On Thu, 15 Jul 2010, comex wrote:
Agora badly needs more players, but the current barrier to entry is
much higher than it should be. Not only do you have to sign up for
three mailing lists (if you don't, you can't even look at the archives
to get a sense of how the game is played), you have to understand a
long ruleset without any real guide.
To address the first issue:
- I was thinking of installing a webmail client for an account signed
up to the lists with no login; you could play at the beginning just by
sending mail through it.
- make the archives public?
I don't think this would work out-of-the-box due to our habit and concerns
for confirming identity (see: Peekee's case on the client e set up, though
that was when "behalf of" worked). I think this would almost need a court
case (or rule) that anything coming from such an account was always legally
ambiguous as to the sender. Which would mean that something set up to make
things "easier" would lead to the types of new player court cases that make
Agora seem so arcane. Thoughts on how to get around this?
I strongly agree that browsing the archives should be easier and not
generally require a subscription, so a separate source of archives would
be good, some kind of captcha against email harvesting maybe.
To address the second issue:
- ais523's thesis isn't very good for really new players; rather, we
need a short guide on how to actually sign up and start playing the
game. Something like this: http://a.qoid.us/join.html (an old
document from one of Zefram's archives), or a similar document I can't
find but I remember reading, which contains, for example, instructions
on what to do if you're assigned as judge.
It was Murphy that wrote a good FAQ I think a while back? Be nice to
see that up-front. In particular, perhaps a re-organization/update of
the agoranomic.org front page with such a FAQ front and center?
-G.
