Events / Edit the main page and the wiki
When:January 21st, 2011 @ 12:00am TO January 22nd, 2011 @ 12:00am
Where:
EVERYWHERE!
Around the WHOLE WORLD
Enrollment
7/unlimited
Organizer:
Pixie
Description:
UPDATE: We are going to update content on the "About" page and "FAQ" as well.
if you want to be in on this, message me with your skype name. I'll probably do this google docs style
we are going to WIKI EDIT! it may not seem like fun, but it's going to be a PARTY! plus, if we all pitch in a little, it won't take long to make it AWESOME!
Also, maybe we can all discuss stuff on
Other things which should/can be written are descriptions that are outdated on the main page. Also, if anyone has cool new era designs, they would be cool to read. But this is mostly EPIC WIKI TIME!!!!!!!!!!!
Also, if you attend the event, and participate and we decided to submit it for a task, you might get POINTS!
(On a more serious note: this is an awesome game which we all enjoy. This is an awesome community which deserves love and support. SSI have real jobs and lives, so it's time for us to take change in our own hands and make things we want happen. I personally want a more accessible site, more new players and for some of the old, epic ones to come back. If these are also things which you like, you should probably just suck it up, deal with the horrible wiki UI and help. Maybe if we do this well, a precedent for more player control will be set and we will be able to approve tasks again, or help design the site itself.
Thank you
-Pixie)
Responses
7 Attending
Terms
(none yet)Comments
I'd like to think so, but i'm not sure. Even if they have a new design, we still, as players, have awesome ideas. What feels like a trend in everyday life is that players need to take things into their own hands to keep things going. I see the wiki as a starting place for showing that players can deal with some of the responsibility of game upkeep and that we can work together. This game was designed by people who played it. Now, the founder's aren't playing anymore, and they are busy with their lives. The more that we take on ourselves, the better. But first, we have to show then that we can and are willing.
I also plan on having an "ideas to improve the game" part of the wiki which will be a way of communicating with the founders about more abstract parts of the game, rather then bugs. IT will also allow our ideas to be out where the rest of the community can access them and add to them. This isn't just "it will make the new era come quicker" but more "this will be good for the future of the game which hopefully will go for years to come"
A wiki is a knowledge dump. Granted, there should be a way for players to submit ideas (a form that dumps into a mailbox that some senatorial committee can sort through), but a wiki isn't exactly the perfect medium for that. If you want a solid change, get SSI to take volunteer developers for the game, get them to appoint players as community managers, and offload the burden from themselves, so that they don't have the excuse of "our real lives are holding up development".
That is the ultimate goal. But i feel like we need to work on something that isn't the code to prove that we can work together, and that we won't put in cheats. A wiki is better then Skype (what we seem to use now) which excludes most newer players and requires that yo magically be online at the right time. Also, hopefully SSI is reading all of this and will comment on/consider what we say. We'll see, but it's better to try and do something then to stand by and whine
Then you don't want a wiki, you want a forum. A wiki is a collectively editable knowledge dump where topics are interwoven and linked to promote understanding and trap people with ADD in it's midst; on a forum we can organize discussions, expose them to the populace, police for jackassery and asshatery (when they aren't appropriate) for the good of the discourse occurring.
We need both, though. A wiki where we can store factual information, where we can catalogue and contribute solid knowledge, and a forum where we can discuss and include; between the two, we can expose new players to everything they need to know, both factually and culturally, and give them a place to introduce themselves and be welcomed.
No one uses 3rd forums, and no one will until SSI make them. I'm not wiki crazy randomly, I'm wiki crazy because I was working on ways of getting new players and I asked SSI to update the new player page. I got a message saying that if i put said new ideas on the wiki we could write them on the wiki and SSI would read them and maybe implement them. I know as much as any that the UI is bad, but i see three options as a player.
1) wait for SSI and do nothing. I've been doing this for a long time, and time after time, we are promised new dates and nothing happens
2) Yell about how mad i am and do nothing. People tend to get annoyed when other people do this and tend to be quiet
or 3) organize something vaguely constructive. It may not make the era come quicker, but at least it's doing something for the site and is a place for us to both get inspired by the old and help conceive of the new.
That is why i'm preposing the wikiedit/brainstorm
http://z9.invisionfree.com/SF0_Chat_and_Forum/index.php?
thats one of the forums in question
I wonder if someone else builds a phpbb forum for the site, if SSI will add it in here. Also, a page with an integrated IRC widget would be nifty too...
