The Tavern

good gravy it's deader than menkaure on monday morning in here

i know people are still playing. are people just not posting anymore?

have been mostly gone for a few years so bear with me here

Yes, tavern seems to be quite quiet nowadays. I suspect that new persons can not (easily) register, at least I do not really see new people anymore. Or maybe everybody has moved to Reddit.

all the cool kids shitpost on discord

There were several waves of spambots, new account registration on CDO was apparently(?) closed in an attempt to prevent this.

(That was never really a solution, though; without new users, it's only a matter of time until this forum dies completely.)

Hellmonk wrote:all the cool kids shitpost on discord

i was sure wondering if there was a discord but i didn't want to ask. that's like asking if anyone is having a pool party this weekend. simply not done

About not registering, sometimes the ban seems to be lifted. So we have had some new users register this year, but they are just 8, and only 4 of them have actually posted something. By comparison, the previous year there were over 300 new users, although I don't know how many of them were bots, and in 2013 they were over 600.

We also seem to have fewer devs posting, although that could be my impression, or just a result of the lack of discussion.

Yeah, I suspect it's a matter of the forum operator doesn't have the time or interest in devoting the resources needed to combat the spam accounts. The forum software is very very old, doesn't have any facility to easily mitigate spammers, and was customized to interact with the bug report database. Because we're effectively locked in to a customized system, and have lots of old data we want to preserve, It's not trivial to upgrade to newer software or migrate to a different one. Adding anti-spam protection to the existing software would take significant time, and it's historically even the best anti-spam software not been overly effective without manual intervention (and there's not a large enough population of people to manually cull spammers out fast enough)

I'm not sure what the solution is, some sort of manual enrollment process would be nice as a stopgap, but who is going to manage it and how (and do we have the ability to even add users manually?)

Anyway, there's not a good, low-effort solution that immediately presents itself.

It may be that the ban-lifting was some sort of manual new-user registration process I'm not aware of (I would suspect new accounts might be added manually through IRC)

Could allowing people to sign up with a google / FB account work?
I honestly don't know how much work it would be, or how effective, but I know some other sites do it. I understand Google / FB block most automatically generated accounts.

PS: not that I'm in general in favour of increasing G&FB's power

i had no idea that registrations had been locked down. this is all fascinating. i feel like i'm posting in a shitty time capsule or something

petercordia wrote:Could allowing people to sign up with a google / FB account work?
I honestly don't know how much work it would be, or how effective, but I know some other sites do it. I understand Google / FB block most automatically generated accounts.

PS: not that I'm in general in favour of increasing G&FB's power

Adding any sort of external registration process would require customizing the forum software which there's not presently manpower to do, among the people with access to do it (it would effectively mean creating a one-off plug-in for the forums/bug report database that wouldn't be generic or reusable) that is a possible solution, but it requires writing a whole new thing just for this forum (And it's not a trivial thing to do correctly, and it would be complicated to integrate properly, and there's a very limited number of people with access to the current system to even possibly make such modifications, and they may or may not have the expertise, not to mention the desire and time)

ZipZipskins wrote:i feel like i'm posting in a shitty time capsule or something

At least you're still getting the classic tavern experience~

Implojin wrote:
ZipZipskins wrote:i feel like i'm posting in a shitty time capsule or something

At least you're still getting the classic tavern experience~

all the way down to the self-flagellation. hurts so good

There's been some discussion about this both among the devs and the tavern mods, and we are agreed that tavern will dwindle as long as registration is mostly closed, which it has been for a while now. I think there isn't really a good path towards fixing registration on the existing setup, and so it doesn't seem likely to me that registration will ever be fully open here again. We've had some discussion of whether it would be worth it to try to set up a new forum elsewhere, with more modern trappings (with or without tavern history, hasn't gotten to the point of deciding that) -- would probably use different forum software (where discourse is the main game in town, sigh). Still not clear whether this will happen, or should happen (feedback welcome!).

I do think that discord has soaked up a lot of dcss discussion, and r/dcss is also more popular/active than it used to be.

there's a very limited number of people with access to the current system to even possibly make such modifications

That number is 1 AFAIK (though he has been happy to work with others who are trying to improve things in the past, we got a bit of a grace period when modern captcha was added by a contributor).

