is no workaround possible for that. I could remove the features that deal with message content there and just have the command report user changes, but I don't see the point of a feature that's so limited. So eyebeast will be retired entirely, with any settings data you may have established being deleted as well.

You can use this time to locate a bot that provides that moderation service.

Positive News
The positive news is that there are many things that will not be breaking that Discord will continue to allow me to do. This primarily relates to welcomes, farewells, autoroles, reacts, the ability to locate members with commands like bank and info, and the ability to have reminders function coherently.

I will also be removing the restriction on how many humans a server needs to have for Dot to stay in it -- since I will have no restrictions anymore in that department, neither will you.

These changes will be all take place when I push the 3.9 update, which is planned for approximately four days from now, April 10th, 2023. Until then, Dot cannot be added to any servers without the sudden lack of access breaking commands after we cross the old server limit.

Free Stuff That Already Happened:

Demonstrations

    Annoy   

You probably already noticed, but I added a little meme generator command.

Annoy allows you to generate a meme image, where a quote of yourself annoys someone with the block of text of your choosing. Naturally, both a target and a quote are mandatory fields.

In this command, you can provide those by separating them with a comma. The speaker will always be the display/nick of the operator, so you can spoof the speaker name in the image by changing your nick. If you are in a server where you are not allowed to have a desired nick, consider leaving that server.

There is a nifty demonstration to the right.

Minor changes:

• Reported errors are now more helpful at diagnosing problems
• Infinity badge slots have been expanded to how many poop badges currently exist in inequality OR the top 3% of donors. Whichever is greater.
• autopins to use raw listeners and compare timestamps instead of the cache
• colour can be used to take the primary colour of an attached image
• colour max increased to eight
• farewell will now display how long someone was a member on their departure
• give remade to operate via component UI
• nation command gets a full on re-work
• region now tells you the total influence points and influence gain in a region, update times, position
• set will try to add a successfully set react
• version's service graph is now linear
• version now displays a graph of all commands, last 60 days & 10 most used commands, last 30 days
• Fixed a bug where recruit silently drops nations during high-volume found times
• Fixed a bug where slackers and WAs can generate empty rows in otherwise perfectly fitting tables

CalRef II: Irrelevance to Laws
CalRef II: OBLITERATE ☁️ THAT LIKE BUTTON
CalRef II: The Ghost of Starbucks' Past
CalRef II: Hey Party People. Got a Lot of Metal There. Be a Shame If Someone Were to Eat It
CalRef II: Answering Dora the Explorer With Whale Songs
CalRef II: The Anime Total Conversion Mod for Skyrim (Which Launches Genshin Impact Instead)

HumanSanity: 81
Emily: 67
Luca: 58
Argo: 30
Kal: 16
Aav: 14
Wasc: 10
FLP: 7
Ziz: 5
Dyll: 5
Fox: 4
Zuk: 2
Catherine: 3
Sueloc: 1
Istillian: 1
Rubywednesday: 1

There's always a ship in the ocean.

CalRef II: The Strategic Use of Being a Mouse
CalRef II: Though a Candle Burns in My House, There's Nobody Home
CalRef II: Gotta Go Fast (Chronologically)
CalRef II: Code Red Panic at The Disco Elysium
CalRef II: If You See a Wild Pig, Open Your Heart to It
CalRef II: I Looked in The Fridge and Realised We Don't Have a Fridge

[We're Kick-Starting the Economy Again]

Dot 3.8: Economy II
We're Kick-Starting the Economy Again

As the quest to determine the BOAT GOAT begins, here is an (unrelated) picture of Nancy Reagan

Demonstrations

    BOAT   

    Colour   

    Inequality   

    Infinity   

    Telegrams   

It's been a little longer than expected for restarting the economy. Generation I was shut down for the 3.5 update when stocks exploded, destroying game balance and killing everyone. Now the gears of industry are turning once again.

On-Message credit generation has resumed. Under the new rules, you have a 50% chance of adding 2 to your bank account if you have spoken in the last sixty seconds, and a 100% chance of 5 if you have not. This allows people who just show up once and a while to still get some credit, but also doesn't forget the heavy chatters.

Recruitment credit has been reinstated. If you are fond of using the recruit command, you may also be fond of the fact that every addressee you send a telegram to will generate 2 in wealth to you.

It's the Battle of All Things!
Long has the day been awaited when the Ultimate Showdown received not only one ill-conceived sequel, but two. Like a Nickelback cover band, it's literally impossible to get us to stop. To coincide with the Battle of All Things in Refugia, Dot will also be participating with the release of a corresponding betting command, called BOAT.

In each round, you can make a costless bet where a correct answer yields 5,000 planets, the in-game currency. You may change your bet as many times as you like, up to the time that the competition you are betting on begins. There is no penalty for incorrect guesses.

At any time, you can also lodge a prediction of who you think will be the final and ultimate champion of the Battle of All Things. You can change your answer whenever you want and as often as you want; however, the earlier you make a correct prediction, the higher your reward will be. The rewards timeline is tied to what the match is when you place or change a bet.

For a correct final bet placed placed during...
 • Round A: 150,000 Planets
 • Round B: 120,000 Planets
 • Round C: 100,000 Planets
 • Round D:  82,500 Planets
 • Round E:  68,500 Planets
 • Round F:  55,500 Planets
 • Round G:  46,000 Planets
 • Round H:  38,000 Planets
 • Round I:  31,000 Planets
 • Round J:  25,300 Planets
 • Round K:  20,500 Planets
 • Round L:  17,000 Planets
 • Round M:  15,000 Planets
 • Round N:  10,000 Planets

Because of the exponential system, it is prudent to try to reach the correct prediction as early as possible. Since answers can be changed, players whose original choice of champion was defeated may continue playing, and guess again for a lesser prize. It also gives players with surviving champions the decision to stick with them to the end, or jump ship to a more likely champion as The Battle of All Things goes on.

