I really like the idea of needing something like a 30-day account age and some kind of minimal activity in order to use public pinglists. Perhaps requiring a minimum achievement point count would allow players to unlock the ability to use public pinglists after their account age is over 30 days. This would help with the harassment issue, especially with the problem of people making throwaway accounts.
Aequorin wrote on 2023-10-27 16:07:59:
This is part of why a pinglist is locked to the player who created it. Because even with pinglists being opt-in, even with them being onsite, we have to weigh the consequences of open-to-the-public pingable lists with the potential for exploit, especially from tech and internet savvy bad faith actors. Throwaway accounts with throwaway emails on a dynamic VPN could easily target and troll a pinglist that's open to the public to ping. This isn't to say with enough time and iteration a solution can't be found. It's to say that we have to keep this in mind and in consideration when developing this feature further.
Requiring someone to have at least 30 days of activity and a certain amount of achievement points (so it's clear they actually are playing the game) before being able to use public pinglists for pinging would help dissuade bad faith actors by making the effort required to abuse a pinglist that much greater. Also requiring players to have a minimum forum post count could help as well, since someone needing to ping people on a public list should at least be expected to have been using the forum and be familiar with it. And require some effort before being able to unlock a feature with so much potential for misuse.
Public (and shared/co-owned) pinglists could come with a pop-up letting players know that access to this pinglist is not limited to a single person, requiring confirmation that they do indeed still want to join it knowing they may be pinged by multiple different people.
Having the owner(s) of a pinglist able to temporarily disable the use of a pinglist without deleting it, in the event of an issue cropping up, would also be really helpful. It could then be re-enabled once the issue is solved, without having to re-create the whole pinglist.
Being able to transfer ownership of a pinglist would be fantastic too, in the event the original owner doesn't have the time to maintain it. Being able to set an option on a pinglist to allow automatic transfer to someone else after a certain amount of time of inactivity would also be really helpful, and a lot less stressful for those maintaining big community lists.
Aequorin wrote on 2023-10-27 16:07:59:
As for approved co-owners, one of the issues we have to consider is how that works with blocking. What happens if a player has blocked the originator of the co-owned pinglist after subscribing? Should the co-owners be able to ping that individual with the list? What if the originator blocks a player, should the co-owners still be able to ping that player with the pinglist?
I'm not sure how hard it would be to code, but having different options for how pinglists handle blocked users and ownership would help prevent issues.
For private pinglists, it would make sense that someone should not be able to opt-in to a pinglist owned by someone they've blocked. And they would automatically be removed from any private pinglists they were on if they've blocked the owner of that pinglist. Additionally, it would also make sense that if a player has someone blocked, that blocked player would not be able to join any pinglists that the person who blocked them has made. And if they block someone, that person is automatically removed from any pinglists they own. Hopefully, this is already how the current pinglist system works?
For public pinglists useable by anyone, however, it would make more sense that only the person using the pinglist to ping would be the one the game checks to make sure blocked players aren't being pinged. So if a player uses a public pinglist, any players on that pinglist that they have blocked simply aren't pinged. Likewise, if players have them blocked, those players won't be pinged even if they're on the pinglist. That way, people aren't prevented from taking part in dom or other community-driven forum things just because someone involved might have someone else blocked.
For co-owned pinglists (where only co-owners can use it to ping people), maybe leave it up to the pinglist creator whether to use the public or private system for how blocked players are handled. And when people attempt to join a pinglist, inform them what type of pinglist it is and which options it's using so that they can confirm whether they would like to proceed and opt-in, or cancel.
That way, for things like connected hatcheries or art shops where only a few specific people need to use the list for pinging, they could use a private pinglist system where all co-owners are checked for whether they have someone blocked when a player tries to join the pinglist. And someone who has one of the co-owners blocked would not be able to join. All co-owners would be treated like the owner, so if one of them blocks a player, that player would be removed from the co-owned private pinglist if they're on it. And if a co-owner is added, players who have them blocked would automatically be removed from the pinglist.
But for things like dom, the owner(s) blocked list shouldn't really matter since it would likely be multiple members of the dom team using a huge flight pinglist without excluding anyone in the flight who wanted to join. They'd probably want to have blocked players handled the way a public pinglist would handle it. Still not ideal, but better than not having those pinglists at all.
Having an option in account settings that allows players to receive pinglist pings from people they've blocked, just like being able to get pinglist pings even if they have general pings disabled, might be another option for those active in things like dom or the large sales groups.
Aequorin wrote on 2023-10-27 16:07:59:
What happens when co-owners have a falling out, where an approved co-owner did more to maintain the pinglist than the originator? Who owns the list? Do we need to task our employees with mediating player personal relationships over pinglists? What if the originator becomes inactive or does something that costs them the ability to access their account? Just the possible solutions floated within the team while reading through your feedback lead to additional scenarios and edge cases.
I could see ownership already being an issue with the current system. If someone owning a dominance-related pinglist goes inactive, the only options currently are to completely restart the pinglist or to move to some offsite system like Discord. Between the prospect of continually having to restart massive pinglists when someone goes inactive or moving entirely offsite, the latter would inevitably be more practical. Co-owned pinglists still seem to me to be a far better solution, despite the potential issues.
If there is a falling out between co-owners, it could definitely lead to a tricky situation. But this sort of thing is already an issue just in forum threads where multiple people are running something. How does staff handle those? What happens if the thread creator isn't the one doing most of the work running the thread? Would staff even intervene, or would they just tell the co-owner of the forum thread to make their own separate thread? Or would they mediate between the players in such a case? I'd say pinglists are similar enough that they should be handled the same way.
Perhaps, for simplicity's sake, make it clear when creating pinglists that the originator would own the pinglist - at that point, either they work it out between them or the co-owner goes and makes their own separate pinglist. The list itself should be owned by the originator unless they transfer it to someone else, but maybe pinglists can come with a setting to designate another co-owner become the main owner if the originator is inactive after a set amount of time. That would mostly be helpful for things like dom and other community stuff.
Aequorin wrote on 2023-10-27 16:07:59:
There are infrastructure concerns with raw mass pings of hundreds of players at a time that we have to consider as well. We understand how they're useful, how they're used, why they're used, but we never coded our proprietary forum software to support it. Even if we adjust the raw ping cap, being able to send hundreds of raw pings in a reply just isn't sustainable for the site.
With all the revamps and partial revamps to core site systems already, this makes it seem like perhaps a full forum revamp should be moved up on the to-do list a bit. Just looking at the latest devlog, I suspect far more people use the ping feature on the forums than use custom skin submissions, for instance. With how central the forums are to maintaining the various FR communities, having the infrastructure to support it feels like it should take priority. Obviously, this is a huge undertaking and wouldn't be done anytime soon, but removing mass pings without a good alternative in place will only encourage those communities to move to other platforms like discord, which cannot be moderated by the FR team at all. And likely would only exacerbate any ongoing harassment issues. I'm glad to see we'll have time to still use mass pings - hopefully some solution can be found to continue using them without needing to rely on offsite communication.
