Thinking about the Awake-list's future

Bugs & Features
1

Hi folks,

This isn’t really a bug report or feature request as much as a look at one particular Wolfery feature, imagining some possible ways it might go awry with a larger player population, and then thinking about mitigation. I don’t necessarily recommend any action be taken right away; I mostly just want to share a bit of my thinking now, ahead of these problems possibly appearing later.

The feature in question is the content of the Awake list in the Realm panel. I see it as something like a combination of WHO, wf, and ws in a traditional furry MU*, with some extra bits that the web UI makes possible, like mini-pfps and filtering. It looks great, and works real well!

And here are three ways I can see it working less well, as Wolfery grows:

  • Scaling: In this good-problem-to-have scenario, Wolfery just keeps getting more popular. Eventually this list has hundreds of character rows during peak times, all arranged in a single-file stack. This is the least problematic of the modes I list here; at worst, the presentation of a super-long active-player list contributes to new players feeling overwhelmed upon their first explore to Wolfery’s UI.

  • Lazy solicitation: Pests can filter on a tag or feature they like—including just “female”, e.g.—and serially DM everyone who lights up, even if their characters have never met “in person”, and have no IC reason to communicate. This, again, can include newcomers still getting their bearings.

    (To the best of my knowledge, this hasn’t happened to me. However, my one character presents as a mundane and middle-aged straight male in his profile text and tags, so I have awareness that he’s probably a less-likely target for it.)

  • Unwanted content: You’ll still see passive examples of extreme role-play, including sexualized minors, even if your characters stick only to areas that disallow this behavior. While you won’t see these characters’ descriptions, you still see everything else: pfp, current activity, tags (if you click), and so on.

    My concern here is a future where—in the manner of certain other furry role-play spaces—the “cub” population becomes fairly significant, enough to look quite prominent in the Awake list at a glance, and making many newcomers feel like this space isn’t to their taste.

And here is my admittedly radical, thought-experiment proposal for getting ahead of these issues: Remove the current Awake list, and replace it with one that shows only the following characters:

  1. Everyone on your watch-list who is awake. (Just like it works now.)
  2. Everyone not on your watch-list whom you have met in the past seven days.

We define a character as “met” if you’ve been in the same room with them—even for just a moment—or if either of you have sent the other a DM.

And that’s it! The idea is that the second part of that list works kind of like your character’s “memory” of an interesting critter they saw in passing or interacted with a bit. You can “consider it further” by clicking the panel and seeing all the same stuff there as now (About-text, tags, and portrait), and you get an opportunity to watch or DM them if you wish.

So, how can you browse the profile or even see the name of a character you haven’t “met” recently?

Well… under this proposal, you can’t! Either you meet them “in person” via chance encounter, or you get introduced by a third party, in an arranged meeting or through DMs. Otherwise, the character is unknown to you—literally! That’s keeping it (minimally) IC, baby!

I also like the tacit encouragement that if you want more folks in your Realm panel, you gotta put at least a minimum effort into going outside… even if it’s only hanging in the park.

I can think of ways that a dedicated griefer could “defeat” this proposed solution, if they wanted to. (Run around the whole map at top speed once per week, “meeting” everyone!) I don’t suggest that this change would obviate the ongoing need for continued, active moderation. I do think it might mitigate some growing pains that possibly lie in Wolfery’s future, as the space catches on with more folks.

That’s my thinking! Thank you for reading all this.

2

Public Toxicity and Extreme Content in publicly accessible fields/pictures are already grounds for moderation involvement, so please process them accordingly. If handled politely, some of this doesn’t even need to go through a report ticket. Most people don’t intend to do harm so some good faith, good attitude and an offer of help to explain how to use collapse fields in the about section to content warn extreme content goes a long way to save everyone some time.

I’m assuming no harm was meant here with the specific, but…
When posting in public channels or forums related to Wolfery, we should at all times be concerned about the idea of accidentally pressuring or persecuting people who are unobtrusively enjoying their themes and content with one another as consenting adults (in places appropriate to those themes.) We should aim to be careful about using examples and aim to be non specific when at all possible. We all have things we’re not keen on engaging in ourselves, but using them as a specific example in public channel or public forum may cause potentially unintentional harm to the people who enjoy the things.

Try to keep any examples regarding kinks/themes/content non-specific for the sake of showing care and respecting anybody who is part of any group who would otherwise be negatively affected by those examples. Thanks!

Having addressed that portion of the topic…

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Yes. The Awake tool’s scalability and search filtering/privacy are certainly more concerning.

• Scale: Not sure to what limits/extremes Accipiter has tested the upper limit for online users to see how the interface reacts - maybe @Accipiter has some insight into this for us?

• Filtering Names: I can type Brook and it doesn’t want to lock onto Brooksong. Maybe its only wanting to look for tags? I feel like this could be stronger or maybe we need a modifier for hunting names vs tags.

• Filtering Tags: This seems to be working well actually (but similarly , but maybe we need a tag people can put on that turns off their ability to be searched via the Awake Search Filter? Also, that tag would also be unsearchable as well if made. : Hopefully this would address the concern about lazy solicitation should users want to avoid being hunted with the search function.

• View Modes: In general, we need the awake tool to be able to show everyone (especially staff needs this) but some more customization and view options would be great. Maybe Accipiter would have some ideas regarding what sort of limitations in logic we have for approaching this. Show All vs Show None is a good start, but some more complex rules could be neat too for offering additional ways of trimming the list down.

Maybe a filter that shows all people who are currently in your branch area or any sub-areas to that parent area would be a good place to start with adding view modes to the Awake tool?