A few devs do have access rights to manually add CDO mantis/tavern accounts, it is sort of a pain to do though.

Well I certainly think having a thing like Tavern is extremely valuable, and especially for the newbies who are the ones being screened out; I don't like reddit. Of course I don't know how hard setting up a new forum is.

I think it's better for something forum-esque like the Tavern to exist (with open registration) as a place for long-form constructive player feedback, than to give up on the idea entirely and let discord + r/dcss handle the traffic. (Reddit in particular tends to be pretty awful.)

Obviously this carries a technical and moderation burden that might be too steep to be worth it if the traffic isn't there, but it seems to me that r/dcss has huge amounts of noise and has had problems with being flooded by thinly-disguised alt accounts of one or two particularly odious trolls. Any Tavern replacement would probably be just as difficult to moderate, but it seems important for the "official" forums to have a clear "Be constructive or be banned" rule, similar to GDD's sticky.

edit: As a tangent of "official Crawl things that need to be updated for the benefit of new players": CDO's landing page also needs to be updated, since this is the first thing people see if they search for DCSS.

Probably the IRC link there should be replaced with discord, the mantis link there should be replaced with a github issues link since new users can't actually signup for mantis, the tavern link would need to be swapped out if a new forum is ever setup, and maybe UV4's guide should be linked in place of / in addition to the chaosforge wiki?

I just don't like Reddit in general. One reason is how it works -- each time I try expanding to see more answers, I am sent to the bottom of the page to see links to other threads, and it's very laborious, because then I have to scroll upwards and open more branches to see three answers, each 40 letters long (which I probably would have read in 1/9 of the time on a normal forum).
The other reason has to do with large websites in general (data market) and how Reddit is also scoured by external parties for information (IIRC, there was a minor upheaval some years ago about how an American party had fundamentally taken note of the political alignment of every user who had expressed an opinion).

It's also that Reddit seems to work by dividing answers under the assumption of a tree always branching outside, while I think conversations are a lot more fluid.

advil wrote:There's been some discussion about this both among the devs and the tavern mods, and we are agreed that tavern will dwindle as long as registration is mostly closed, which it has been for a while now. I think there isn't really a good path towards fixing registration on the existing setup, and so it doesn't seem likely to me that registration will ever be fully open here again. We've had some discussion of whether it would be worth it to try to set up a new forum elsewhere, with more modern trappings (with or without tavern history, hasn't gotten to the point of deciding that) -- would probably use different forum software (where discourse is the main game in town, sigh). Still not clear whether this will happen, or should happen (feedback welcome!).

I think that a new forum would be worthwhile. I know that having a longer-term repository of information in Tavern as well as access to various opinions on a slower-moving timescale were both very helpful to me when I was new, and I know as well that if I had tried to rely on Reddit I probably would have quit Crawl. I also am highly aware of the difficulties of actually setting up and managing/moderating forums, so I don't want to promise other people's work. I just know that for me as a new player (and to some extent me as a more experienced player) Tavern was pretty instrumental, in addition to approximately one billion "laffs" it has provided.

please implement thanks so that i can remain dopamine fueled by the rush of social approval though

I do think that discord has soaked up a lot of dcss discussion, and r/dcss is also more popular/active than it used to be.

Discord is great for conversation but it's also not great at the things Tavern is great at- searchable, durable posts that are relatively easy to index and navigate.

A few devs do have access rights to manually add CDO mantis/tavern accounts, it is sort of a pain to do though.

That's a huge pain in the ass for devs, who are already busy people, and to me isn't really a solution, but I can't speak for others here.

advil wrote:There's been some discussion about this both among the devs and the tavern mods, and we are agreed that tavern will dwindle as long as registration is mostly closed, which it has been for a while now. I think there isn't really a good path towards fixing registration on the existing setup, and so it doesn't seem likely to me that registration will ever be fully open here again. We've had some discussion of whether it would be worth it to try to set up a new forum elsewhere, with more modern trappings (with or without tavern history, hasn't gotten to the point of deciding that) -- would probably use different forum software (where discourse is the main game in town, sigh). Still not clear whether this will happen, or should happen (feedback welcome!).

I do think that discord has soaked up a lot of dcss discussion, and r/dcss is also more popular/active than it used to be.

there's a very limited number of people with access to the current system to even possibly make such modifications

That number is 1 AFAIK (though he has been happy to work with others who are trying to improve things in the past, we got a bit of a grace period when modern captcha was added by a contributor).

