Dev Tracker

Thus why I wanted to post an explanation and apology, because I’ve found that far too often, the symptoms & idiosyncrasies of neurodivergency get read by others as being acts of intentional ill will when they are only misunderstandings.

Thank you for putting this thread together. We're still in the early stages of this functionality being live. While we'll review all threads, replies, and tickets with feedback on the new pinglist function, I want you to know that yours has been bookmarked internally for additional team focus.

First and most importantly, we want everyone to know you can breathe a sigh of relief. The change to raw mass pings and the future cap mentioned in the update—as in raw pings posted in a reply, not pinging subscribed players in a site-supported pinglist—won't be in the immediate future. And it's not lost on me as I post this reply that the very way I opened my reply to you would be capped under our current future plans.

I would keep in mind that it's the end of October. We're heading into the holiday season, we have one more ancient breed to release, we have Frigidfin Expedition, and we have the Night of the Nocturne rapidly approaching. Plus our engineering timeline for the skin and accent system and, well, some much needed employee time off. In other words, you've (players) got time to work with the system as it is, give us your feedback, and we've got time to finesse and iterate.

During this time, our plan is to allow the new feature to soak, for players to adopt it, and collate your feedback over time, both initial impressions and experienced usage. From there, we will meet as a team, discuss your feedback, your communicated needs, and explore our options and possible solutions.

Now, onto the subject of some of the decisions made going into this launch...

As you might know, there have been increasing incidents and reports of offsite-to-onsite harassment via open-to-the-public pinglists. The tickets submitted alongside these incidents have also increased, whether it is an offer of help to investigate or a demand to solve the situation, it all takes time to review and respond and often requires multiple team members including engineers to investigate. The fact is, as long as the offsite spreadsheets are open and available to anonymous/public editing and the ability to send mass raw pings remains, the offsite-to-onsite harassment will continue. Even if we could identify the individual(s) responsible without a shadow of a doubt, ban them and their IP, it doesn't change the fact that the offsite and public spreadsheets are still vulnerable. 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.

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? 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.

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.

All of the above doesn't even touch on how granular and specific the current player-run systems are, and just how different they are from one special interest or focus to another. There's a lot for us to consider. Basically, we're not rushing the development of this system nor are we rushing the sunsetting of raw mass pings. We've already released the foundation of the pinglist system and with a solid foundation, we can build up a comprehensive system from there.


Regarding your concerns, I can offer you one answer about one aspect of your Flights and Flight pinglists concern today:

If someone is no longer a member of your Flight, they no longer have access to your Flight forums and they can't see your pings, nor should they be alerted to them.

Something else I'm also able to let you know is that we have some pending, more straightforward updates to the pinglist system that we hope to implement next week.

I hope this helps to address some of your concerns about how we're moving forward, and provides you with some insight into what we're looking at, into, managing, etc. Thank you again for reaching out to us, both here and in tickets. Please, please continue to discuss this and provide your feedback on the pinglist system. Even if we aren't providing personalized responses to every suggestion, idea, or complaint during this period, we are absolutely reading, considering, and discussing your feedback. Have a great weekend

@/Aequorin no offense meant, my ND brain interpreted your comment extremely literally as “do not make a new comment after reading this post” and assumed that a comment I had started writing before you posted would be fine >_< apologies and I appreciate the clarification.

how many pinglists are we allowed to have now? i can't find it in the main post and i've read through like three times but i could be missing it (if i am i'm sorry)

Awesome! I'm still wondering if deleting will be allowed though. If your hatchery closes, or you no longer offer something that people wanted pings for... I imagine there would be a lot of reasons to delete a pinglist you don't use anymore.

With the cap of 50, the ability to delete would be very handy.

@Xhaztol again, respectfully, it does not seem feasible for the fr team to address and replace the functions of user-created lists. will you be implementing a system for those who are interested in skins and accents, but would like to be pinged for specific breeds and subject matter only? what about a g1 pinglist which can filter every color combination (or more general categories of colors, like ‘grayscale’ or ‘pastel’) and account for hatch date? will there be a replacement for dominance pinglists, which need to be accessible to the community? this is a massive oversight. the team can certainly take steps to get closer to these functions, but i genuinely doubt that a replacement can match the versatility which is critical for sellers, buyers, and collectors. we understand that you are open to feedback. we are concerned that the long term impact caused by this change will be overwhelmingly negative, and that any on-site replacements can’t match the functionality of user generated tools.

i do not agree with pinglist harassment, but there are many ways that users could still be harassed via spreadsheets. for example, skincent artists often take preorders for skins via self-edit spreadsheets. harassed users have been added to these as well - are skin and accent artists supposed to rely on forums exclusively for signing people up, something which isn’t entirely feasible for some artists? if not, what are other ways to counter spreadsheet harassment while maintaining the ease of an off-site feature that many people rely on? this change is reactionary and does not begin to address the issue at hand. not only that, it causes issues for players who have spent years on projects that allow us to engage with the flight rising community easily.

i trust that the team is open to feedback. i do not trust that there is any practical way that site features can replicate player-made features. this is not trivial, as i’ve already typed many times. this genuinely impacts so many dedicated players that it’s a bit depressing and it will definitely change how i use flight rising.

let us know if this is a limitation on the amount of users on a list or a limitation on the amount of times the list can be pinged?

@/SilentWanderer, we can absolutely revisit this limit. We received some reports about unhappy players trying to use pinglist creation maliciously and had to take some temporary steps to protect infrastructure. I apologize for the inconvenience and hopefully can get that addressed soon for you!

I'm capped at 50 pinglist creation? (I'm actually just trying to edit the name of an existing one but it says I've reached the limit)

As someone who has a Hatchery which has pinglists for each pair, each breed, as well as different lineages and events which all have multiple pinglists - 50 isn't enough...

the moment it’s implemented, there will be massive repercussions for many communities. giving us time to adjust does not allow us to come up with solutions for the functionality that is being taken away with absolutely 0 replacement in sight. the community can’t ‘play around’ with a tool that has none of the functions of off-site pinglists because the functions cannot be replicated. this is a massive burden for users who have already spent years creating and maintaining tools.

I don't understand the thought process behind adding new features for skin/accent artists, and then taking another one away in the same update.

Also - I don't see any mention of how pinglists interact with blocking? Presumably if I have a person blocked, they cannot join my pinglist, but what if the person joins and then blocks me, will they still be getting the pings? Or what if they join, but then I block them? What if the person is banned, can the pinglist be deleted? (Can they be deleted in the first place?)

CRs have (had?) a bug where if a person got banned, the CR couldn't be canceled, so I'd fear that blocking/banning might have an unfortunate interaction with pinglists too.

Question! If we change our username, will it be updated on these pinglists? I'm assuming yes, but wanting to make sure c:
If so, very excited for that, it's the main reason I've been so hesitant to change my username thus far

But I'm asking for understanding, for me and the thousands of users who rely on mass pings and will continue to do so far into the future.

Additionally, is there a function to use pinglists from one thread in another thread? I know people will move their skin and art shops to new threads for a fresh start, and they just use that old pinglist because it's already good and made and all that. What do they do when mass pings are officially disabled?