Activate the command with /boat or I cast boat

The Return of Infinity and the Rise of Inequality

       

It is, perhaps, inevitable within a game's economic system that inequality will appear. Ours will be no exception. This time, however, I am planning on it from the start. Unlike last generation, the only way that you will be able to receive a Gen II Economy badge at the end of season will be to donate planets through the infinity project. The Infinity command has returned with a freshly emptied account, and an even snazzier, paginated leaderboard feature. The top 2% of players who contribute to Infinity will receive the badge. In the unlikely event that there are less than 50 nations at the end of the season qualifying for a badge, the number will be expanded. But for now, it's 2%.

In order to encourage (or discourage??) people donating to the Infinity Project, there is a new command called inequality. This command brings a separate leaderboard of the wealthiest players by unspent bank. In this command, the top 1% of players will be receiving the legendary Gen II Shitlord Badge of Extreme Wealth Hoarding. Whether this is something you are aiming to obtain or aiming to avoid is up to you. I suspect many may try to avoid being saddled with this trophy for the rest of their days, plagued by it in the upcoming profile command. Fear not, you can escape it simply by keeping your balance low and donating to Infinity. Alternatively, embrace being a shitlord!

Something that I missed during the stock hype of the last economy generation was that inflation made it less possible to use the economy for events and activities. We have that opportunity again. Consequently, at the end of the Battle of All Things competition, there will be more fine sources of income added to Dot as well, and new events that will arise. The economy functions will continue to expand even after this update, and the season will not be closing any time soon.

Everyone will have ample opportunity to pursue their goals in our various events.

Notable Enhancements
The colour command has been pretty substantially improved in this update, and will likely be substantially improved again in the next update. But as of now, the output of a given colour comes with a label in the created image of the hex code it represents.

When you input a hex code, you will get back the name of the colour you are searching in the footer, or at least the closest name by euclidean distance. If you wish, you can use those colour names to as inputs, themselves. This means you can search colours even if they are outside the CalRef traditional colour palette, like "kelley green" or "very light pink". You are also now able to use commas to separate inputs, generating up to seven images in at a time, with the output image organising them nicely into the same image dimension as usual.

Two other commands getting an upgrade this update are info and timestamp, which can now be used as context commands. Context commands appear whenever you are interacting with a certain type of object in Discord.

You can use the info command by right-clicking or long-tapping on a user's name or profile picture, which will skip typing the command entirely. You can use the timestamp command in the same way, by right-clicking or long-tapping on a message to query Dot for the exact time it was sent. When using timestamp as a context command, the time object will also be a URL to the message, just so there is no confusion or dispute about what is being queried.

Finally, the telegrams command has been enhanced by providing an optional button to see the found rate over the last 28 days. Telegram queue history and newly founded nation history have a strong correlation; however, telegram queues heavily depend on how fast NationStates actually sends a message. They could linger in the queue for some time.

Still, this contextual information can be useful if you wish to study found trends and how recruitment might impact the queue.

Bug Fixes and Minor Changes

• Map and RRS, despite being the oldest still-existing commands, have just now been added to the documentation
• RRS, for whatever need, can now be used outside of the CalRef server
• The commands / help command layout is improved and links to the CalRef server for support
• Fixed a bug where Eyebeast stopped reporting the user that deleted a message
• Fixed a bug where hail could not be used in a DM, if used as a slash command
• Resolved an issue where Discord did not permit recruit to function as a slash command
• Fixed a bug where roster could not display role data if that role had an icon
• Fixed an ancient bug where save caused Dot to crash when saving a region with mixed-case BB tags
• Fixed a Transitional Council error where tart's websheet led to a 404

Report all errors to the local authority.

What do we think of the above?

I don't know if it's intentional but the February transitional period assumes the existence of a leap day, and the transitional periods vary between two and three days. Otherwise, I like this a lot. It's a good way to stir up activity.

This is true, I'm not super sure how to handle the existence of leap day and February's schedule itself. There will never be a four month rotation where all the terms have the same number of days so that the dates align.

Shorter terms good! Shorter transition period also good. It does seem kind of confusing having all of them be the same dates except February, and also having the variation in transition periods - would it be possible to shift it to January/April/July/October, with some kind of provision for them happening late for the first go round?

That might be a better strategy.

Ideally, we'd not be holding elections during an ongoing site-wide event, but unfortunately with NS' new Event Calendar (wherein they rerun the same events at a faster pace), it will be less predictable when things will arise, and an ops councillor will likely always have to deal with multiple site-events during a given term from here on.

Or time them so they start at the start of the month so that there doesn't have to be all the date variation? But it's not a massive deal, so.

Mostly my own neurotic interest in having the terms actually align with the way that we record their dates, which is itself a spin-off of how staff records are recorded.

I'm not super sure what "and initiate such referendums to the stipulations their respective laws prescribe" means but other than that looks good.

It's meant to mean that the councillor should follow the procedures for whatever type of referendum it is. There's only one type of referendum that would be under their domain at present, and that's an RRS amendment referendum (as opposed to a CoFA embassy referendum). If it sounds confusing, I can change it to specifically cite RRS 6.