A few devs do have access rights to manually add CDO mantis/tavern accounts, it is sort of a pain to do though.

I wonder how much work it would be to simply set up the current version of phpBB, or if that would be sufficiently helpful. I know the current version does have some anti-spam measures, and does have a large number of plug ins but I've done little research into what it would take to port the data over (or if it's even reasonable to do) at least it would be similar to the current format, which I think the current participants do prefer.

Discord has always struck me as basically an IRC replacement, rather than a forum replacement, and reddit is... well it's not a forum, it's better for ad-hoc fragmented conversations, but much much worse for having a single group discussion about a given topic, particularly if you want to have ongoing long-term discussions.

advil wrote:A few devs do have access rights to manually add CDO mantis/tavern accounts, it is sort of a pain to do though.

Also it's hard for me to imagine a new player with a question getting in touch with a dev to ask for a tavern account. (I'd have given up had that been required, I suspect.)

Shtopit wrote:each time I try expanding to see more answers, I am sent to the bottom of the page to see links to other threads

change your url from www.reddit.com into old.reddit.com (or use reddit enhancement sweet to force old-mode always). all threads will be visible, except when there's 250+ replies, or when there's downvoted misinformation/trolling.

ZipZipskins wrote:Discord is great for conversation but it's also not great at the things Tavern is great at- searchable, durable posts that are relatively easy to index and navigate.

Discord is searchable, though not "easy" to search or index. For instance, when deciding whether to start using some artifact you found named Sniper, you can put this in the search box: from:minqmay#4416 OR from:Pekkekke#7112 sniper. There's a wealth of commentary from experienced players stored in discord, and it's much more useful than asking for the opinions of a scrub who happens to be sitting in the channel.

again, if i were new, that process would completely exhaust me- i wouldn't know which veterans to search for or even why i should care about specific players' opinions over others. this kind of thing is much easier to see in forum threads because it's straightforward to do comparative analysis between the advice of two different posters

not here arguing that discord isn't powerful! but it isn't user-friendly for the purpose of getting new players quality information.

(side note i can't believe i am here claiming that somehow tavern is a good source for quality information)

Even as someone who's been playing this game for over 5 years, it wouldn't have occurred to me to search for minqmay#4416 or Pekkekke#7112.

Even after you recommended these ridiculous looking search expressions (how did you come up with them?), I can not even find the search box on discord where they give any results. I am probably stupid, but can someone enlighten me how to actually search for anything dcss related on discord? I can't find a single dcss related post - I most probably miss something trivial.

sanka wrote:Even after you recommended these ridiculous looking search expressions (how did you come up with them?), I can not even find the search box on discord where they give any results. I am probably stupid, but can someone enlighten me how to actually search for anything dcss related on discord? I can't find a single dcss related post - I most probably miss something trivial.

Unrelated, but congrats on your nice round number of 1000 posts! :mrgreen:

shping wrote:change your url from http://www.reddit.com into old.reddit.com (or use reddit enhancement sweet to force old-mode always). all threads will be visible, except when there's 250+ replies, or when there's downvoted misinformation/trolling.

Oh, thanks. I sort of get Reddit nowadays not caring to show posts it considers the least useful (good for skimmers, although it artificially privileges certain posts creating a positive circle for them and a negative one for the others), but sending you to the bottom of the page instead of simply showing them to you when you explicitly clicked on them is really odd.

sanka wrote:Even after you recommended these ridiculous looking search expressions (how did you come up with them?), I can not even find the search box on discord where they give any results. I am probably stupid, but can someone enlighten me how to actually search for anything dcss related on discord? I can't find a single dcss related post - I most probably miss something trivial.

I'm not on the DCSS discord, but for my other communities, in the upper right there's a search box that lets you search *that discord server* I don't think there's a discord-wide search at all afaik.

(So you'd have to get an invite to the server you wanted to search, join it, then you should be able to search within it)

There are several dcss discord servers/channels. I assume people are talking about (IME) the most active one, which is a channel on the r/roguelikes server, and is public:

https://discord.gg/t9cVHhj

You can search just that channel by adding `in: dcss` to the query while in that server. (As mentioned there's a search bar in the top right corner.)

