TripleA development

frigoref

@lafayette
Alright, I have added the role Donor.
For the question on the content behind the "player" contributor role link, I would ask you to try it: Player

Panther

@frigoref said in TripleA development:

PS: The link was an invitation to contribute on github directly

PR sent

frigoref

@panther thanks for you input.
Anyone else is also welcome!

TheDog

@frigoref
Maybe the Map Maker should be called Map Loader or Map Git Loader?
AFAIK @beelee and @ff03k64 could be added to the list of Map Loaders.

To me a Map Maker is alkexr, ebbe & Frostion they are not always the same as a Map Loader.

LaFayette

@frigoref

Missing Roles

Seemingly two missing two roles:

Map Admin: These people curate the maps and generally try to make sure that they work. They tag maps and check for them for quality and to the best of their ability trademark issues. They help out with updating XMLs as needed, helping to ensure that all maps are complete (have images) and generally play well.
QA: these people do extensive user testing of the game, typically on the prerelease and then submit high quality bug reports regarding their findings. They help doing regression tests before 'stable' releases are launched.

Terminology - Contributor Role vs Community Role vs Project Role

Having "Players" as a contributor role was seemingly a bit odd (or so I thought initially). Though, I see we basically ask Players to submit problem reports when they come across them. I would consider renaming the term: "contributor role" to "community role" or "project role" perhaps.

Alternatively, we can avoid labeling these roles and rename the header of the section to something like "How to contribute to Triplea"

beelee

@frigoref said in TripleA development:

@beelee
Can you help me please on the "graphically creating the map". A map maker should have a way to create image files for the map items like territories and units, i.e., a tool (like Photoshop) and the skill to design it in the tool?

Yea idk how to do the graphic stuff other than tweak a few existing units. Cernel and wc_sumpton can do both xml and graphics that are currently active here. A few others as well.

PS: The link was an invitation to contribute on github directly

ahh ...

frigoref

@thedog @beelee @LaFayette
Please don't take offense in my question, but I am genuinely interested in what prevents you from using the link to make a pull request to contribution page, but you are still writing - even some extensive - posts here about what should change?

TheDog

@frigoref
I dont know what a Pull Request is or does.

I find github is not intuitive and not easy to use. I have tried to use it to upload a map and failed and wasted over 3 hours achieving absolutely nothing.

The TripleA forum is ideal for offering opinions and thrashing out ideas and so others can agree or disagree.

Then you as the original owner of the document make the changes, as I dont feel qualified.

frigoref

@thedog I understand your frustration, but this is a normal MD file which is even having a text editor like for any post you make in the forum.
Adding some text is as simple as writing a post here.
But maybe that was not clear and some are not feeling comfortable on github due to past experiences like you seemed to have had.

TheDog

@frigoref
I didnt know what a normal MD file was so I googled it.

The file format is 'md', which stands for Markdown documentation. It is a lightweight markup language that can be easily converted to text.

GitHub still does itself no favours.

On a positive note I do use github to help Devs, but I treat it like a forum post,
my greatest contribution is;
https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/issues/7819

frigoref

@lafayette I am not quite sure how to adjust the current page.

Map Admin is the Map Maker as far as I can see.
QA is not a proper name. How about 'Release Tester'?
The role term should reflect that it is an active component. 'Community' or 'Project' are reflecting more a passive association. Therefore, I would vote to keep 'contributor role' as the role term.
I would definitely want to keep a proper name. We are missing currently a clear structure and for new community members it is difficult to see how they can contribute to the project. Defining roles gives guidance for new members and also identification for existing members. Furthermore, the role lables indicate who is supposed to do what and this separation of concerns is helping to give a community spirit.

LaFayette

@TheDog , just a few responses to what you posted:

The TripleA forum is ideal for offering opinions and thrashing out ideas and so others can agree or disagree.

It is actually far easier to comment on a pull request than it is to offer one or offer other changes. Because comments are in-context, notably they can be specified to the specific lines and can be resolved, it is far easier to track a multi-facetted conversation on a pull request. Forums are actually really bad at this, as soon as a thread has more than 2 or 3 topics, it is difficult to manage them. Further, any topic and conversation creates more content, contrast this with well organized discussion threads that are resolved (and so the amount of content is reduced as consensus is reached vs the other way round).

