How Recruiting Used To Be

Calvin Coolidge

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Oftentimes we hear about how recruiting used to be a lot harder to do back in the day, which is often in tandem with the defense of Asperta as an Honoured Citizen, earned almost entirely on the back of his recruiting efforts from 2010. Today I wanted to provide some information about what recruiting actually used to look like before we had the recruitment tool that we have now, and what that meant for recruiters in those times.

Before getting into the article proper, a short disclaimer: everything you will read in this article has been pulled from the general Ministry of Interior thread. I did not go into any hidden subforums or channels to get this information, it is available to all citizens. I will provide links throughout this piece so you can examine the threads for yourself.

With that out of the way, let's go back, way back, to 2007, when the region was young and recruitment was probably more vital than at any other point in our region's history. In August, Lethen posted a visual guide to walk recruiters through the process. While the images now have a large watermark in the middle of them, it's still pretty clear to see what had to be done back then. Essentially, recruiters would have to manually go to the NationStates website, and go to each of the feeders (The Pacific, The West Pacific, etc.) then watch for new nations to be created and telegram them individually.

There are some tricks and tips to make this process a little quicker, including opening multiple nations at once in multiple tabs so you can send the telegrams without having to search after each one, but it's clear this process was not as simple or easy as our current method. I tried the process out (without actually sending any telegrams, but getting right up to that point) and it took me roughly 15 seconds to get from my nation to the point where I would send a telegram. However, I can see that over a long course of time things would get even slower as I would have to wait for new nations to be made in each region, and the going back and forth to check each of the five regions would add up over time.

The biggest inconvenience, though, is having to "check in/out" every time you recruit. Lethen describes it in his guide, but you can see an example of what that looks like in practice within this thread from 2008. The most important takeaway from this check in system is that only one person can recruit at a time, to avoid doubling up on nations being created. Additionally tedious is having to track every nation you recruited yourself, and post the nation names in the thread as proof. I can already imagine the recruitment pile-ups that must have taken place as recruiters wanting to send telegrams had to wait for another recruiter to get tired before they could take over.

This system remained in place for a year until late 2008 when Europeia got access to its first recruitment tool. As HEM ecstatically explains "It keeps track of all nations not having been sent a telegram from Europeia. It links to nations so you can easily recruit. NO MORE page surfing. This program keeps track of the number of telegrams you sent." Additionally, in a new guide published soon after, HEM notes that "It doesn't matter how many people are recruiting, you cannot end up sending telegrams to two nations. If someone clicked a nation before you it will not let you send a telegram." This system actually resembles our current one quite a lot, so I won't go too much into it.

However, tragedy struck in June 2009 when the tool went down, and recruiters had to return to the old system. This lasted until November when a new tool was made available for recruiters. This system was implemented immediately, but a guide from June 2010 has pictures, so you'd get a better idea of how it went by looking here.

This system was basically the same as the previous tool, but a little worse because you couldn't recruit at the same time as someone else. Also like the previous system it had to be downloaded onto your computer before being used. Furthermore, you had to "refresh" the list of nations every now and then once it ran out of nations on the list it generated for you when you first logged in. In a guide for what looks like the same tool, or a very similar one, Asperta himself makes an appearance a few months later in October, with a new piece of information that for the Sinker regions (The Rejected Realms and Lazarus at the time) you still had to check in and out like under the old system. I assume this was the case before, but it failed to make the guide.

In 2012 we get confirmation that it has been the same system since 2009, when Alarm Siren (who made the PARANS, the tool) comments that he has been updating this system for three years. In what appears to be the final update on PARANS, we see that an addition was made so now only recruiting in The Rejected Realms require a manual check-in. Finally in July 2013, we get an announcement of what I imagine to be r3n's recruitment tool, which we have used since.

And that is the history of every method of manual recruitment we have done as a region up to this point. So the next time you hear an older member complain about how recruiting used to be in the old days, cut them some slack. It really was worse back then, and you have no excuse for not recruiting now, given how easy it has become with our nations being delivered to us in an instant, and multiple people being allowed on at the same time. Plus no downloads or manual check ins! Until next time, this is Calvin Coolidge, shilling for the Ministry of Interior.
 
