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[What? We're Still Doing These?]

CalRef VII
What? We're Still Doing These?

Evidently!

What's Up With This Sick Theme?
You likely noticed that there's a hot new theme for the forum that dropped around the 3^rd of April. This theme is called Silvehn, it's named after Emily's Elven nation theme, and took approximately six eye-bleeding days working basically non-stop. I've kinda found that I've developed this frustration with everything on the internet looking generic and corporate. So, going forward, I'd like to really bring back colour and return to an internet era where every website actually looked different from every other website.

Read/unread icons are the Refugia Culture department icon, but they're coloured in unique ways depending on what hasn't been seen. The redirect icon is also available as a Dot rotato icon, born out of this [wallpaper] I recently made up in inkscape (which is actually a literal joy to work with). The board logo is a slightly saturated version of the same style we had in Endar, and the post editor is made up of styles and icons of that era. The background is not mine, though it is licensed, and about everything else is made from scratch. This theme renovation improvement also allows for more permissive avatars, as well as threads you've posted in being easier to spot.

Osmium? A New Server??

Finally, a wiki theme fit for vampires and goblins.

Yes, me, this is also true, we now have a new Debian 12 server called Osmium -- a name picked by poll popularity. Every now and then I reach a point where I feel like I can't get a version of something that I want, usually Python, and it boils down to the version of Debian. There's also bountiful things that accompany such upgrades, such as added security, whatever that is. Personally I just let Amazon and ByteDance pound the server like a thirteenth century French brothel, and assume everyone else does too.

Amazingly, this sort of subconscious awareness that the time had come to renovate the server is well-sourced. Apparently, the Refuge has almost always swapped to a new VPS every three years since forever. So I suppose I am just following a long tradition under the guise of free will and choice. Hydrogen was officiated, to my recollection, in December of 2021, so we're a little early, but that's alright. Now we have new and nifty things like Python 3.11 and PHP 8.3.

PHP 8.3 is great*, but also means that the wiki died. So part of this upgrade involved spending a significant amount of time manually upgrading the wiki, its mods, and its database, incrementally, from 1.31 to the latest long-term support version 1.39 and its six additional patches. I believed, however, that flashy version numbers going up wouldn't get the blood pumping, so I added and briefly spent some time modifying a dark mode theme. Being a staunch traditionalist, I have not made it the default theme, but it is available for you to use at this very microsecond by visiting your [preferences] and selecting DarkVector.

* it's still PHP

More! Give Us Nummy Nummy New Things!

No.

But! I'm excited to give you old things. The deal with programming is that it's a never-ending learning process. Every time you do something, you learn how to do it better again by making it. Downside is that you already did it, so you can either waste time doing it again or move on to something else. Oftentimes I'm more than content to do the latter, but recently I decided to take some actual programming classes to shore any gaps in my knowledge that came from the haphazard way I figured things out on my own, without formal training.

The vast majority of content was material I already knew, but what I didn't turned out to be very helpful. I think [Eyebeast] benefited from this a bit in terms of accessibility improvements and the lord, our God, Google's blessed search rating. So, now that's been done up, visit it today! Or as often as you normally do, and note that it is marginally better than it was this time three months ago.

One other notable update to share is that I've followed in the footsteps of Refuge admins' passed and put up the source code on Github for others to study and learn from, or politely suggest improvements. It is released under the 'if you smelt it you must dealt it license'. Visit and star the [repository] today, or whatever people on Github do.

But I Said Give Us Nummy Nummy New Things!

No.

Also! You might think that my next stop on this journey would be to, then, ground-up improve Tart.CalRef, and you would be correct. But I also think that I'm marginally better at figuring things out with code than I used to be, so I wanted to do something unusual while improving it. In this, I decided to recode Tart.CalRef in PHP. Mostly to prove to myself that I could learn a language that I have never worked in before and spit out something modest in it without any framework.

I also just thought that PHP would be more suitable for handling Tart than python with flask and, now after having done it, feel like that was a pretty bang-on assessment. I'm not a PHPist, so probably professional PHP developers can find a dozen things to poke holes at, but for my purposes I think it's put together relatively well. More importantly, Tart is now faster, scores 100 on lighthouse ratings in every category, and has basically zero dependencies.

