I Have A Few Ideas As To What Can Be Done
Elaine of the Snowy Forest
Hello to my friends and enemies.
This is not a sponsored post. This is an ignorant newcomer chiming in with her own ideas about the political situation we find ourselves in. The opinions contained within this article are expressly my own and any potential relation to the positions of those I associate with is purely incidental.
I saw a bunch of people asking questions about what can be done. I like to try to solve problems because having problems is pretty lame. When first looking into this issue I made the following statement, with additions in parentheses.
"I do not think any foul play (on the forum) has actually occurred. I haven't seen any evidence of such, as I am new to the forum. However, it's simple logic. There is greater risk of potential foul play in a forum owned by an interested party than voting in-game. It's like if a single Senator (or even a political party) owned the Senate building, and had the power to deny Senators access to the Senate chambers at will, but never did and promised they wouldn't. Even if you really trust that Senator, it's not good from a process or security perspective."
Now, it has indeed been brought to my attention that voting in-game is extremely terrible, impractical, and insecure. As I am new, and having not dealt with the in-game political system like my seniors, I will simply take their word for this and assume we must vote on a forum or forum-like system somewhere. With that in mind, I have some proposals here that may or may not be practical.
1. Interested parties begin negotiations to elect someone all groups involved approve of to host this forum. This could even be a public election. If the forum operator is an elected official, it would serve to make them more legitimate at the least and improve upon the current situation.
2. Political parties take turns hosting congress on their own, private forums. This assumes some bias is inevitable, and at least attempts to make every group equally unhappy by removing any individual group's clear advantage. The specifics can be hashed out without issue as well, such as a minimum party size and even a standard forum template to expedite this process and the onboarding of new political parties.
3. I'll do it. Now we would quickly run into the same problem we have now at some point, and I'm mainly suggesting this to illustrate that there isn't a large barrier to entry in setting up a new forum. It's not expensive to rent a VPS to host a forum on, and it doesn't take a lot of technical ability. I trust me, you probably don't trust me. But I figured I'd offer.
If you think I make sense, or would have a decent chance at making sense given additional guidance and context, vote for me in the upcoming congressional elections. If you think I do not make sense, then vote for someone else who does.
Ultimate Regards,
Elaine of the Snowy Forest
Comments
You are indeed new...
the forum is in fact owned by someone, but the congress part of the forum is moderated by the SOH who is elected by congress. In my 8 years here I can't really remember a single instance where the forum owner changed any forum voting etc.
Also, the voting done on the forum is voting that CANNOT be done on erep. The forum allows for much broader political play for congress and also allows for a different, and imo much better set of ruled for the eUSA than what's available on erep.
You must have not read my article after past the third paragraph if you think I still advocate for voting on Erepublik. Furthermore, an elected moderator on a platform controlled by a contentious party is still subject to the same issues. Since having moderator privileges on a single board does not give that moderator power that supersedes the privileges of whoever is the primary admin of that forum that granted that power in the first place, or whoever has root access to the server. In case it's not clear, I am saying that this elected position (if we go that route) should control the entire server the forum congress meets on. Complaining that this is tedious would be true, but can be mitigated by a modest about of technical ability and also the understanding that convenience is generally always in opposition to security.
And again, from a security risk perspective it doesn't matter if the people with the platform have been responsible *so far*. I am proposing a better solution that will make it easier for people to trust each other.
Sorry, I made a typo. The corrected sentence is "I am saying this elected position (if we go that route) should control the entire server hosting the forum congress meets on."
You misunderstand.... I'm saying that we MUST vote on erep. You haven't been in congress yet but congress must vote in game to do many things, for instance move money out of treasure, make peace agreements, airstrikes, and taxes.
The voting we do on the forum are all the other things that cannot be voted on in game,
Listen, I have no problem with the idea of having the soh rule the entire server, but unfortunately I don't see how that can even be possible. A forum must be owned by someone. That means that even if you give all the keys to the soh each month, you still run the risk of an soh keeping those keys etc etc etc....
Yes congress is allowed to vote on the eUS forums on things that goes against erep laws such as buying army bots lol. Can't allow that vote to happen in-game. 😛
Thanks Elaine for thinking outside the box and offering alternatives.
o7
Oh just shut up.
Someone piss in your cornflakes this morning?
1. Unlikely to work out given that we're in the state we are in now. Very few people have that level of trust, evidently. Getting even a 2/3 majority to agree to someone, for example, would be difficult if not impossible.
2. This removes one of the biggest advantages of the current forum: history. We have records of virtually everything we've discussed, voted on, considered, and done in one place, available to be reviewed and referenced. Now, the dumping into the trash has made that a slow process to get it back to visible and available, but it's all still there.
3. Same as above, honestly. And some parties are against 3rd party forums at all, not just the current one.
1. This is fair, at it is unlikely to succeed. That being said, I do not think we ought to throw up our hands and not even try. In another game I play, one player famously facilitated high-profile trade deals and slowly earned a high degree of trust in the community. So I think it is possible to at least take small steps towards this. But I agree, it is a tenuous proposition.
2. This is an easily remedied technical problem, and not a significant barrier to this proposal. There is nothing stopping that data from being moved to future forums or otherwise archived in a convenient and accessible way.
3. Yeah, I think ultimately whether or not forum systems area feasible at all will depend on a simple 51% majority vote in terms of who chooses to use which systems. This is one of the reasons why I think compromise is so important - the potential to exclude up to 49.9% is not encouraging in terms of sustainability and could be quite damaging to our country.
The forum has proven itself to be the best solution.
The fact that it is vulnerable to mischief caused by labile mods is not a strike against it.
CG's war with the forum is due to the fact that he has been permabanned after repeatedly being temp-banned by an entire board of mods. As Derp's latest article points out, every site is owned by someone, so there must be an agreement to use it according to certain terms.
If there was a better solution than the forum, most of the forum users I know would be eager to adopt it instead. There isn't.
Halfway through my article I mention that *a* forum is the best solution based off of the advice I have received from more experienced players and that going forward it makes sense to think of solutions that involve increasing the amount of trust we can place in a forum based system. I am not arguing for voting to take place in game.
Also, Derp's statement about every site being owned by someone is disingenuous. By playing Erepublik, we must trust Plato with our entire account, and a very large portion of our gameplay experience. Plato is trusted by default as a part of the terms and conditions of playing this game, at least to a certain extent. Thus, it's fallacious to equivocate the bias of Plato with the bias of any other entity. But again, if you read my entire article you would know that I am not actually arguing for voting to take place in game.
A newcomer and the account has been created in 2009?
Yes. I am level 31, and I only have 4000 strength. I played this game when I was roughly 12 years old for 1 or 2 years without any level of political involvement. Consequentially, I am new to the systems that matter in this game, and the game has changed enough in the decade+ I have been absent in order to qualify me as new in all the ways that matter.
Okay dokay. But the forums matter very little, it is for the role playing.
You'll learn soon enough if the idea doesn't come from certain players it will be ignored or abused.
Certain players fear change because it means they could lose w/e power they built for themselves when they created the eUS forums.
you'll learn soon enough that certain players cannot leave the past alone and also love to play the abused shunted aside poor underdog...