> I have been developing a graphical online version of Diplomacy and
> need a bit of help beta testing it. It's hard playing by myself and
> spotting the errors, so I'm looking for a few players with a fresh
> view on things
I love what you are doing. I'm only slightly jealous that you and
J=C3=A9r=C3=A9mie Lefran=C3=A7ois have success already with something that
=
has been on
the back of my mind for a year or so. Please don't take anything that I
say below as anything else but an honest input and curiosity.=20
In addition to asking for more eyes on the project, you could also use
archived judge games as source moves for automated testing.
On your "about" pages, you touch on the history of the judges, but I
think that "the famous Diplomacy judges, mostly maintained by
universities" may not be completely accurate. See:
http://devel.diplom.org/Zine/S2002R/Miller/What_is_njudge.html
Ken Lowe and later the judgekeepers of USCA and USWI may have used
University equipment for their judges, but I believe it was a matter
of individuals using the computers and Internet access available to them
rather than a matter of academic sup****t. Misunderstanding would be
understandable and it may not be a distinction worth making, but if it
reflects different history source information than I cited above, I'd
love to read it. (If it's personal memories of you or someone you know,
I want to conduct an electronic interview.)
What's the state of adjudicator testing? Have you been using the
DATC test cases (http://web.inter.nl.net/users/L.B.Kruijswijk/)?
No
fault if you haven't, but it might be helpful if you wish a systematic
rather than (or in addition to) a stress testing approach.
There are some things I'm used to as a judge user and judgekeeper that
I'm not sure that I can do without. If you are interested I'd be glad
to talk to offlist about these wishes and concerns, most of which are
security features. If you have access to the web server logs, it's not
a bad set up. Otherwise, you probably should be logging IP addresses
from the the login/register page. Also, the links to login and register
at the beginning of the page should link to that page rather than the
opening page. I can guess how that came about and my experience with
my Wiki (cycalia.lendary.org) suggests that adding an entry page is a
good idea for search engines, but it is surprising to get kicked out to
a start page when you are expecting the registration page.=20
Also the entry page should have some content on it so that it will get
indexed by search engines - ALT text for the image and a couple
paragraphs about the game that reflect your HTML headers.=20
Chris=20
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