I have also made its code available through a public Github [repository] so that you can look on it with awe and terror, and also to get an idea of how you can parse a data dump with PHP. It is released under the do whatever as long as you keep the copyright license.

Shall There Be Nummy Nummy New Things in The Future?
Not really. Maybe. It's classified.

Report all errors to the local authority.

"Kaegan, wait up for a minute, my shoe got caught on a leaf," Rizali said, attempting to catch up. The pair had been wandering for at least several minutes after what they'd come to call "The Scottish Incident," and were now, as ever, in the woods. The leaf Rizali had caught their foot upon was one of significant size and mass, at least the size of three leaves. No, four.

"You can't fool me again, shapeshifter," said Kaegan who had unstuck Lyndh from Rizali posing as a leaf on more than one occasion. Walking through the eternal and endless forest was sure starting to feel less like a figure of speech from unambitious explorers and more like a literal description handed out by more knowledgeable individuals with every passing moment. Fallen branches and foliage passed under foot, but still the forest found the capacity to give way to more.

"This would be easier if you," Rizali grunted as their cloak caught on another branch, "just took some time to enjoy this. You refused to do the alphabet game, which would have been easy enough, so I have to find something entertaining to do." The alphabet game, of course, involved finding each letter in the 84-character Ustendellian alphabet in order on various leaves they passed. It seemed like it would be easy enough, but no, it couldn't be done. So here they were, sticking to each other like leaves on shoes.

"Enjoy...enjoy...enjoy," Kaegan said. With every word, he gestured dramatically towards a piece of flora that they were passing as they walked. He paused in front of the trunk of a particularly large tree and stared up at it with arms raised: "I am expressing enjoyment. Tree."

"Tree!" said the tree.

"What the shit." Kaegan found himself having said. Well that was certainly odd.

"Kaegan, what's that over there?" Riza asked, having just caught up. They grasped to his arm and pointed to a nearby clearing, where people could be seen. Just as the people became visible, their voices became audible as well, proclaiming and loudly continuing on at length about something or other. Rizali started walking closer, hoping to make out what they were saying, barely hearing as the tree joyfully repeated, "Shit!"

Kaegan moved closer to the clearing. The people were dressed in all-white drapery, standing on various stone steps within a small amphitheatre half-buried within the ground, and leaning against stone columns half destroyed by time and weather. "It looks like some guys in bathrobes," he concluded.

Rizali nodded, "I agree, they're also speaking no language I've ever heard." One by one, each of the draperied individuals were speaking with wild gesticulations and increasing amounts of drama. It was all very big and extra, and unfortunately also very... "Time to boogie," said Rizali, who stepped into the clearing. "Hello, sorry for interrupting, I hope I haven't taken away from your big... whatever this is, I just wanted to ask for some directions. I'm Rizali."

"Τι στο διάολο?" came the response from one of the individuals on the steps

Kaegan blinked for a moment and continued a blank stare. One of the larger and balder individuals walked forward, his hands outstretched and menacing. His thumb landing in the middle of Kaegan and Rizali's brow, and his tubular fingers wrapping all the way around the back of their heads. There seemed then to be a distant metallic gong sound, followed by the quiet ambiance of the forest.

"Your evolution has now been augmented, and you can comprehend the great wonder which is the Greek tongue," said the bathrobed man. "I am Nikon," said the bathrobed man whose name was now Nikon.

"What the shit." Kaegan found himself saying again.

"Σκατά!" said the tree.

"Yes, very good, all according to plan," said Rizali, who had planned none of this and was increasingly concerned by the minute. They nodded to reaffirm this. They'd never heard of this Greek tongue, which made sense because they also hadn't recognised the words when they were being said.

"We have been debating, a classical tradition dating back millennia. It is truly the highest class of activity."

"What have you been debating?" asked Rizali, immediately regretting the question as it came out of their mouth.

"Why is it a table? Is it a table because we call it a table or is there some intrinsic table quality that makes a mere board a table? Or has it convinced us through the power of spirits that it wishes to be called a table?"

