It’s that time again! Because of the July scheduling oddities surrounding the anniversary, we didn’t have an Infrastructure Staff Meeting at the end of July, which brings us to today’s General Staff Meeting. Surprisingly there was no private portion this time around, so it felt about the same regardless. Here’s what happened!
Role-playing and long conversations should exit #media
The #media Discord channel is intended for players and companies to post announcements and advertisements related to their in-game activities. Recently there have been a few instances where these messages have been drowned out, either by a series of lengthy role-playing statements (often made on behalf of various towns’ government divisions), or by long conversations that have drifted from the original post.
We are now asking players to please help restore the #media channel to its original purpose, and to take other conversations elsewhere. Some examples of conversations and messages that should NOT be happening in #media include:
- Responding to a franchise announcement or advertisement by asking for a franchise to be built in your town.
- Role-playing beyond the scope of an announcement or advertisement. For example, if a town announces that a train station is being closed, it’s probably not appropriate to post a lengthy statement condemning the closure in #media, especially if you don’t manage a rail company that would be affected by the closure.
- Excessive bandwagoning. You are free to react to messages in #media as much as you want.
- Discussing something that’s not related to an ad or announcement.
Messages that aren’t appropriate for #media should be posted in a project channel or in another Discord server entirely. As with most channels, we hope most players will get a feel for what seems appropriate.
Lab world improvement initiatives beginning
We will be making three changes to the lab world effective immediately:
- We will be creating warps every 1,000 blocks on the coordinate grid to help players quickly navigate the world. While in the lab world, you can use /mv spawn to teleport back to the spawn point. Warps will be placed at the lab world spawn.
- We will be reminding players to remove old and unused items from the lab world as soon as they’re no longer needed. Please use the #lab-world-cleanup Discord channel to request something if staff aren’t online. The lab world should not be used as permanent storage: while we do have a lot of disk space, it does have a limit, and we want to ensure that lab world space is available for everyone. Staff can also help you make use of your vertical space by stacking assets on top of each other for easier access. If disk or world space becomes an issue, we may need to start removing abandoned assets.
- Maps should be moved to the map world or deleted as soon as possible. These take up a significant footprint and so should be removed from the lab world.
As a courtesy to other lab world users, please also mark off a border to your lab area, and stay within it as much as you can. While we won’t be enforcing this as strictly, it will help immensely in terms of organizing the lab world.
To be clear, purging the world as a whole or forcibly removing old assets are last-resort actions that we don’t want to take. We recognize the large number of assets and asset templates that everyone has built in the lab world. We also want to balance this availability with accessibility, by ensuring there is world and disk space available for anyone who wants it. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.
Speaking of disk space:
CoreProtect purge incoming
Once Minecraft 1.16.2 is released, we will announce the timeline for our next CoreProtect purge.
We purged the CoreProtect logs when we upgraded to 1.15 and Zeta, and because of our immensely high traffic levels since Zeta opened (who’da thunk a pandemic would strike right when we switched servers?), we’ve filled up our logs again to the point where we’ll need to purge some in order to not run out of space.
We will announce the details of the purge when it happens, but players should be aware that it will involve at least a half-day of server downtime, and likely much longer. Please note that this will not bring us to Minecraft 1.16 as we are still waiting on some plugins, but rather this is a maintenance operation that will need to happen soon. We will likely leave about a month or two of logs to assist with rollbacks and other items.
Other community issues
- The Trial Moderator rank has been retired (bringing daltdisneyland up to a “Full” Moderator). We will still retain the concept of a probation period, as well as moderator warnings for serious misconduct, though these won’t be as visible.
- A proposal to allow community builds to progress through ranks did not pass. Community builds wishing to build airports or use other rank-restricted perks can request them as a Section 10 item at a GSM or ISM.
- The MRT line construction moratorium to the Zeta region has been lifted. Staff wishing to build lines in Zeta (coordinates beyond 18,000) should ensure that the lines serve existing towns as a part of the proposal.
Transport projects and MRT lines
- A proposed extension of the Southern Line West was denied per our new guidelines of Zeta lines.
- A 4K rule waiver (added to the agenda for timing reasons, not out of necessity) was denied due to station information missing and confusing alignment and elevation details. Pretzel may re-propose this via email by providing station locations, elevation information, and whether or not the line will run using tracks that FooteChicken has been approved to build parallel to the Jungle Line.
- A bus terminal in Central City, proposed by EliteNeon, has been approved provided that the Merchant Radio building is not moved, and provided that no single bus company has a majority of bus gates (a 50-50 split is okay).
- autobus22 has been granted retroactive permission to bypass the inactive town of Pyeongmun.
- The following roads have been approved:
- A1/B1 North Extension (provided that the B1 section within Oparia is upgraded to A-road standards and signed as such)
- A230 from Merritt Lakes to New Bakersville
- B58 from the A54 to Dand
- A canal from Elecna Bay to Lake 18 has been approved.
Events and IATs
All of our events and IATs this time around were approved. They are:
- Funding for Assassins, season 2
- An IAT for Merritt Lakes
- An IAT for the town at F14 Station
Upcoming events
- The MRTvision Screenshot Contest 7 finals will be occurring on Saturday, August 15, at 7:00 pm UTC. The top 10 screenshots will be featured on the website.
- Voting is still open for the DesertSun Expo.
- Vulpicula will be presenting a dramatic recitation of the Bee Movie script on Sunday, August 16 at 9:00 pm UTC. (Please stop bothering him about this. He knows. He needs to prepare.)
- The next staff meeting will be an Infrastructure meeting on Saturday, August 30, with a General meeting on Saturday, September 14.
That’s all for now folks, we’ll see you around!
<3, Chief