Government registry and updates to forum header

r3naissanc3r

Honoured Citizen
Citizen
The admin team has a couple of announcements.

First, there is now a government registry spreadsheet.

This is linked to the pre-existing citizen registry: Once the forum profile ID of an official is specified, all other information (forum name, nation, etc.) is automatically pulled from the citizen registry. Likewise, if that information changes in the citizen registry, then it will also change in the government registry.

The government registry is intended as the single, central location for getting information about the current government makeup. It will be maintained by the admin team, in at least the same frequency as we used to maintain the forum header (i.e., very frequently).

If you are building some application that needs up-to-date information about government officials in Europeia, we strongly encourage you to use the government registry as your source, rather than use some alternative source or try to manually enter the information. Similarly, if you need to link to a location that lists government officials, we strongly encourage you to link to the government registry.

Second, and related to the above, there have been a few changes to the forum header.

Specifically, in the past admins needed to manually edit the header code to update the officials listed in the "Region" and "Government" drop-down menus. This has changed, and now both drop-down menus automatically pull information from the government registry, without the need for manual edits from the admins.

This has two advantages. The first, and the one most relevant to non-admins is that, given that the nation and forum profile information is already available "for free" in the government registry, this information is now also included in the drop-down menus. This has been requested many times in the past, and we always had to say no due to how tedious manually updating the header would become. This is no longer an issue, now that the links can be created automatically. See here for some related discussion.

The second advantage is that, with these changes, we have completely eliminated the need for frequent manual edits to the header. This editing process is very error-prone, and mistakes can be quite dangerous - miss one "/" in the code and there goes the entire forum page. With the new system, everything is safer.

One downside of this change is that now you need to have JavaScript enabled to view the "Government" drop-down menu. However, given that JavaScript is already needed to view the "News" (EBC Wire) and "Info" drop-down menus, and that JavaScript is anyway necessary for properly displaying many other non-custom parts of the forum, this should not be too big of an issue.

Finally, note that the "Government" link on the header has also been changed, to link to the new government registry.

All comments and suggestions are welcome.
 
On a further technical update, the header rendering code has been reorganized so that it pulls all external content through one HTTP request to our offiste server (this page, on the off-chance anyone wants to link to it). Previously, it made three calls, one for regional info, one for government, and one for the wire.

In practical terms, this means slightly faster loading time for the forum.
 
Now I can't view it on mobile because it it's a link. D:

Anyways, good work! I was kinda confused when I saw "NS" after each govt. official. :p
 
Great work r3n :D

One minor note, I usually update our header after elections in all skins and have only screwed them up once, maybe twice. I don't mean that in a John Henry vs. the engine sort of way, but in a "don't make it sound like I'm that error-prone" sort of way :p
 
Quick note, i am seeing on the drop-down that the Legislative column labeled as Judiciary.

Still, awesome work r3n, thank you very much.
 
Yay for automation!
 
I mentioned this off-handedly to Mal on Skype the other day, and I love the links to the profile pages. While I understand why the nation links are there, the NS superscript is throwing me off, and I'm just not a fan. As an alternative (and bearing in mind that I have no clue how doable/not doable this is) ... would it be possible to either code the nation listing on the profile pages as a link? Or edit in a clickable link (perhaps from the citizenship spreadsheet) to link to the nation page from the profile?

The automation is super-awesome, however, and likely to be quite handy for dispatches and the like. :D
 
Mousebumples said:
I mentioned this off-handedly to Mal on Skype the other day, and I love the links to the profile pages. While I understand why the nation links are there, the NS superscript is throwing me off, and I'm just not a fan. As an alternative (and bearing in mind that I have no clue how doable/not doable this is) ... would it be possible to either code the nation listing on the profile pages as a link? Or edit in a clickable link (perhaps from the citizenship spreadsheet) to link to the nation page from the profile?

The automation is super-awesome, however, and likely to be quite handy for dispatches and the like. :D
I think it's important for new members to have easy access to the in-game nations. Keep in mind that they may be new players or diplomats who don't want to register, or do not have much experience about using the forum, whereas they know how to communicate over NS.

We could try some alternative styling, for instance,

Mousebumples | NS

Or we could use an icon, either as superscript or with a separator:

Mousebumples | [icon]globe[/icon]
Mousebumples | [icon]flag[/icon]

Mousebumples[icon]globe[/icon]
Mousebumples[icon]flag[/icon]
 
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