Dot 3.3.0 Endotarting Update

Luca, didn't you just post an update?

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Oh, you got me there. I was planning on bundling this feature with the next one I'm working on, but I feel like the next one will take me several weeks to finish, while this one is done now. So let's have some free stuff!

Sadly, I will say that as of this update, I'm following through with the forecast I gave in the 3.1 update. As of now, all remaining auto response messages like being thanked are being restricted to only interact with the CalRef server. For everywhere else, they are now deprecated. Ah well, they had a good run. What's next?

Originally, Dot was created to provide CalRef an in-server ability to endorse all the World Assembly nations within Refugia. It's been about two years since then and it never happened, such that it became a bit of a meme. After I got the CalRef VI work off my chest, I felt I had a mental road map to getting this feature out and, naturally, that meant I couldn't rest until I made it. With an absolutely minimal amount of testing, I'm done as of yesterday.


Cross! Cross! Cross! Cross!

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There is (finally) a new command called tart.  This command pulls all of the nations that you have not endorsed as of NationStates' last Major update (21:00-22:30 PST), or at least after Nightly has processed it, and compiles it in a way you can easily use.

The nation you would like to get information on is a required argument for this command. The output is an embed of nations, hyperlinked to the closest anchor to their endorse button, and paginated by discord buttons below the message. To the right of the navigation buttons is a link to the web sheet, a procedurally generated webpage which presents the same information, but without leaving your web browser. So you can use whichever platform you find easier.

The web sheet contains two methods, the first is an assistance button. This is a button whose name and link will change with every click. On Chrome and Edge, you can hold ctrl and click the button until it has cycled through all the nations you've missed. Regrettably, Firefox does not permit this functionality, but you can still left-click, endorse, back-button, and repeat if you find it convenient. The second method is a table of buttons for all nations you have yet to endorse, which you can ctrl+click through individually. With every click, the button will turn green so you can visually keep track of where you are and not lose your progress.

The discord message's buttons may be operated for up to ten minutes after the command has been called, after which they will deactivate. Similarly, for privacy's sake, the generated webpage (which already has a hashed name) will be deleted from the server an hour after its creation.

To activate, you can say for example, I cast tart Refuge Isle to bring up all the nations in Refuge Isle's region that it didn't endorse by the previous Major.


Setable Autopins

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Whether you'd like to give your users more control over their chat environment, or have a hard time determining which shitposts are worthy of being uselessly pinned, there's now a feature to handle that for you. The autopins feature allows a message to be pinned if it receives a requisite number of 📌 emoji reactions within a reasonable amount of time after being posted. Similarly within that time, if the message falls under the required number of reactions, the message will be unpinned.

You may be thinking that looks familiar. Quite so! But now server admins can control it with the new setting added to set, called set autopins. With this, you can toggle this behaviour on or off, or set the threshold to something equitable to the population of your server, or change it as it grows or shrinks. The default state of autopins is off, so if you previously enjoyed this feature, you'll need to set server preferences to use it again.


This feature is the first of a series of updates that will be coming out in the coming months to improve server features and accessibility. Dot will be shifting away from empowering NationStates-specific services, and more to empower server admins who want to make things easier and more pleasant to their members and staff.


Bug Fixes

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• Fixed an bug in button interactions where someone other than the operator would cause an interaction to fail for a button that wasn't theirs.
• Fixed an bug where running timer without a base would invocation error.
• Fixed an issue in buy/sell where the database got very laaaaaarge.
• Fixed an bug in set where certain subcommands would fail in barebones server configurations.
• Fixed and issue in WA where disruptive tabs appeared in the stats areas on mobile.

CalRef VI

What? We're Still Doing These?

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Why, yes.

As it turns out, expecting that even constant small updates could replace periodic larger ones was very short-sighted. In previous upgrade phases, we rolled out everything at the same time and surprised people with it, but that's not really in my power to do anymore. There's too much stuffs. Between this and the 3.0 update for Dot, I've spent about eight to ten hours working on the server or coding things for it, every. single. day. for the last month. So, there's probably some level of obligation for me to talk about it. So here we are, hope you enjoy.


Regarding Carbon

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The name "Carbon" has been tossed around for well longer than it ever should have been; however, at this point, I am pleased to announce that I have now accomplished what the G20 could not: Removing Carbon.

This server was thrown together four years ago in a more or less rushed situation, as I got the sites back up after the domains were yoinked. I wasn't super knowledgeable about how network administration worked back then, so the result was poorly structured and put together. But it did work and that's what mattered.

Still, the issue was that a lot of the transferred-in software was old as hell and aging rapidly in a time where the systems it needed to run on were increasingly unsupported. These forums, for example, were intensely modified from the standard SMF base, in a determined attempt to keep our forum software modern and relevant when so many other admins sell their soul to subscription-based, closed-source, proprietary software solutions like TapaTalk. The creation of Dot required systems that were current and modern, and that finally forced the issue of bringing everything up to (then) 2021 standards if we wanted to grow.

During the CalRef V update, many systems were transferred off of Carbon and into a newer server of similar hardware specs, called Hydrogen. Regrettably, the forums and wikis could not be taken out of their functional time capsule, no matter what I tried at the time. There were just too many modifications to account for. Consequently, Carbon remained until last week when I finally completed the last of the migrations.