Like I said, wikis are static and factual, one person edits one page at a time. We need a forum, here on the site, with a link in the topbar, and something on the new player page that says "Stop by our forums and say 'hi'!". The internet being the place it is, people join websites because they like the community, and while we expose our community through tasking, non-players don't grok the game enough to draw that from our praxis, so we need a forum, a record of our discussions, were we can make announcements and everyone can contribute their two cents.
But we also need people to know it exists and is official. That, up there, didn't even know it existed. Might as well be as clandestine as your skype meetups. The problem, like with most great ideas that fail, isn't the idea, its the publicity. Like with Firefly.
So, i posted the wiki edit as a public event, and told people about it. If forums that we can mod and that are awesome get made, I'll figure out a way to publicize it.
Just go along with this first step, and we can do the other stuff too.
Minos, in your impetuousness, you mistake me. I have this knack for rushing headlong into situations and being impatient, and thus for my own survival I've developed caution, clarity of thought, and patience. A wiki sounds like a great and fun idea, but I'd no sooner let the idea stray that one should be used as a forum as I would let it go that a plugged-in toaster would make a good bathtime buddy; it's not what it was made for, it's not what it does well, and it's even counterproductive.
Short version: I love it when people do things, assuming they have a little thought and purpose behind them.
Before Wikipedia, the norm was for the wiki to be a variant form of forum - people post comments, in order, signed, until discussion dies down. Then somebody does what other forums don't make possible, namely refactoring the discussion into an article about the topic, which may then raise more questions (if done well, questions asked by people who weren't there the first time), which leads to more discussion at the bottom of the page, ad infinitum.
I would rather use the existing wiki in that manner than try to set up something wholly new, but I'm up for whatever we do.
Also, take a look at any of the discussion pages on Wikipedia. It is still used in that way, but the "article" portion is on one "page" the discussion about it on another. Discussion on wiki pages is possible, and is done all over the place.
My position: if we want a sort of a "suggestions for the next era" page, then we should do it like Wikipedia, with an "article" which describes the consensus, and a "discussion" which talks about how to improve it. The discussion need not take place anywhere on the wiki, but that seems like the easiest place to put it for now. Also, if we don't put it on the wiki, then it tends to become hard to find, and thus hard to contribute to the discussion.
That would work. The appropriate framework is already in place for discussion pages using the comment system - it would just need to be tweaked a little bit to point at wiki entries, not tasks/events.
I should note that my issue with this hasn't been anything but mechanical. The problem with collective wiki page editing is just like the problem with collective task editing: only the most recent copy closed gets saved. Since a discussion page solves that, problem solved. Now we just need a diligent, responsible community mod (or group of mods) to read the discussions and keep the pages updated.
i don't know much about much, but i'd like to help.
This is troubling.
Honestly, I think it's a fantastic thing that we don't have a forum. We don't need a forum, and, quite frankly, I don't want a forum. Something about SFZERO is that, always, something must be happening for discussion. Forums take that away, making it about the discussion instead of the action. Pretty soon we'll have threads that are about as little as the color of something on the site. Or we just won't use them in the slightest. Here we should do things instead of just talking about them.
Anybody else agree?
Agreed.
I do not want a forum.
I do not want to help edit the wiki.
I may have information to contribute to the wiki, but I do not want anything to do with it. I like the game the way it is, I have never gone to the wiki, and I don't know how to find it, and that's OK with me.
It may be because I have been here for awhile and know a lot about what has happened, but I have no desire to update the history. Our history here is praxis. If you want to know what happened before you showed up, check the praxis. I joined this game in progress and felt like I had been thrown into the deep end, but I figured out the history of things before I joined by reading praxis.
I would suggest reading all of Piratey Monkey's & Cameron's & Oliver X's & Gadget's tasks to get a feel for how the game looked early on, and starting there, you'll get wrapped up in collaborators and check out their praxis, and then theirs and theirs, and theirs and so on. All of our history is right here. You just have to want to find it. And when you go back and read any old praxii and you like what you see, vote for it. Leave a comment.
When you comment on something, that comment shows up on all of your friends' pages. And I want to read what my friends are saying and what they're saying it about. The only reason I knew to come here was because of Bryce's comment. Keep that chain going. Let me know what you think is good.
(an extra added bonus to voting and commenting on old praxis, is that the players get email notifications when they get comments, and if they have stopped playing, maybe a few emails from SFØ telling them somebody voted for their praxis is just the kick in the pants they need to get back to playing.
