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"not yet sure how to word it," is my favourite proposal from odan yet.

Debates and votes are already saved in these newspapers (if, of course, CoC does his job properly, and does not hide certain events or results to confuse people). I don't see a reason, why we need to legally save them on some private forums as well.

That's because you're usually very biased, proven by how you opened your comment.
Not archiving properly makes things harder to find. The forum has a search function that erep papers dont have, and has proven useful many times already.
Not seeing the reason just shows how shortsighted you are.

Inserting two personal attacks into justifying your opinion only shows, what do you value more. Whether debating, or starting flame wars. Either way - in-game articles are archives on their own, and all citizens can access them. That does not happen with private forums. It all depends on the ability of CoC, how well he is able to utilize these newspapers. Some Chairmans do it well, some do it worse - depends on their experience and wilingness. All in all, in-game methods can be used for legal archiving purposes well enough, so I see no reason to add external obligations.

Also, if someone wants to make proposal, it is better, if the proposal actually exists (instead of having a blank proposal and expecting the empty space will fill itself). Truth to be told, this is not the first occasion of "blank proposal", but this one is really jarring.

CoC is purely congressional. so that proposal is there.

SCI is something which needs some input from gov first imho, so i decided to not put a ready to vote on proposal in the debate.

Input from Government? This has already been discussed 20 days ago by Government and Congress in the Congress PM!

and tell me how are you going to find info in a year about an old debate you wish to reference? finding something in a paper is going to take you a lot of time since there is no search function.

on the forum it will take you a couple of seconds.

saving stuff to the forum also ensures it is saved in the event of erep admins for whatever reason decide to do anything to an org.

also ignoring the immigration part....

What happened to your debated Monetary Policies proposal? Anyway, I don't see the necessity to add it to our Law Book. While I can see the reasoning, it seems too less of importance (as opposed to actual procedures and in-game mechanics) to add it and gives too much official power and references to the Forum. We can come up with something better than that!

i'll probably reopen it in a day or 2 with some changes and hope that a new congress actually means more of them participate in the debate.

what power does it give to the forum? it's archiving stuff.

better like what? flood the wiki, google docs? none of those sound good to me.

References too ''enetherlands.nl'' and such don't belong to Law in my opinion. That does not mean I'm against archiving, which is technically automatically done by the article-system. In addition, Chairman can if he wants archive it elsewhere, which you have taken upon yourself and is good.

It takes a few seconds on the Forum for those few who know about and wish to visit it, indeed. Something inaccessible is not better than something that takes some effort to find but it located in the environment everyone is in.

Something like the ''End of Term Report'' by former Chairman ElGorro seems to be an elegant option:
https://www.erepublik.com/en/article/-congress-end-of-term-report-2693600/1/20

the forum is accessible to all eNL citizens. and if they are interested in finding historical data they will have an account or are able to create one.

should we also remove the reference to the wiki? a CoC is also required by law to do things there.

and how does an end of term report help with finding stuff? there still is no search function.

Sure it is odan. You know very well it's not physically inaccessible, but not visited regardless. It's fine as private initiative, but let's not force it in any way down anyone's throat. The Wiki is an integrated eRepublik mechanic, not to mention there is no reference in Law that 'forces' the CoC to do anything (it's quite ambiguous). Asking archiving fine, but let's not upgrade external individual projects as the Forum to something more than it is and actually work in the constraints of the game instead of ignoring it 🙂

@NoTie:
Yes, that article by ElGorro is a good example. Archiving public congress to the forum might be as simple as posting such an article there too, as it briefly mentions the debates, making it relatively feasible to search. Also, if these summaries were to be put in a single clean thread with such monthly updates, it would be very convenient to find things even without searching.

That indeed seems like the most pragmatic approach, @djirtsdew

have any of you even checked the archived topics and votes?

@odan: Due to its nature as a copy it lacks some of the structure (nested replies) of the original, but if you want to know: yes, archiving the full debate of course makes it even more searchable. And this nesting is inherently flawed as these last few replies here show...

we all know that debating in articles has limited functionality. archiving can't solve that.

however archiving does ensure easy search ability, and preservation of all debates and votes. including private congress stuff something that is not in articles.

can we also get some comments on the immigration part of the debate?