So, for real now, farewell Carbon and rest in carbonite. Thanks for serving us for four years, but your monthly fees will not be missed.


Overview: Hydrogen

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Without needing to divide resources, hydrogen was roughly doubled in specs, including using DigitalOcean's newest CPUs, such that even Nightly is able to run about 30% faster. Because the capacity has been so dramatically expanded, Hydrogen now runs all of the administration's sites and services, while all of the hosted sites remain on Xenon. For fun trivia, Calamity Refuge is now on its ninth server and sixth domain, in a freshly minted Debian 11. With some hefty security upgrades that makes the server more resilient to a variety of different attacks, we now boast a better security rating than my government.

The CalRef Network site has gotten a fresh remodel during this upgrade phase, and you can scroll to the bottom of the page and see an overview on these two servers, and that's where any additional ones we'll use in the future will be as well.


The Wiki that was used for the original CalRef RPs and side projects (OldWiki.CalRef) is now deprecated.

It turns out that running an alpha build of wiki software that came out in 2014 has some drawbacks eight years later. It was split for, among other reasons, some privacy concerns regarding our past members, but retained because a lot of the content there is still the basis for how we theme some of our modern stuff, especially in Refugia. So, we're solving both the privacy issues and continuity issues by transferring the article texts and imagery, sans-history and user information, directly into the modern wiki, at Wiki.CalRef. You can visit any time, but registering an account still requires you to contact an admin directly, as previously directed.


Forum Changes

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Functionally, the thing that made this update possible was that SMF development has resumed after about a five two year hiatus. The much-awaited 2.1 update made vanilla a lot of the functions that we had put a whole load of effort into modifying in. Such revolutionary breakthroughs include native support for IPv6 addresses. In 2022. Eight years after CalRef first modded the functionality in the database, and seven years after IPv4 exhaustion actually occurred in North America. But this is a welcome reversal from the previous developer line of "Just block access to all IPv6 users". But our rickety homebrew setup couldn't be transferred off of Carbon previously, so I'll take it.

Other abilities gained include the tag, which I previously wrote in as [floatleft] and [floatright] -- no need to keep that anymore. With the native float tag, you can simply use and . You can also provide more detailed specifications such as , to mark what width the floated item should not exceed.

The [youtube] tag is also a native feature instead of a modification now.

The [tt] tag, which I have used for ages to denote commands or code, and which was used heavily in the FTaWSotR RP, is deprecated by SMF. That's is unfortunate, so I've added a [key] tag to provide the same font, since tt is still a taken namespace.

All the previous tags, such as background, nation, region, box, sidebar are still in and good to go, and accessible through a new and much more pleasant post editor. Members also pick up the ability to do quick edits of their posts while remaining on the same page, leaving edit messages again and quick-quoting highlighted text in posts. Users, mods, and admins now have a more sensible way with dealing with IP addresses which made their way into accidental screenshots a couple years back.

Oh my god and we now have the ability to search content inside threads instead of the entire forum. You will observe the search bar in the upper right, which provides this functionality whenever you need it.

We now have a notification system, where users can be pinged on mention. For example, you can use @Luca and an alert will pop up in my upper left alert menu in the forum bar. This @ method is an alias of the new [member] tag, which you can also use if you wish.

Karma has been removed as a feature and, although we had this since the beginning, I feel like it was never really used much, except when Gabriel's was manually set to -6000 karma. So that's out, and has been replaced with a more modern-standard post "Like" system. As with mentions, you'll get notified whenever a member has liked a post you've made.


Dot 3.2.0: CalRef VI Update

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A Dot update too? Sure why not.


Going forward, if you're interested in finding out about Dot, I'm shuttering the old forum thread that served as Dot's documentation and from here on out, everything you could ever possibly want will be hosted on Dot.CalRef. This site is also going to be linked in Dot's bio, future update posts, and there's even a handy link to the site in the "Network" button at the top of this forum's navigation. Every command is linked in the new docs site, with an MP4 video modal of every command being demonstrated. So, if you can't figure out how something is supposed to work, hopefully this will help.

This site also contains a privacy overview for the information that is collected by Dot. Or, more specifically, a declaration of things that are not. If you're interested in adding Dot to your server, you can do so by the large blue buttons that are at the upper right of these pages, or by the invite link that's been attached to Dot's bio.


The commands menu has been changed to provide hyperlinks to the relevant section of the docs for every command registered. The restored help command will also direct to the doc site.


If you've ever been curious about a region's population history history, or liked the graphing features of save, have I got some sweet news for you: You can now get that any time you want.
There's a new command now, called population, or pop. This command delivers a graph similar to that on regional history pages, providing the history of the region's population. However, with this tool, you can see much further back than NationStates' graph limit (2016), and instead see as far back as 2012. You also have the option to get the history of the current iteration of a region, or the entirety of the time the name has been used since 2012, across all refounds.

In both cases, you'll also be given the spreadsheet of the data, if you'd like to do something extra with it, yourself.

You can say I cast population Greece for the incarnation, or I cast population Greece, all for all the history of that namespace.


Minor fixes:

• Fixed an issue in save, where XMLs were not being properly shipped with the zip file
• fixed an issue in the wa command, where verification that NS was down wasn't triggering the right checks.

That's probably all for now.