Y'know, I hadn't thought about it that way, but I'm kind of inclined to agree with Bryce there. Hm.
As a new player, I'm fine with updating the wiki. Though I do agree that the major source of information about the game comes from reading people's praxis, many of us new people don't know which of the over 10,000 praxis to read.
It is easy to know that there is some great history here, and having a basic overview of the history would be something I am interested in. It took me a LONG time to know what SSI was/is, and though I knew there were previous eras, I didn't know how to find praxis from earlier eras, or even what the earlier eras where for quite a while as well.
Lincoln: I will definitely take a look at those players to get an idea of how things were in previous eras, but if you hadn't posted that comment, I would have no idea that they even existed. If, in another month, someone else new comes along and they are very interested in how things were in the early days, how are they to know the players to use as an example? Are they expected to find this comment? Should they just expect that the great players, such as yourself, who intimidate them are actually nice and would freely and happily tell them what to read? I think of it as a way for us as players to expose these new players to everything that we as players who have been around for longer take for granted.
I don't expect, nor want, people to update the wiki, or talk in a forum, rather than work on their praxis. But if your sole argument against a forum or a wiki is that people will use that instead of task, then we should stop the skype chat immediately, because that is just another version of the same.
I ask the players who have been around for multiple eras to contribute, even if just on one day (not even necessarily the day of this event), what you know about the history and what you think it means to be an sf0 player to the wiki, for those of us who didn't find this game until years after it started. I don't ask you to make it a comprehensive resource, but you could at least let us know the parts you think are important for someone interested in the history of the game.
I have edited the wiki. I'm not sure I know any more important things that I haven't put up there.
My argument against a forum or even the wiki, is that it will be just as difficult to find those things as it is to find Lowteck's Bus Stop Seating Conversion.
My argument isn't that people will use it instead of tasking. It is that they will use it instead of reading, voting for and commenting on old praxis. I believe The Villain is in the wiki, but it is almost impossible to explain who he was or what he meant without reading his praxii and the comments that his presence inspired. I'm afraid that a forum or even a wiki will become like Clif's Notes for SFØ.
I know you had no idea who to look at to see some great old praxii, and I only listed four players out of hundreds you should be reading. And I think it's better you found those four names this way rather than from a wiki.
And that mysterious future player who won't know anything about the game, but jumps in headfirst and starts tasking and getting to know the game by doing instead of reading will be told of those four players and many many more because somebody will have told her about them. And do you know who will tell her? You will.
Also, if that future player doesn't ever read any praxis other then ones that are submitted after they start playing, well, that's OK too. This game doesn't require any knowledge of its own history in order to play it. That is part of why it is so amazing. And if you DO want to know more, either you will have sought it out and found it on your own, or you'll have discovered some older players who know more of the history than you do and you'll ask them. Case in point.
Maybe I wasn't clear. I definitely don't want a wiki or a forum to take place of the awesome praxis we have, but it could be an awesome way to index that.
I am probably different than other people here, but I often have to write things down in order to remember them. I see the wiki as being SF0's way of referencing what we think is important, but to each their own. I'll probably contribute where I can, but honestly I don't have the knowledge of the beforetimes that I would like to have to contribute what I would like.
I also don't intend the wiki to take the place of praxis. I just believe that it can be a helpful resource for putting some pieces together. In the same way in which terms allow us to put together different praxis, people and themes that go together, a wiki lets people share that kind of information with less typo's and more context.
Lincoln: Great for you. You've been playing, creating, unlocking for years. You have very high standards for everyone who plays, probably because you were around in the days of the revolutionary, and because you go for the shplank every-time. While I love the way you play, i also love the way other people play too. I know you won't need the resources because you know where to look, but other people have things like lives and the desire to sleep and don't feel like reading through 20 crummy compilations of saucy tales to try and find a Jem to emulate.
Think of how most people start off with the game. They see a few cute looking tasks they can do in five minutes, try it, and post it. Because it's like a normal first task, it's ether ignored, or told that it's bad. This doesn't give people the desire to come back. To deal with this problem, there are two strategies. 1) Be nicer. I do this, but i know that many people are purists and want to fix the wrong people on the internet. Okay, honesty is cool. So that leads to option 2) creating a better flow of initial information about how the game works to the new members of the community. Thats what i'm trying to do.
