forum.freeciv.org

Hi everyone, thanks for taking the time to read this.

I hope we can all agree that the recent discord between the communities has been a disaster: freecivweb.org (FCW), tacticsandtriumph.com (TNT), longturn.net (LT) and upstream. It's a disaster because it wastes our time and efforts, distracts from making and playing fun games, and makes us all spend time on things that aren't taking freeciv forward.

I have personally spoken to several players who have quit freeciv over the recent infighting. This forum is overloaded with it, the most active thread in a while is an argument between communities. Personally, I have been threatened with doxxing, and heavily insulted both in private and in public.

Surely this is unacceptable to all of us? Are we not here to make and play the best game ever?

Recently I have been leading attempts to build bridges: we have readmitted Canik and Corbeau at FCW discord and issued an open amnesty for anyone previously banned to have that ban lifted, we have started to link to other communities games and do some soft promotion of them, and I offered to put my money where my mouth is when TNT needed extra funding (Canik ended up not needing it yet).

The future does not need to look like the past, and I am asking those at TNT, LT, FCW, and upstream to give my new proposed initiative a chance.


The initiative is this: an attempt to ensure different servers are cooperating rather than playing a zero sum game of division and destruction in the form of a new open source forum for all server administrators and upstream to frequent and discuss. It has been referred to as the "Freeciv Co-operative". It is there for resolving disagreements in private, and especially for any personalities who struggle to get along, to have a space where they can communicate, safe in the knowledge that their communications are not public, but also not totally private either - they will be witnessed by other server admins and upstream. I believe this will lead to better "behaviour" between individuals and communities.

The goals of this co-operative?
- resolve difficulties in private
- co-ordinate on projects and development with each other and upstream

The Co-operative is not a replacement for this forum. It's only for co-ordinating and co-operating between communities and taking certain discussions/disagreements outside of the public sphere, for the overall good of freeciv

The rules of this co-operative?
- be polite and respectful
- no doxxing
- conversations there are private and not to be shared outside the co-operative

If you can agree to those and are willing to give it a go for the good of the community, I would like to invite the following teams to sign up:
- admin teams from FCW (qrtv, me, Lexxie, dramon)
- admin teams from TNT (Canik and anyone else you wish to nominate)
- admin teams from LT (Louis, Corbeau, Wieder, and anyone else you wish to nominate)
- admin teams from warclient
- upstream (Marko, Sveinung, Cazfi, JTN, Andreas, and anyone else you wish to nominate)

If you are one of those individuals and would like to accept my invitation to a better, more open, friendlier future for freeciv communities, please sign up at [link redacted - message me if you want to join] - it is an open source forum

This forum could be helpfull in many ways. I have for a while wanted an easy way to ask the various downstreams about if the solutions I work on also covers some of their use cases.

sveinung wrote:This forum could be helpfull in many ways. I have for a while wanted an easy way to ask the various downstreams about if the solutions I work on also covers some of their use cases.

You can always ask here. We're watching

Concrete action of actually opening the group. Good!

Corbeau wrote:

sveinung wrote:This forum could be helpfull in many ways. I have for a while wanted an easy way to ask the various downstreams about if the solutions I work on also covers some of their use cases.

You can always ask here. We're watching

Still no spell checker at the computer I use so sorry about the mistakes.
It isn't reasonable for me to expect downstreams to read all posts at this forum as I myself only read a small fraction of the posts here. I'll give myself max two forums. When it comes to ruleset stuff I tend to post in the ruleset forum here when I can take the time to craft a message that hopefully won't get misunderstood. We could say that I'll post non ruleset questions for downstreams in - say - the "Help Wanted" section or even a particular thread if I end up having non ruleset questions for downstreams and - again - if I can take the time to reduce the number of possible misinterpretations posting on a forum as public and official as this could generate. Because a post from a developer on this forum will get misinterpreted. I have seen people - a bit understandably I must admit - take "too late for 2.6, that will have to wait for 3.0" as "I promise to do this for 3.0". The worst I have seen was Freeciv-web useing a particular version being taken as Freeciv dropping the C clients in that version.

This leaves stuff I don't want to put in a location as "official" as the Freeciv forum, say because I'm just collecting data for a hypotethical future feature or because I don't have time to write stuff in a guarded enough language. It also leaves stuff I want to be sure that downstrams have seen. There are more cases of stuff that I want to be semi private.

I therefore hope that the forum will work out. Thank you to everyone that signed up and started to participate in the discussion!

This initiative doesn't seem to be working that well. Questions asked, issues raised and the answer is usually silence. Or that's how it has been lately. No one is of course required to spend time answering. Yet if there are no talks it's not really working that well.

Also no idea how to add people who are making valuable contributions to the ruleset development.

If someone has ideas about how to make this work or how to replace it with something that works, please let us know. Meanwhile we are possibly preparing a suggestion but it will take some time before we can make one.

I never thought that forum was needed. If people want to talk, they will talk. If they don't, yet another forum won't make them talk.

Guilty parties talking like angels, it's fine.

Bigger projects using crappier corporate pay-to-win and having 50x more people, not so fine.

3.2 server with agnostic client and everyone working on it admitting or not to unification, very fine.

Forking your projecting into new licensing that restricts others while sucking them up, not so fine. Using trade names of other sites and changing the .org or .com or .net, not so fine. Sharing ideas, fine.

The usual problems solved a while ago: cheaters, politics, fighting over who has more of the 1000 users when it could be 2 million in a year, not so fine.

This project evolved a version of things to a version of things, i am not going to say, but is a pride of open source work. I am amazed.

We have the secret sauce and don't even deserve to have it but we do, so, needs to be people fighting less over 1000 users when 100M is a blink of an eye.

Cheers

Lexxie would you please talk on the discourse forum?