An end to the council of Elrond?

Now we're using feature branches, have a staging site, and a fairly stable GP, we can be much smarter about development.

There can now be a clear separation between development and release.

That's not to say that development and fixes will stop - but this group was set up to decide which fixes should be developed, the implementation and what should be released.

I'm going to leave it up to the community to decide how they determine what should be included in a release and release schedules. I'd like @Len (or someone else) to manage that. I come here to have fun. Being involved in decisions for the whole community is not my idea of fun.

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1. This is going to be the GP dev game.

The job of this game will be to shape things for staging. To offer features, not decide on them.

We've deliberately avoided adding the more controversial stuff (like discord integration), but now we're able to implement those features and preview them on staging, we can leave it up to the community whether or not to choose them.

This game will be for the people who want to make changes, look at things on staging and discuss changes to implementation - but not deciding whether something should be included.

I'm going to make this game open to anyone with constructive ideas (and maybe even a few destructive ones too).

2. As I said, I'll leave it up to @Len and the community to decide how to decide what should be pulled from staging.

Sound sensible?

I need a new name for this game.

Sounds sensible.

Well, the chapter after "The Council of Elrond" is called "The Ring goes South".
Not sure that's a super fitting name, though. Maybe "The Return of staGing" 😆

Not bad bowl. I expected something more puny to be honest.

Not bad?! No more LotR references. I didn’t like this one. Can’t we be the "Fire Ninjas" or something?

Ask, Debate And Mingle?

Inglorious hackers

Since it's now everyone who can participate, how about we move from Kingpins to Pins. Or Pinsants.

Or maybe Gamers Plane Featuring Adam

Or Developers Plane

Or Gamers Plans

Gamers' Plans. Agreed.

I do like Gamers' Plans, mainly because it looks like a typo.

But this game won't make the plans - that's up to @Len (I'm going to say Len as a placeholder for whoever sets up that group). It'd be a good name for the group that decides on releases.

Maybe heretical, but I don't even like LotR and am more than happy with no more references lol. But I do love puns, so here's some name suggestions.

Advice, Ice, Baby
Staging Coach
Sage Stage
Feature Creatures

Gamers' Pain

Hi everyone,

First off, I'm not interested in being a boss or project manager or something. That seems too corporate and antithetical to the grass roots nature of the site. Also, it's unsustainable. If the manager decide to ghost the site or gets hit by a bus or whatever then the process is decapitated. Or worse, if the manager is a tyrant and tries to force a particular vision then it'll make us all want to quit.

This council model is great. You've done really good work. You are all passionate users who have great ideas and want to spend time giving back to the community. Why are talking about ending this? I'd like to work alongside you folks, not replace you.

What I am bringing to the table is a vision of how it might work moving forward, and my labour to help make it happen.

This group has been primarily a think tank for generating ideas for improving the site. It's based on your individual interests/preferences and experiences and as a diverse group of users it is meant to reflect the community's needs. Ideas seem to flow quickly and Adam seems to enjoy implementing them, and your ideas and labour has improved the site a lot. But, documenting and testing are lagging behind despite best efforts. And it sounds like people are not sure if the changes actually reflect what the community wants, or if it solves problems.

I would suggest slowing things down and breaking development down into focused stages. A group like this one would oversee the stages together, recruiting people to help. We can contribute to the work too, but only the parts that interest us. Here are some suggested stages in this post https://gamersplane.com/forums/thread/23378/?p=1087575#p1087575.

This is just a first take on this vision and I'm sure it can be improved - please feel free to make changes. But, if you think there are fundamental flaws in the vision then I'm not here to impose it on you. I won't be offended in the least if this isn't what you think the community needs. But if you like it I think it would be an enjoyable way to work beside like-minded users to give back to the community.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

I think you misunderstand me, bud.

This group will now develop features, not releases.

Another group will decide which features make a release by selecting them from staging.

I don’t mind how this other planning group is set up. I’d recommend keeping the format of having a cross section of the community as a council. That worked well.

This frees us up to be a little more experimental, and if the other group doesn’t like a feature then they don’t take it. It lets them try before they buy. It’s a better model and possible now because we’ve developed staging and a better release model.