I know that people should have to work to find a lot of information. digging though L0 tasks and old praxis is fun. The game has secrets which are best discovered on our own. But it's also important to initially provide information to people. I don't want people to feel that there is no point because the game is too old and in-jokey to play. I want the game to be accessible. That won't make the game shittier for you older players: it will just make it better for other people, and when they get good, more awesome and interesting as a whole.
Not everyone good gets noticed, accepted, loved and invited to the skype chat. I want to make sure that people who don't get smiled upon by a small group of top players still have some resources.
Is that such a bad thing?
sorry for the rant, just got about from a debate tournament.
I think the wiki is a good idea. It won't be trying to replace the pleasure of reading through old praxes and finding out about the game that way. It shouldn't try to describe players or praxes, but rather provide links to good starting points for new players to immerse themselves in the history of the game, should they wish. As Lincoln says, once you find the right starting points you can follow links to collaboraters, or other completions of that task, or whatever takes your fancy. But having that starting point is important.
I think it is also a good idea to have explanations of certain terms, as the wiki does, so that if while reading through praxes and comments a new player sees people discussing 'shplanks' or someone celebrating their 'Zeroday', they have an instantly accessible resource to help them understand what's going on, rather than having to wait hours for a reply if they're not too intimidated to ask an experienced player.
Of course this only becomes useful if the wiki is more accessible, by a link in the 'about' page or something, as at the moment I don't think there is any way for new players to know it exists.
Forums, however, I don't think would work for SF0. We can comment under any task, praxis or event, and I don't think there is any need for another place to comment. The idea of an SF0 forum has been tried before and it quite quickly died because nobody really had a need for it.
The very fact that we can discuss this topic here without a forum shows that there is no need for one.
And for random non-game-related discussion, there is the Skypechat, which we can advertise in the wiki if we ever make it easily accessible.
I'm not trying to poo poo your idea. Although I see that it looks like it is.
I'm also a little offended that you implied that I have no life.
I think you should try to implement any change that you think is necessary. And because I am helpful and want to help all players (as a Senator I feel it is my duty as well as just the right thing to do), I will do what I can to help.
Although, technically, Pixie, Sombrero Guy, APR, Møbius or Bryce haven't voted for my Campaign Trail, so they're really not my constituents.
I like your enthusiasm, and do not wish to squash it. I just think there is a better way to make new players feel welcome. I know you and I both send welcome messages to new players who show promise. And I think some new players are going to be great and some will suck no matter how much help and advice and wikis we throw at them to try to help them out.
I wasn't warning that a wiki might take the place of praxis reading, but in order to fully explain and encompass what the things they're explaining really are they need to be as long (or longer) that the actual praxis, and we already have those. I think the wiki will be (and should be {and kinda is}) a reference tool for us "older players", not a starting point for younger players. "How many meta-games did Harry Lee start? How many of them were actually carried through to some kind of conclusion?" "Let's check the wiki!" not so much a "How do I play this game better than I am? What tasks should I look at that will inspire me to do better?"
The cool thing about a wiki we design ourselves is that we can use it as a tool for anything. We can reference good tasks on it and give new players an organized reference of things that have happened. Seeing as there are 4 different ScienceGuru's and everyone has turned into the villain and Rubin at some point, attempting to decode what has happened is hard. Having something which gives a short description about what the heck happened and links to them would be nice. There can be resources for new players and for old players. If we write a new player guide for the front page, we can't link to specific praxis (seeing as that gives it an unfair advantage at getting votes, votes which are probably deserved, but still unfair.)
There is a problem we can all agree on. The site isn't organized or new player friendly. Also, no resources are up to date. If you guys all don't think the wiki has potential to be a useful resource, then i'll give up trying to have you guys edit it. But the problem still exists and i want to be part of a solution
Sorry for the comment. I know that you have more of a life then i will ever have. I occasionally get frustrated because nether my life, nor the life of anyone i know on here is as flexible as yours. I'm not allowed to go to burning man, and i can't drive to SF on a whim. I know that this is a choice, but i also know that if i made that choice, my family would disown me and i would loose most of my friends. Sometimes it's hard to see you do what you do and know that there is no way to do anything as epic without loosing a lot of important things in my life. Most of us have more strict day jobs, and when you are new, spending time away from real friends to try and discover obscure metaplots on a website is less attractive.
Also, while we aren't your "constituency" we are active, which is probably more then many of your constituency can say.
Maybe I'm biased (okay, I am biased) but it seems to me like the solution to helping new players get an idea of how to task better isn't compiling a massive history of the glory days of sf0, but simply having a guide on the front page that tells new players about how to task better. I'm not saying discount the wiki entirely, but I do agree with Lincoln--it's never going to be a resource for the newest players. If we want a way to help the newest players, why don't we just make *that*?