No comment on the wisdom of this approach or its suitability as a replacement for forum-type communication, but hopefully that helps you if you want to try it.

Also it's hard for me to imagine a new player with a question getting in touch with a dev to ask for a tavern account. (I'd have given up had that been required, I suspect.)

Yes, this does occasionally happen for mantis but I'm not sure it has ever happened for tavern. I wasn't intending to propose this as a solution (and tbh if someone asks me to do it my response time will ... not be ideal), just as a response to the informational question.

Re the discord searches, names autocomplete so I presume that's how people were getting those. But it's not a place where you very often look at old discussion, more of a place where people can ask something and get an immediate answer, or can run a bot query (relayed to Sequell). Roguelikes discord #dcss is definitely filling the past role of ##crawl in that sense.

What is the threat which could only be averted by shutting down registrations? Spambots flooding the forums or something else?

Magipi wrote:What is the threat which could only be averted by shutting down registrations? Spambots flooding the forums or something else?

Simply put, the level of spambots and spambot registrations is higher than the CDO server owner is willing to deal with / put up with these days.

Spambots under control of Big Social Media to destroy the last forums.

I think most local forums more or less died. Internet is getting centralized into silos. You have a forum either on Steam or on Reddit. Boardgamegeek has forums for all board games. It's not specific to Tavern.

It's the death of small internet communities. Corporations give people a place to talk, then they monetize them. Convenience trumps most concerns for people. I mean it's not hard to install a game without Steam but some people refuse to, and will not play a game until it comes to Steam. They already have a Steam or Reddit account, they don't want another one. Discord is not searchable... but when was the Search button last used? Do it and you'll be accused of necro.

I like the form of reddit and threaded discussion more than web forums with automatic chat flooding. You have to endure posts by people who don't interest you. I just don't like the Chinese shareholders.

Well, this forum seems to have, at least temporarily, come back to life over the past few weeks. I don't know what happened; I see no flood of new users, alas.

And I dislike reddit. Both can exist.

What happened to avis?

I don't care for reddit or chat systems to take the place of a classic forum. My preference would be to bite the bullet and add/create whatever sort of interface can either be found or written that effectively puts a gate in front of the entrance to the tavern, but doesn't halt all new registrations. The captcha example is in line with that track. Maybe we could get that back somehow. I have technical resources and decades of experience I'd be willing to pitch in to help out. Fighting spambots isn't something I've previously tackled, but I'm sure it's doable with research and/or some creative thinking.

Off the top of my head a few ideas, the gate could permit someone through if just one condition is met:

* Require registration use another system's email address (temporarily at least) that has robust spambot protection. Fight fire with fire by turning "the machine" into a tool that doesn't feed it, but leverages capabilities.
* Multi-factor authentication. Yes, it's invasive, but it's a big obstacle to obtain a telephone number per registration.
* Captcha - why did we have it, then lose it??
* Vet users on other systems (reddit, discourse, etc.) and invite them automatically after X criteria is noted. This could be fully or semi-automated. It could also just be manual with volunteers. As for fully automated, we could cross-reference actual game data of players that have statistics that at least don't appear to be bot games (sending invitations where matches can be found).
* A small $ donation is made. It could be a couple bucks even.. just enough that if someone wants to spam a thousand accounts, well, it starts to become worthwhile for administrators with benefits. If we get enough donations, heck we might even be able to pay for some services/help against spambots.

I think ultimately, if many fairly easy avenues are presented, and the person still thinks it's too hard, well, then they just don't want in badly enough. The worst case scenario I see then is that the quality stays high, but the site isn't squeezed to death either. Quality beats quantity, despite a lot of the world today trying the opposite.

I'll think about it more if there's more interest. If any existing devs/admins want to seriously take me up on my offer to assist, just send me a private message I suppose. I'm an ex enterprise-architect. I'm pretty sure I could get something working with some effort.

Just to clarify, I don't think there's a technical or financial solution to this problem as long as the forum remains hosted where it is. (We have considered, and still are considering, whether to move it elsewhere. But this is a massive time sink.)

Is there a discord server for this game? Can someone link it here if so?

There is a rougelike server, where there are dcss related channels.

There is an invitation in this very thread a few post above:
https://discord.gg/t9cVHhj

The Tavern

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