We might also wish to explore the idea of an option to users in order to allow them to hide their online status (from anybody except moderator flagged accounts) for the sake of privacy. I’m not sure how that will affect any auto-fill functionality in text input, but I imagine that may be a topic for concern regarding such a feature.

3

Yes, the Awake list’s scalability needs to be addressed.
I’ll give you some input from a technical point of view:

  • Tests has been made with 500 awake bots, without noticing any issues. Above that? No clue
  • Commands such as mail, join, etc. uses the Awake list for tab-completion and high lightning, and are currently in need of the client having access to a complete Awake list in memory.
  • For technical reasons1, any ‘individual’ listing (such as “characters you’ve met in the past seven days”) would likely need to be handled client side. Meaning, the client is sent the whole list, while it only display a portion of it for the user.
  • Similar technical reasons makes Area specific lists less costly to implement, would we wish to go that route.

Its kind of similar like to the restrictions I have on how you cannot see someone’s description unless you are in the same room. I like it. Not sure if it is too hardcore for the community though. And implementation wise it would be a pain, as I would need to track everyones “who has seen who”. But I like how you think! :smiley:

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1 Due to the way Resgate works, smaller server-sent individual lists are more costly than a single (albeit large) list that all clients share. For the service that provides the list(s), this can be a matter of sending 1 event on someone waking up, or sending 1 event for each user awake, which could mount to thousands of events on a single wakeup. Also, the individual tracking of “who should be included in this list” can get costly for the service too.

4

What about the obscure function you were thinking about developing for chat output? Could this be used to similar effect to obscure much of the list while still retaining access to the data contained within the obscured portions so that auto-fill could still function and revised view modes could work with modified sorting rules that simply push invisible obscured entities to the buttom and out of harms way as per the viewing rules?

5

You mean the name lookup function to be used for mailing with just first name and such?

Yes.
The “currently in need” means we can replace the client’s local lookup from the Awake list with a server lookup. A bit more costly, and not as rapid an experience, but doable.

6

I feel like maybe I’m misundestood but maybe not?

I’m referring to the chat mute/block obscure feature you were talking about, replacing lines with pips instead so the information is still there client side but not viewed until clicked. I was wondering if we could simply have the users in the awake list perfectly accessible client-side for any functions that need the names they contain, but more or less hidden by the client with the proposed functionality that the mute/block output toggle would provide, applied in a different way? Maybe the two ideas portions of the UI are too far apart concept wise to be applicable like that though.

7

Yes. I totally misunderstood :sweat_smile:

True, the mute/block feature could be extended to filter out characters in the Awake list too.
Filtering the list client wise is very simple. Filtering it server wise is problematic (as it creates individual lists).

8

AHHHHH. :crazy_face:

The logic behind making an area filter is trackable but also introduces more concerns than I initially thought now that I started charting what would need to happen and the additional angle of sending the client more information about a user’s location than we may be intending. XD

We’d have to essentially feed information through the server between clients only if specific conditions were met, while also tracing areas and subareas contained within those areas… as well as tracking any new entries or departures from the area in question.

9

Maybe the regex isn’t doing substring searches.

10

It doesn’t do submatches.
But it matches full words in name, surname, gender, and species. For tags, it needs to match the entire tag, eg.control will not match the tag breath control.

11

I like that too! I really respect that while the Wolfery UI doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a specialized text-chat interface, it has so many design decisions that encourage—and even require—interaction with others and exploration of the shared space beneath the chat.

It’s not “convenient” that I can’t see what you look like when I’m across town from you, but it makes sense! Meanwhile, the meta-info of About and tags plays no simulation role at all, so that’s always avaiable.

In retrospect, I must have had this in mind when I made my suggestion.

12

As a perhaps simpler implementation, but one that could make for a UI improvement: What if the ‘Watchfor’ portion were the only one to display images and descriptions, and the rest were simply a list of names- removing the gender/species and user icon unless opened? Or perhaps this could be a toggle setting. This would give more user names in the same space.

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13

As Wolfery continues to attract more players—again, the thing we want to happen!—I’ve increasingly been targeted with unsolicited come-ons from characters I’ve never seen or had any IC interaction with, and who I assume were just scrolling down the Awake-list, fishing for a fast RP with anyone.

So far in every case, their words have been polite and work-safe, and I often just ignore them. The initial solicitations still feel a little obtrusive and unwelcome, especially in a realm that tries to maintain a baseline “IC” level.

I’m also not sure this calls for further rules against certain player behavior, and I don’t have any real suggestion of immediate action. I note this here because this is an example of the behavior I was concerned about when I started this thread, before it had started to happen to me, and… well, here it is. :slight_smile:

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14

I’ve definitely had some unsolicited approaches from people I haven’t met. However, that’s not necessarily a Wolfery-specific problem; on Tapestries, I’ve had people use WHO and searching for wi tags to contact me out of the blue. It hasn’t happened there in a while, and so I kind of attribute that to the Taps population as being old enough and experienced enough to wait until they run into people before asking to scene.

My current strategy for these approaches is to give some version of “no thank you,” and move on. I’d go as far to say that these approaches are unwelcome, but I’m not sure that’s the case for everyone. I’m not sure a rule would be necessary to curb this, but it might be worth talking about in any etiquette guides.

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15

So, I’m actually going to say: I don’t mind random solicitations!

Many of them don’t interest me, but that’s fine. Much of what I see if I wander out to the park doesn’t interest me either!

I rarely want to jump straight to the sexytimes with someone out of the blue, but I have definitely invited people who’ve messaged me because they saw my name on the list to a “let’s get to know each other” RP somewhere in public, and some of those have in fact achieved not just the wet and wild but also ongoing friendships.

I definitely think there’d be value for people to be able to say they’re not interested in such random solicitations, but… they’re not a universal problem, just a preference.

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