"Mephistopheles had just finished laying down a counterargument that the table, itself, has no care for what we call it, and therefore there is no sense or reason for it to be a table, indistinguishable from any other horizontal plane," said Nikon.

"It's bullshit!" interrupted someone from the back of the crowd.

"Yes, quite so," Nikon resumed "I should adequately restate that Mephistopheles has most recently just finished losing and failing to convince in his final defence of this lost cause he has championed."

Mephistopheles- or at least, who Rizali assumed was Mephistopheles- interrupted at this point. "I concede that I was unable to convince you all that the language we use imparts meaning upon objects. But isn't there more debate to be had, more nuance to introduce, more facts brought to bear? Perhaps that which holds us back in our debate is not merely the facts, but the form."

"The form?" asked Nikon and Rizali at the same time. Nikon shuddered.

"Yes, to properly gauge all aspects of this topic of debate, we must not limit ourselves in dialogue to this, the language we all understand to be the greatest thing to ever be created and that ever will be created. But now, we must reassess this topic in the second greatest language to ever be created or that ever will be created. In doing this, we will be able to consider with new eyes and new ears those things that might have been lost upon us before."

"You don't mean-" said Nikon.

"I do!" said Mephistopheles. "We must hold this debate again.


...

In Latin."

"No!" screamed Rizali, who had also never heard of Latin. But at this point they were invested and didn't want to be touched by the giant hands again to learn yet another language.

"Very well," said Nikon. "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum..."

"Kaegan, run!" Rizali yelled, and fled from the scene.

[Sure, happy to explain. Also welcome to the forum.]

Why Is Recruitment Missing?
Sure, happy to explain. Also welcome to the forum.

• Reason #1: Dot isn't really a recruitment bot, and that's not why Dot exists.

This is a decision that I have been wrestling with since...I don't really know when. I'd say the latest possible beginning was Mayish 2022 when I took a review of the commands used in the last thirty days and found that the top two commands were used more than the next thirty seven, and recruit made up over half of those two. Before that I had no idea when commands were used, what commands were popular, which ones were flops, and (most disturbing to Discord) no way to know if someone were abusing my commands. So I added usage collection and later reported this in the version command. At the time I added them, the top command was recruit. Also at the time I added them, I thought that would change at points. It did not.

My goals for 2023 were to dethrone recruit as the most-used command, and I planned to do this by really going to town on adding new commands and really sprucing up the ones that already existed -- giving them new capabilities and analytics. So now there are 61 commands and some that allow you to look through twelve years of almost every imaginable metric of NationStates record, with visual graphs, trends, and events. This was a shitton of work, and unfortunately this impacted usage almost not at all. Recruit is down from where it peaked at 46 per cent of all commands used in the last 30 days, but almost exactly where it was two years ago at 34 per cent of total, and that's just very sad.

I feel like this is a big reason why I've lost motivation to work on Dot, which I have worked pretty hard on for years. Irrespective of graphics and documentation, there's over 750KB of raw hand-written python and about 2 per cent of that is the recruit command. Yet Dot is know for being the recruitment bot, and any other services Dot could provide will probably always be overshadowed by that.

• Reason #2: Manual is less effective now, and that's partially my fault.
  
  

Dot's documentation page mentions how she went from being in one server of 50 people to 300 servers of some thousands. And this probably comes across like a humblebrag, but really what it's meant to convey is my abject horror. Dot went through a lot of command rewrites in v3.0 and v3.1, and a lot of it was dealing with Dot's explosive growth axe-murdering my server. But 34 per cent remember? Now there's literally hundreds of servers which are using this system (maybe not all at the same time), but collectively hundreds more servers are popping in and out of Dot recruitment with six to ten going at any given time, raising the competition for all. Included amongst those new recruiters were, bizarrely, feeders which the command was never intended to benefit.

It is less effective than ever to use Dot's recruitment because it has become a relative baseline for manual. This means that it is, ironically, now less effective than going fully manual. One alternative is hammering the API right at the ratelimit to get new nations the picosecond they come out, but I'm not really interested in pursuing that line of development. The fact is that timing only gets you so far; at the end of the day, some nations just aren't going to be buying what you're selling. Also, I couldn't even pursue it if I wanted to because Hydrogen already makes a ton of requests to NationStates to service other commands and software.