That's not a bad idea. Take a couple of good and bad level 1 completions, and do a list of do's and dont's for new players to look over.
Wow. That was a bit low, Pix. She has a point, though. Your lifestyle allows for more time to work on tasks, which, granted, only offers the difference that another player's shplank may take months relative to a week, it's still intimidating and hard to work against that kind of focus.
I know personally that it's difficult to get people to join if they don't have someone who's already playing to hold their hand for a while; it's all very cryptic and impenetrable from the outside, and while there have been those of us who've charged right in, not many people are willing to do that. While I appreciate that some of us send messages to new players and some of us try to leave constructive comments on their early tasks, it doesn't seem to help our attrition problem.
Bellyaching aside though. I know I can take your style of constructive criticism (it's how I do it too), but my newbie Fettucini took your comments as "sit down, and don't even try", and that's what he thinks all the high-levels think now.
People have options on what they spend their free time doing, and when you can sit and play WoW, instead of trying to decipher this mad bunch of loons whitewashing fences or holding senatorial campaigns, it's more appealing. And before you say "we don't want those people", why don't we? It's possible they'd be amazing taskers once we broke them from their shells, but we are the ones fostering an institution that makes it hard for them to get started.
You're not the only culprit, by a long shot. I've scare them players away too, looking back on it. And so, our general attitude is something that bears addressing as another roadblock against new player retention.
The obvious decay isn't helping. It was around level 3 (where promising new players seem to drop) that I noticed the site is stagnating. We get old players back through every so often to collab with their old teammates or friends, but a lot of them have left because nothing is happening. I don't think a new era will help, necessarily. This is one of those "it'll be what we make it" things. We need more tasks at higher levels, 3 level 6s and one level 7 isn't acceptable. We need tasks being approved on a more regular basis; instead of the "20 people interested, then SSI get around to approving them" method, why not have the senate begin approving tasks (senators can table submitted tasks, and then a majority vote for approval), and give the approve button to Lincoln and Pixie (we all know they've got the integrity not to abuse it, and they're two of the most constant people I know of on here).
To help that, we need other stuff updated more often. The new player page has an entire section that's just crossed out. Why don't we move that bit to the wiki, under the "history" section of the page about Task Scoring? Then we can clean up the new player page, so it doesn't look like a 3rd-grader ran out of eraser. That's just one example though. We need community managers, people that can unflag Rubin-ed tasks, and keep the content updated, who we can point to as leaders of the site, who can provide information to the wayward, or at least have good hands into which queries can be put.
So what do we do? We have a mountain of problems, and a handful of dedicated players who aren't trying to spark rebellion or undermine the game. A plan would be nifty.
Our goal should be to find ways to take the load off SSI's shoulders, while rejuvenating the game and building our player base back up to something respectable. I click on here at least once a day, hoping to see a big pile of praxis to read, and I'm more often than not disappointed. Recently, the only new stuff has been bullshit political sock-puppetry, and when that's the most interesting thing, then we have a problem.
Message if anyone gets an idea that I can help with.
/rant
/gibbering
I agree that the senators should be a part of running the site, to keep things from appearing to have died off and atrophied.
In fact when I first unlocked the Senatorial Race task, I believed it to be a clever tool for pulling devoted players into admin positions for the sake of longevity.
Look at any ongoing charter club or organization - they all sport distributed leadership models.
Our avenues, provided by this site are very wiki-like. We can edit and update just about any page (annotate with comments on other peoples' praxis, provide cross links and terms, and easily contact one-another through the readily present links.
As a result, I'm inclined to agree with Lincoln and Bryce on this, though I want to clearly state some support for the goals this project is aiming for, namely more players, and an easier path to initial understanding (and thus success) for curious newbies.
Lincoln is right when he points out that we needn't know the games history to task, and while I will acknowledge the trepidation some new players might have regarding tasking, I think that's true of any group recreation or club. Goblin Market was my second task ever and I had to go *meet in person* a group of players I had never met ( I found this game on my own internet wanderings) -- and I had to do it in a mask I made myself and prepare myself for high strangeness in and amongst them. That's sorta nerve wracking, but it turned out very good. Almost praxis in itself, and I think that transformative effect is a valuable trait of the game.