There is no proposal to discuss and your notions have already been discussed in Congress. To paraphrase:

''Now on to your question regarding the immigration procedure. We have been treating this PM as 'SCI section' for a while now, you participated in them and until now there has been no complaint. I have my doubts about the necessity of articles for this, because 1) it lengthens the process that already takes a while even more because it requires waiting for an article 2) seems abundant for something that occurs 1-2 times a month and is mostly a bureaucratic process 3) potentially serves as a place to only scrutinize people unlike previously the very shielded Forum. If need be, I'd argue for a National Feed post - that any CM can open, just like we do for the Chairman.''

so because someone got talked about once in a pm. (a pm that is considered private congress btw...) no official debate can be opened?

SCI used to be done in the open allowing all citizens and the applicant to discuss the request. i'm only opening this debate to see if once again going back to the open nature of this procedure is once again doable.

I'm perfectly allowed to share my - own - previously phrased thoughts, so I don't see what the comment on 'private' is about. I mentioned it because I saw snarky comments about how 'input' from Government is needed, whilst it already was provided three weeks ago.

I think its good idea to have a backup outside the game as you never know if it will crash or be unserviceable.
Also i think our lawbook should be posted outside too.
Not too much work for future CoC i think.

lawbook is already in law that it needs to be kept on wiki. i've already kept the version on forum up to date (shadow copy), but it might not be bad to have that as official backup, since wiki is changeable by all.

Any form of archiving, be it forum, a gdoc or whatever else means copy pasting the debate and the risk of (unintended) changes.
Therefore the best way to keep track would be a place where links to the debates are stored. As forum requires registration that will have it's downsides. A gdoc or spreadsheet requires a link that can be added under all CoC articles and therefore be accessible always. It can be a simple list or grouped as long as it is on 1 page and searchable which will be no issue with google. I'd advise to add a few columns before the actual link though like date and requester as well as a link to the vote if applicable in a column behind it.

i archived things to ensure that nothing is lost, be it votes/debates/private congress pm etc. not to create a sheet with some links. a sheet with links isn't an archive at best you could call it an index.

and unless the CoC is a total clutz, copy pasting isn't that hard.

Yes it's an index. But as eRep, till now, never deleted articles eRep itself is the archive. We just need a smart way to search. There is only one doubt for me and that's the option to archive votes if done by PM. Should we have a voting article or vote under the article itself (not my preferred choice) that would be solved as well.

No, copy pasting ain't hard but to prevent any doubt someone leaves certain parts out we can better prevent it.

And like it or not and be it just or not forum will always be ignored by a lot of players so it's not the place we would want to use.

erep admins might not have deleted an article on this particular newspaper, however they have meddled in the comments already (on pretty mundane stuff). so its not a big leap to say that it can happen. we've also seen more than enough bugs with erep.

there is an easy thing on the forum called a search function. copy past to forum (in appropriate section) and if you are cm/gov member you can search all of the cm stuff. only open stuff if you are just a citizen. give me an alternative that is as easy to work with?

and left or right wherever we archive it, we need some sort of measure in place to keep the the private stuff private, so anything google sheets/doc related will already be less secure than our national forum.

from vote message:

Shawtyl0w
Here is a suggestion (Use an Excel sheet with article links if people really want to image links for private debates)
erepublik.com/en?countryPost=244165


that's a reference sheet not an archive/backup of data... how does putting a link in a sheet solve data getting lost?

Properly recording can be done in several ways like is mentioned here. However when it does not include forum all of a sudden it needs to be a searchable archive…

Personally i don't care much how it's searchable. A file with links to debates seems fine indeed. As long as it does not include something that will be moderated by a few which therefore excludes forum...

how is creating a reference sheet properly recording?

and the forum already has the rest of our data from the last 10 years, so it's a perfect fit to add new data there.

congress section would be moderated by the (d)CoC (like it has for years) a sheet would be moderated by the (d)CoC as well.

also how does having links to article debates solve the problem of keeping the private congress debates/votes data?

We just need to record where the debate is as the debate itself is already recorded.

Yes forum has that but no-one wil visit forum to have a look besides yourself.

Moderating discussions is something we don't want but will (potentially) be the case on forum as was the case earlier when several parts were deleted if it did not fit the purpose of a Coc. In a sheet the Coc could delete a link but not (parts of) the actual debate therefore it's more safe.

I doubt private congress debates do really need to be kept private. Name an example issue that would require a private debate please? And if needed we could keep a "private" place in which the debate is stored. Could even be a print as PDF towards which links are kept in a "private" sheet if we must.