• Reason #3: More of a detriment than a benefit.
  
  

There's a whole bunch of people out there who spend an inordinate amount of time hating my living guts. This is fine, but it does raise an interesting question of the ethics of decrying my evil in public, but continue to benefit from my work in private. I guess that's not my problem so much. The ethical question for me is should one continue to benefit people and organisations that simultaneously attempt to erode your reputation and public trust? I think the ultimate answer is "no", but I have vowed to uphold Refugi values as Arch-Admin of Calref, and I consider free and public access to tools and software to be one of those non-negotiable values. It's why I opened it up to the public in the first place instead of retaining it as an exclusive tool for myself.

So the lights have stayed on, and stayed equally on as long as I thought the command was good to have around. Now that I no longer believe the command is good to have around, the lights can also be equally off. Ultimately, I just don't want to run the command anymore, but hopefully some good came from the three years that it was around.

Greetings,

The transitional council's timeline has now been concluded. Old URLs will no longer route traffic or process requests, and all old email addresses have been terminated. All sites and services are functioning well under the new calref.ca scheme. If you find anything broken from this point forward, check if it's going to the right calref.ca address, and please correct it or notify someone to correct it if it is not so.

Understood. I will keep this up for comment and suggestions until the 26^th when I plan to submit the proposal to vote.

Scheduling the Council terms for Ops is, indeed, the most difficult part. It was the most difficult part last time as well, but then I was going off of NationStates' event calendar to try to anticipate what to expect. Since Frontiers released this year, I think that is the reason that not all of them were executed as planned, but the current situation might not be as imbalanced as you believe:

January	February Secretary-General Election (Feb 4) Best Nation (Feb 14) N-Day (Feb 25)	March	April AF Event (April 1)
May World Trade Fair (May 13)	June	July Cards Against NationStates Global (July 1)	August Secretary-General Election (Aug 5)
September N-Day (Sep 30)	October Z-Day (Oct 30-31)	November	December

The scheduling could still be improved, although we don't yet know what the schedule will be for next year, or if they intend to use the 2023 calendar as a template for 2024. Ops does not necessarily need to be on duty or running all of these events, and we may encounter an ops councillor who actively will push for the region to not participate in one or more events. That makes it a little challenging to know what the right dates are as well.

Is the following an improvement?

January	February Secretary-General Election (Feb 4) Best Nation (Feb 14) N-Day (Feb 25)	March	April AF Event (April 1)
May World Trade Fair (May 13)	June	July Cards Against NationStates Global (July 1)	August Secretary-General Election (Aug 5)
September N-Day (Sep 30)	October Z-Day (Oct 30-31)	November	December

Once upon a star supernova, twenty six legendary cards descended from our tall card tower. Hooray!
Our newfound love Testlandia, wore splendid magenta fursuit, specifically commissioned to contain BEES! It buzzed through rainbow, over walls yonder, and into the sky. At midnight, Gerald Ford erupted from his volcanic lair, overflowing with meritorious service. Both chambers reloaded their legislative shotguns while removing glistering shirts, heated by lava undershirts. Ford devoured the 535 imperial guards, while copper prices skyrocketed, and legislation stalled.

Meanwhile, the legendary crocodile, Crocodile Irwin, initiated CPR for the legislature of New Hartoria. Mercifully, HS wrote textwalls of nonsense which follows:
"Spinning crickets mercifully inundate Equestria"

Obviously, this sucked. Mercifully, Andraste (Jesus Ronaldo) smote tobacco from a Tevinter corpse. Aromatic! It smelled. Unclear directions confounded the manufacturing executives, who decided there was no better fate than death. Opportunistically, they provided Andraste more timeshares filled 37% of the time by Tevinter, but why? For this, the ultimate price of three dollars and forty seven cents must be paid.