So, a little meandering, but I think what I'm getting to is that this game, the old praxis, the old players, and the magic of all of these completions sort of opens up like a flower as you look more and more closely. I agree that an inactive forum is a sad thing to look at, but the site *is* a forum, so not so sad when you look at it that way. I have read the wiki, and learned from it, but the things I learned are mostly metagame information (i.e. how to abuse/exploit a sockpuppet, and that doing so is acceptable but inspires debate) - things that do not make the core of the game, but are discussions of ways people play the game, or strategies for point/task hoarding and similar. Metagame stuff, like a WoW support board that has maps and tricks, or a panel discussion where no game is played, but the nuances of advanced play are debated by old hands. In short, an additional dimension that is separate from the game itself.
The Skype channel is another of these, but it is instant, like an irc room - and provides us some easier way to communicate and become acquainted in an immediate way with the players widely distributed across the world. It is emergent, like a conversation, and thus I think needs no history.
I enjoy reading SF0 as well as playing it, and I have learned who I feel the aces are and found some hot-shit praxis merely by spelunking the task list, and the completion lists of people that do great tasks.
I feel like we provide each other with our favorite kinds of content, and that's cool. However I share the concern that the wiki could become a cliff's notes of sorts. A way to skip some tasks (and even shoddy tasking shouldn't be erased or stuffed to the back of the drawer - flagged praxis are lessons in bad tasking, right?).
In short, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think this is a good goal, but I worry about losing some of the mystery and discovery by providing a simple roadmap (the figuring out is cool) I also worry about fundamentally changing the game by exposing all of the lateral ways to play to immediate newcomers, rather than by their discovery of such through play (and reading, voting, discussing other praxis is play.)
I still think we/the game should show "best of all time" and "best of this era" fleurs ~ some 'glory day' players and praxis from earlier eras have garnered so many points by now that they are forever the first, and that can be sorta disheartening.
That's a conundrum because Lincoln's comment about comments bringing players back with email reminders is valid. So I dunno about what to do there.
I'll chime with a couple quick things and then duck.
- Yep, I started an extensive refactoring of the code, following a couple of failed rewrite attempts. For the most part, this works just like the current site does. But, now it'll be
easierpossible to build on top of again. Some big still to-dos, though:- The messages system needs a full redesign.
- I want to move file storage onto S3 (or similar)
- All the messy scriptaculous / prototype / miscellaneous JS should be moved to JQuery
- Good god, the praxis form!
- New stuff
- The code stuff is a thorny issue, as I'm sure you can imagine.
- I'll put up a staging build of that within the next couple of days; help finding what's broke would be great.
- I'm also not into forums, and am glad a couple of other people have made that case better than I could have
- The wiki — and in particular it's minimal design — was intended to be a basic CMS for creating little pop-up type windows with helpful info about whatever you're looking at (e.g. one about voting, about submitting proof, etc). But I think it should be a fine place to just put together some ideas about what's obnoxious and what might fix it.
- On that note, I was really hoping that Terms would let us integrate a lot of the wiki-type content people are discussing into the site itself. Some of this has happened, e.g. following a certain ancient epic via the "meanjeannine"
tagterm. Basically, I figured I'd just make the tool, see how it got used, and then try to improve it for its adopted purpose. So: what would make terms a better way of finding old awesomeness, or explaining in-jokes and secret language, etc, etc? - A lot has gone wrong, but I feel good about 2011. I feel a rumbling, and perhaps with a little help, I'll find my drive around here, somewhere!
Thank you for the update sean!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you for the coding too! and good luck! and sorry Ian's hair was stolen!!!!
Minor request re terms: I'd like to be able to see who termed something while looking at the term page rather than only at the thing termed.
That's a good idea, as is an idea someone emailed about splitting up RSS feeds. And hey, it took a while, but that staging build is up at: ny0.org.
I used a DB copy from a couple weeks ago, changed the generic header colors, and played around with the logo to keep anyone from mistaking this for SFZero Classic. LOTS of stuff won't work, most importantly uploading any files. The staging site is set up to use sf0.org as its media server, so any images deleted on SFZero won't show up here. It also means that the lightbox popup on praxis in "smaller" media mode won't work. Any email stuff is (I hope) disabled. Messages are a mess. Just about anything AJAX (stuff that happens without re-loading the page) is liable to be broken, although not too much of it.
I'm down with the idea, but as I've uttered a few times, this is beyond our control. If they're working on a new site, they've probably already got a design done. So... Some more specific plan for accomplishing this would be nice before throwing support behind it.