That's why I sent welcome TGs instead to get the mandatory recruitment waiver.
 
Nicely written and very interesting article! I've recruited for very small UCRs before using the "check in" method and it is just terrible. So slow and such an inconvenience, so I have a lot of respect for everyone who recruited using this method. I'm very happy that we've got the recruiter tool to use here, it's so simple and easy to use.
 
Firstly, this is such a great resource, I had no idea how hard recruiting was back in the day! I'd be really interested to look back at Europeia's population back during the old recruitment method days, just to see the kind of success recruiters actually had back then, especially given the talk about the golden era of Europeia being around that time, and the amount of big names that dominated the region for a time too.
 
Great resource! To give a little extra context, at the start, there was a discrepancy between "list recruiting" and "region surfing" as different mechanisms of manual recruitment. In list recruiting, you would open a feeder's nation list sorted by length of time in region (which I believe was the only way to sort besides that day's UN/WA rankings) and just start plowing down the list. When this mechanism was used, people could "check in" to different feeder regions. Best practice would dictate that you occasionally check Regional Happenings to make sure you were sniping new nations as they were created -- which sometimes happened, sometimes didn't.

Pure "region surfing" was just going back and forth between each feeder and looking at Recent Regional Happenings to message new nations. Obviously, this method tended to provide more bang for its buck, but as Calvin pointed out, it limited recruiting to one recruiter and was very difficult to scale (especially since there were many times periods, where frankly, very few new nations were being created because Nationstates was "dying" -- as it always is).

There were also debates and discrepancies about keeping the "list" of nations you sent telegrams to. By the time Europeia became a Republic, I think it was customary to do so, in no small part because the spam trap meant you had to kill a few seconds between nations anyways so helped to create a rhythm to recruitment.

Another small point on the first recruitment software: there were actually two different softwares at the time. The first was a software based on The Commonwealth's forum (a federation of regions originally founded by our Verteger, only to be inauspiciously deposed by his developer Crown Prince Charles), and the second was a standalone site developed by Charles as the "second generation" of the software. Europeia entered into a treaty with The Commonwealth to get access to generation 1 of the software, but generation 2 came out a few weeks later. Charles offered to nix recruitment from the treaty (because it required us to support their military operations in exchange for access) as generation 2 would be open to all. Skeptical of how long generation 2 would truly be open, we declined to nix it from the treaty. Sure enough, sometime in mid-winter 2009, generation 2 was yanked and The Commonwealth kept using generation 1 on their forums -- which we still had access to because of the treaty. However, eventually Charles would unilaterally take access away (I'm guessing that's in June 2009) which caused a bit of a kerfuffle, though his days in Nationstates were numbered by that point anyway.

Phew! That's all to say that this was a super interesting article, Calvin. And I think it is worth discussing more how for older players, recruitment was such a central (dare I say, lifeblood) of the region that we were willing to trade away our military for it. It was a huge foreign policy and domestic objective, second to basically nothing else. The fact that that is no longer the case is surely a good thing, but definitely explains some of the very....deep divides brought up during the mandatory recruitment debate several months ago.
 
"Europeia is the sports car that every one wants to drive, the woman that is unattainable but you suddenly get a date with; the sweet smell of victory as you drive home the winning run."
- Lethen

Simply hilarious.
 
One addendum I want to add is that this mini-project reminds me why I hate the modern trend of wanting archive forums for every single subforum and her mother. This information is relatively easy to find because you can just click back to the last page of the Interior Ministry, and boom, there it is. This stuff would be much harder to locate if there were a "Immigration Archive 2" subforum somewhere in the archives.
 
Wow, I am GLAD things have changed. Thanks Calvin and also HEM for providing that history
 
"Europeia is the sports car that every one wants to drive, the woman that is unattainable but you suddenly get a date with; the sweet smell of victory as you drive home the winning run."
- Lethen

Simply hilarious.
2007 me saw this meme coming, clearly.
 
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