Weekly Briefing Release 1 Sep 8 - Sep 15

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Introduction

This is the first issue of the official OWOT weekly briefing. It covers important events that occur on OWOT and official updates on the state of OWOT. The primary aim of the weekly briefing is to document policy changes and future plans on OWOT. It does not aim to provide a full picture of the state of the community.

OWOT currently has one unofficial dedicated news organization called OWOT Today. It is currently maintained by AndreiXYZ and had its first post on June 12, 2023. On September 14, 2023, the Discord server for OWOT Today launched and has approximately 30 members as of today.

Another news organization called Our World of News (OWON) is maintained by Lemuria and involves a weekly release on the various happenings around OWOT and various other websites. The very first issue was published on February 23, 2024. As of today, there are 59 issues.

Following drama involving Our World of News in early August, plans for an official weekly briefing were realized which aims to provide official weekly information about OWOT.

FP discusses ways to reform OWOT's leadership

On September 13 at roughly 10 PM EST, FP went onto the Global chat to discuss ways to improve the leadership structure of OWOT. FP had a chat with an anonymous user about the issues scripts and the chat have posed on OWOT as they were the only participant. The mindset regarding how OWOT should be run was called into question. FP compared the managing of OWOT to "shoveling sand into a river," which refers to the fact that a lot of work is being put into OWOT with very little return on investment. This means that FP is not making efficient use of his time and should prioritize the security of OWOT as well as the attitude towards how OWOT should be run.

Among FP's duties involve maintaining OWOT's server, posting a daily screenshot on the Discord server, moderating the chat and the Discord server, rollbacking parts of the frontpage, rate-limiting script abusers, and more.

More emphasis should be placed on the community and the security of the website. This means being more direct with the community and working on the triaging process.

Our World of Text is still running on a temporary server

Following difficulties with the main server, OWOT moved to another server on July 30. After arduous efforts, OWOT was moved to a temporary server on July 31 at 4 in the morning. Subsequently, OWOT started using Cloudflare again after moving away from it in late 2022.

As of September 15, 45 days later, OWOT is still running on the temporary server. There have been reported stability issues, but they've been dismissed as temporary hiccups. Still, this is a severe downgrade from the previous server as CPU and network bandwidth is more limited.

There are concrete plans to move OWOT back onto a proper VPS before the end of the year. We are working with Uvias to rectify this issue.

There are plans to move vital feedback functionality off the Discord

A portion of the OWOT userbase does not use Discord. An even smaller portion refuses to use Discord citing grievances towards the company as a whole.

It's important that ways to provide feedback to the developers and admins are created that do not involve using Discord. This includes making suggestions, reporting bugs and any issue in general, and viewing the daily screenshots.

There are plans to rewrite OWOT's client in TypeScript

Ever since the launch of OWOT on October 8, 2017, the client has not had a major rewrite. On August 29, it was announced on Discord that the client will be rewritten in TypeScript to make future development on the client easier.

No major features will be introduced immediately after the client rewrite will be released, but it will help make the client have a more consistent design and open up to more possibilities of modding.

A new WOTD has been nominated after 104 days of stagnation

The current WOTD was assigned on June 3, 2024 and has remained WOTD for a little over three months. This follows difficulties getting people to submit new worlds on /fp/submit and the poll being rigged by proxies.

There are plans to fix the current state of the WOTD. On August 19, 2024, FP made amends to the WOTD policy which includes:

  • Rebranding it as "WOTD" literally or writing it as "Featured: /world" at the bottom of the center console
  • Abolishing the poll or delegating voting powers to a group of selected members
  • Continuing to use the /wotd world to list past WOTDs
  • If there aren't any worlds left to choose from, FP can create a world himself that can stand in as a featured world.
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