Dissenting Justice reminds us of prison. Thanks Justice! Very cool! Not until Alexander Wallexander jumped out and landed beside several upside-down teletubbies doing yoga. "Hi peoples how do you learn

CalRef II: So Much For the Lactose-Tolerant Left

HumanSanity: 81
Emily: 68
Luca: 61
Kal: 46
Argo: 30
A819: 26
Aav: 14
Wasc: 10
FLP: 7
Ziz: 5
Dyll: 5
Cat: 5
Fox: 4
Zuk: 2
Ruby: 2
Potato: potato
Istillian: 2
Sueloc: 1

Uh, so, we doin this? Or nah.

I am interested in this, but I was unable to write the technical infrastructure this year that would have supported it and, at present, I do not know when or if that will be possible. I remain conceptually interested in the idea, however I will probably be suspending this idea for now.

I agree that the map should be handled by us again, but I have a thought on this. What do you think of us taking the original map over again, but leaving the Councillor of Cartography position in place to oversee secondary maps and RP treaties? That way we have a consistently-updated map, but if people do have novel ideas on things they can change or enhance the position with, they still have some opportunity for that.

One primary issue would obviously be duelling awareness and legitimacy. There would, presumably, be a links which read "Regional Map" and "RP Map", yielding an indefinite stream of questions about what the differences were between the two and why one would be preferable to the other. While this solution may make sense from an administrative perspective, that may be the only perspective where it is viable.

A second issue would be that there is presently no user-interfacable way for someone to regularly update and publicly back up the map data on CalRef servers, meaning that there is no infrastructure in place to handle administration changes in spite of attempts to carry out malicious data removal or sabotage (such as was seen from Operations earlier this year). I would not (and should not) feel rushed or compelled to create new software to address a liability that did not exist when I was managing the map exclusively.

Both of these concerns would be relatively moot if the Councillor of Cartography map were, instead, a game map that rest every term and did not depend on stable transitions between administrations and did not promise long-term continuity, but interest in that manner of service has never been expressed.

Thesis 3: Consistency In Our Maps

PREAMBLE. Recollecting that the map of the Region was first created four years ago in late September of 2019 by Refuge Isle and Sylh Alanor,

Noting that consistent and high-quality updates of the Regional map occurred thereafter across 46 instances, nearly exclusively in one-month intervals,

Aware that this regular map operation handled hundreds of applications, including special requests to recognise sapient aquatic species, raise or lower land masses, and make raw data files available such that Member States could reproduce, extrapolate, and experiment with their own map versions,

Iterating that Statute Revision #28 created the Regional Council seat of Cartography in order to reconcile multiple regions of the map and alleviate "challenges to decision making and organisation" as a result of not being administered by parties who were Councillors elected to do so,

Lamenting that regular updates to the map have since ceased, the map's quality has decreased, and its public raw data access has been reduced, while the format of the map itself has become a matter of political debate,

Concluding that while it was never understood what the Revision was referring to when suggesting problems that appointed individuals create, it is certainly clear that issues of decision-making and organisation are established and renewed every election cycle under the current scheme, jeopardizing the consistency, continuity, reliability, expedience of the Region's cartography, and consequently:

Abolishes RRS 7(f). and its subsections.

Authored by: Refuge Isle
Seconded by:

[Candidacy Period]

Thesis 2: Coherency In Our Text

PREAMBLE. When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to reflect on the text that governs a land, one may find that an original law may be insufficient at addressing a scenario which was, at the law's conception, inconceivable,

Although some governments may elect to establish, for example, twenty-seven addendums to the original law, this Region adopts a more enlightened possibility, provided by electronic documentation: The Delete Button, and

Revises RRS 12 and 13 in their entirety to the following, more diet-conscious text:

RRS 12. The Arch-Administrator will call elections for all democratic Council seats according to the following convention:

Candidacy Period	Feb 12 - 19	May 12 - 19	Aug 12 - 19	Nov 12 - 19
Voting Period	Feb 20 - 26	May 20 - 26	Aug 20 - 26	Nov 20 - 26
Transition Period	Feb 27 - 28	May 27 - 28	Aug 27 - 28	Nov 27 - 28

• During the Candidacy Period, any Member State may declare their intention to stand for office.
• During the Voting Period, all Member States may vote in all elections via ranked preference instant-runoff; candidates are eliminated by fewest votes in each round of ballot counting.
• During the Transition Period, elected councillors will receive overlapping access and powers with their predecessors, and all predecessors are dismissed at the end of the Period.

