Liaison Domain Projects

— the other things we do

Apart from their normal liaison duties, members of the domain can choose to participate in some of the domain's projects. Here is an overview of some of the projects we have done in recent years, are still doing, or planning!

Ongoing activities

newbiehelper admin: Members of "newbiehelper admin", which are usually two or three liaisons, are responsible for the newbie channel and newbie helpers. They take care of the hiring and firing of helpers, and are the first point of contact for questions about newbiehelping. They also decide on policies for the newbie channel and maintain the corresponding help files.
improving and updating player help files: While keeping documentation up to date is not a specific liaison responsibility, it is nevertheless something we are well placed to do. This involves, among other things, fixing bugreports and including recent changes (or asking the person who did the change to do this).
improving and updating liaison documentation: Liaisons have their own documentation as well; policy help files, general help files on regularly occuring problems and domain help files on specific things (for example faith rods). The last of these are usually written when some new development of sufficient complexity has been added to the game, by the creator or domain responsible for the change (although liaisons may be asked to give an overview of what they want to be told). The first two kinds of help files are entirely our own responsibility.

Projects with a fixed start- and endpoint

Pumpkin Town: Just as the newbie channel is the responsibility of the liaison domain, so is the newbie area. When the old newbie area was found wanting, and ideas were flying around on revamping it, the project was managed by the liaison domain. Together with several interested playtesters and creators from other domains, liaisons have been involved both in running the project, coding in it, writing help files and NPC talks, and working on descriptions.
This project ran from 2004 to 2008, in various states of activity and slowly progressing until it was finally ready for release into game. Now it has entered game maintaining the area is still our responsibility, but this is not a lot of work and closing reports there is also regularly picked up by some of the non-liaisons who were involved.
summarising outstanding issues: This was a project from 2007. As some background information, liaisons are used to posting on the creator boards when bugs occur that require liaison intervention to be put right or are otherwise quite serious. Sometimes, there is just no one around to fix these and they stay open for a long time, or are forgotten about. An example of these were playershop bugs. Anyway, at the time a crack team of coders was put together to work on these (and other) problems, and several liaisons trawled through the last years' worth of board posts to summarise issues and find as much information about them as they could. Most of these problems, where reproducible (the non-reproducible ones had likely been corrected before), got fixed. :)
liaison toys: When a situation calls for it, liaisons may give away toys to players - rare little tidbits that are not available from the game. At the time of writing, this doesn't happen a lot, but nevertheless an open (planned) project is to have a look at the toys we have, classify them, toss out bad toys, come up with ideas for new ones and identify situations where it would be appropriate to give out each toy. A coding inclined liaison on the project could also meddle with toys or write new ones.
updating the liaison webpage: Every once in a while the liaison webpage needs to be updated, to reflect changes in policy and the general running of the domain, as well as answering questions that regularly come up and might not have before. This is a short, but recurring project.

Projects in other domains

Liaisons can also join projects in other domains, with permission of the leader of the domain and/or the project. The main restriction we set is that this should not negatively impact on their liaising.

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