So someone needs to set up a group that chooses from the features that’ll be available in staging, and decides on release schedules.

Setting up the group that decides on what to take needs to be done by someone respected in the community, impartial, and with the smell of wisdom on them.

So, yeah, there should be a council, but it needs setting up. Preferably by someone else.

Right, so Council of Elrond (CoE) comes up with the features. The second group finds out what features are wanted/needed. They work independently and in parallel. Once the second group comes up with the plan, they pick from among the features that CoE has made that will address the community concerns.

The problem I see with that model is that that CoE might not make features that address the issues that the second group identifies. Also, CoE might spend a lot of time on features that never see the light of day. I also suspect that the 'try before you buy' approach will lead to a lot of "invention is the mother of necessity" type of features.

I could be wrong, and I won't be upset if you aren't into the plan I wrote about earlier. Thanks everyone for taking the time to read it. If it's not what you were looking for, let's let it go.

While Adam has been very tolerant of our demands, the nature of free, volunteer development is that people mostly work on things that interest them, when they are interested.

'Slowing things down' is a useful technique in the professional arena, but might not be feasible with volunteers.

It is ultimately up to Adam how fast things get developed, and if we want to see changes (at all), we can not complain about 'too many' or 'we can't write documentation fast enough'. We had shoddy documentation before this, when features and changes were measured in (fractional) decades.

If we care we can document, if we don't care we can skip the docs and be no worse off than we were before,
so long as new features don't break things we already rely on (which has been my only concern, those breakages can be subtle and hard to predict (Discord!)). I say we let Adam drive this as fast as they like, and just be thankful someone is doing something.

Thank you Adam. It has been awesome working with you and seeing your responsiveness (even if grudging:) to our push-back.

Thanks for spelling that out for me vagueGM. I definitely misunderstood. Sorry Adam, I meant no disrespect.

I don't think it came across as 'disrespectful'.

It's hard to find the right words when you realize your foot is in your mouth 🤣

Nah. I'm good. Vague is right - I want to work on things that interest me. Although there are features that have been developed that I have no interest in. Reroll aces by default - I'll never use it. I never use the threads menu or backfill either. I was weakly against @mentions (I thought they'd be abused - I was wrong).

How did we get here?
1. I wrote a chrome extension to customise GP to the way I wanted it.
2. Other people found the extension useful.
3. It didn't matter if people didn't like those changes - the extension was optional.
4. Cave asked for dark mode in the extension - I didn't want that but added it anyway.
5. A little over six months ago we got docker working (you should know Len, you were there).
6. I checked in a couple of fixes (allowing people with short names to be added to games, and allowing duets).
7. I started to bring extension features over.
8. It became apparent that some of the things Adam liked, others weren't so keen on.
9. The council of elrond was formed to stop me doing stupid things. There needed to be a consensus before a feature was worked on.
10. Keleth gave us permission to change the homepage and add mobile styling.
11. We had a few big releases to make use of that permission.

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Where are we now?

We can now separate development from release.

We can take ideas from wherever they occur, without caring if they're good. They can be developed, reviewed, but not released.

Like wood, code has a grain. It's determined by the languages, the libraries, the servers, the existing codebase, and the metaphors used on the site. There are some things that people want that go against the natural grain of the codebase. Weirdly, negative numbers in dice rolls (2d6-2d4) is one of those. Which features are developed is often decided by the existing codebase as much as by me or the community.

So, yeah. I intend to continue having fun - taking suggestions from everyone and anyone, and playing with the code when I'm feeling inspired to do so. If anyone else wants to jump into the code, then let me tell you, the water's fine - come on in.

With staging and branching - I don't need to care whether the ideas are good ones. That's up to y'all.

To me the feature suggestions now look like this:

Each thread is a feature. The ones that join the green line are in staging. The ones hanging in space are on my workbench.

Last release they looked like this:

Where every dot was a feature - but it was very much "take it all or leave it all".

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Summary: The In Staging forum is not a release plan - it's a catalogue of developed options for the GP community to choose from.

Someone (else) needs to work out how the community will choose from that catalogue and schedule them into releases. Slow, fast, fully documented, or sneaked out - I don't mind.