RRS 13. The following rules govern election procedure:

• Declarations must be posted to the Regional Message Board.
• Candidacies composed of multiple Member States are invalid, and candidacies where a Resident has lost Member State status during the election cycle become invalid.
• Member States are prohibited from occupying more than one Council seat at a time or occupying the same Council seat more than two times consecutively.
• In the case that a Member State has won multiple Council seats, they must select their Council seat of preference within 24 hours of the Voting Period's conclusion, otherwise the selection will be carried out by the Arch-Administrator.
• If a position is unable to be filled or becomes vacant by resignation, absence from existence, or legal impossibility, the Arch-Administrator may act in that position's capacity or appoint an individual who will serve in that capacity for the remainder of the term.

Authored by: Refuge Isle
Seconded by: Chacapoya

Thanks for that. Fixed.

Thesis 1: Peace In Our Time

PREAMBLE. In the year since the acknowledgement of a state of war,

The enemies of Refugia, which had previously existed through incorporeal planes between realms, have been subsequently purged from the plane in which Refugia primarily occupies, in accordance with the arc of natural justice in the universe,

Where deficiencies in alacrity as well as lethargy in personal responsibility previously manifested without contest, trans-dimensional safeguards have since been established to reduce the potency of bad actors' relevance and maleficence in any future attempts at belligerence,

Although aware that such events are impossible to prevent, the Region is receptive to the attempts made to do so regardless,

Therefore observes that a state of war no longer exists and,

Abolishes RRS 16. and its subsections, and decrements the Refugia Revised statutes by one thereafter.

Authored by: Refuge Isle
Seconded by: Tiralta

We're now two-thirds of the way through the transition timeline.

For the last eight months, you should have seen a massive yellow banner whenever you clicked a URL for an old domain, letting you know it was time to switch your bookmarks or what have you. Starting today, the web apps that were mirrored on dual domains with no file hosting are no longer being provided on the old URL. This means:

• Eyebeast.CalRef can now only be accessed via eyebeast.calref.ca
• Tart.CalRef can now only be accessed via tart.calref.ca
• Vote.CalRef can only be accessed via vote.calref.ca
• These forums can only be accessed from forum.calref.ca (previously you just couldn't sign in)
• Dot's documentation can only be accessed from calref.ca/dot

Cryotic

HumanSanity: 81
Emily: 68
Luca: 60
Argo: 30
Kal: 30
Aav: 14
A819: 11
Wasc: 10
FLP: 7
Ziz: 5
Dyll: 5
Fox: 4
Cat: 4
Zuk: 2
Ruby: 2
Potato: 2
Istillian: 2
Sueloc: 1

Once upon a star supernova, twenty six legendary cards descended from our tall card tower. Hooray!
Our newfound love Testlandia, wore splendid magenta fursuit, specifically commissioned to contain BEES! It buzzed through rainbow, over walls yonder, and into the sky. At midnight, Gerald Ford erupted from his volcanic lair, overflowing with meritorious service. Both chambers reloaded their legislative shotguns while removing glistering shirts, heated by lava undershirts. Ford devoured the 535 imperial guards, while copper prices skyrocketed, and legislation stalled.

Meanwhile, the legendary crocodile, Crocodile Irwin, initiated CPR for the legislature of New Hartoria. Mercifully, HS wrote textwalls of nonsense which follows:
"Spinning crickets mercifully inundate Equestria"

Obviously, this sucked. Mercifully, Andraste (Jesus Ronaldo) smote tobacco from a Tevinter corpse. Aromatic! It smelled. Unclear directions confounded the manufacturing executives, who decided there was no better fate than death. Opportunistically, they provided Andraste more timeshares filled 37% of the time by Tevinter, but why? For this, the ultimate price of three dollars and forty seven cents must be paid.

Dissenting Justice reminds us of prison. Thanks Justice! Very cool! Not until Alexander Wallexander jumped out and landed beside several upside-down teletubbies doing yoga. "Hi peoples how do

Maaaaagnummm, buuuuleeetts
Eroding our my floor!

Maaaaagnummm, buuuuleeetts!
I shouldn't have bought a Ford~