stabbeurfou : allowing in judge nostalgic players..

You may now send your orders by email to submit.RemoveThis@stabbeurfou.org
Mail are processed only once evey hour.

Here is the syntax (using an example):

GAME la_passoire
POWER England
ACCOUNT jeremie.lefrancois.RemoveThis@wanadoo.fr
PASSWORD secret
F BRE H
F ENG S F BRE

I wonder if that could lead to merging in some judge communities...
specifying first a small subset of the judge syntax to be used to
drive a game on stabbeurfou..
Any thoughts ?

> I wonder if that could lead to merging in some judge communities...
> specifying first a small subset of the judge syntax to be used to
> drive a game on stabbeurfou..
> Any thoughts ?

Your format has a lot going for it. It's more intuitive and readable
than the judge sign on and you aren't bogged down with a large feature
set to support.

It's more verbose than the judge format, though, so it's not a
strong candidate for crossover play. DP Judge syntax is very much like
that of nJudge, but crossover play is limited somewhat by the minor
syntactical differences and by the fact that DP Judge doesn't play well
with the standard web tools. The fact that it has its own interface that
is arguably superior in many respects doesn't change the fact that a
number of people will perversely prefer to use inferior tools that are
merely sufficient.

The Diplomacy server that achieves widespread interoperability between
email and web interfaces will probably have the following
characteristics to its email interface:

- The ability to read any syntactically correct set of judge orders
without generating any error more severe than "Not Implemented,"

- Output that is sufficiently judge-like to be processed by existing
judge utilities and/or cooperation with existing users of judge output
(floc.net, diplom.org, JDPR/DRR, judge utility programmers) to make
them work.

- Real-time mail processing. Five minutes is acceptable lag for a
small judge. USAZ, USAL and (last summer) USAK run with 3 minute
updates. I'm putting USAK back on real-time right now and the users are
overflowing with gratitude.

I think you've got a good start. For better or worse, SF has carved a
niche for itself as a tournament host and the work you've done here
would enable interaction at that level of play just by stepping up
your updates from email to 3-5 minutes. It's still a new interface,
though, so it doesn't gain any traction from the installed judge base.

I wish we'd been able to work together on this. We're both competent at
deployment but we have strengths in design and development that are
complementary. I mean, I envy the way you get the code working even
when I disagree with elements of your design.

Chris

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