Then you as the original owner of the document make the changes, as I dont feel qualified

Once an item is merged, the owner is the 'TripleA' organization, there is no actual explicit personal ownership. In other words, it's not my code, it's TripleA's code and documentation.

LaFayette

@frigoref said in TripleA development:

but I am genuinely interested in what prevents you from using the link to make a pull request to contribution page, but you are still writing - even some extensive - posts here about what should change?

I think this is simply inertia and the conversation having started here. I'm pretty lazy, why click a link when I can just open a reply button? It's not a convincing answer, but I think that's all there is to it on why we are still discussing here the issue.

LaFayette

@frigoref said in TripleA development:

Map Admin is the Map Maker as far as I can see.

They are actually quite different. Map admin's have write access to every map repository while a map maker has write access to only the maps they have published. Map admins do XML fixes and other maintenance activities, they categorize maps, remove broken maps, etc..

QA is not a proper name. How about 'Release Tester'?

Can you elaborate why 'Quality Assurance' is not a proper name? 'Release tester' is not super proper either though as we want this kind of testing to be happening almost all of the time. There is a lot of manual testing that needs to be done after every single change, the need does not scale at all, but nonetheless we need people manually checking TripleA very frequently. Developers should be doing this very thoroughly, though there is too much ground to cover to always catch everything and hence the backstop.

For releases, there is more emphasis on this kind of testing to find any issues before we do a release. We had a formal 'QA' group for a while but it somewhat fizzled.

The role term should reflect that it is an active component. 'Community' or 'Project' are reflecting more a passive association. Therefore, I would vote to keep 'contributor role' as the role term.

I would definitely want to keep a proper name. We are missing currently a clear structure and for new community members it is difficult to see how they can contribute to the project. Defining roles gives guidance for new members and also identification for existing members. Furthermore, the role lables indicate who is supposed to do what and this separation of concerns is helping to give a community spirit.

I can generally agree to the above points.

LaFayette

Re: roles, I think there is some confusion as the developers, specifically the maintainers, have often assumed every role there is. For example, map admins previously did all of the source code work to add maps and received maps as attachments to forum posts. They managed updates this way as well. The responsibilities of the role are less today than before due to available automation in github compared to those source forge days of yore.

The current map admins can be found here: https://github.com/orgs/triplea-maps/teams/mapadmins/members. I don't think the concept has taken off very well, we mostly have developers on that team.. It is a goal for TripleA to try and distribute as much workload as we can so we avoid further cases of individuals leaving or taking a break and bringing the project to the halt. Your work here @frigoref should help that problem quite a bit.

frigoref

@lafayette The link https://github.com/orgs/triplea-maps/teams/mapadmins/members is not working for me. Does the github user need permissions to view the org details?

frigoref

@lafayette
Thanks, I understood the difference between map admin and map maker.
"Quality Asssurance" is already better than "QA", but not very expressive. Maybe just "Tester"?

frigoref

@lafayette thanks for your feedback. Do you see any way to make the transition easier so we can move the content discussions of guides to github?

RogerCooper

@thedog said in TripleA development:

I find github is not intuitive and not easy to use. I have tried to use it to upload a map and failed and wasted over 3 hours achieving absolutely nothing.

I have worked out a system for uploading mods. I will post detailed instructions soon. It is not an intuitive process..

LaFayette

@frigoref

Does this link work for you?
https://github.com/orgs/triplea-maps/teams/mapadmins

Do you see any way to make the transition easier so we can move the content discussions of guides to github?

This is a pretty pervasive problem. I've come to find that splitting conversations is often more harmful than trying to move them to the right place. Only suggestion I have is to spam the PR link a bit more, and be more explicit that you would prefer feedback on the branch or a PR rather than in this thread.

Overall this thread is seemingly not well focused anymore and probably the conversation should wrap up here or regain focus back to the OP.