Idle Status (player-controlled retirement)

For the history of the discussion about "player-controlled retirement/snooze", go HERE.

FEATURE GOAL
To give players a way to "retire" inactive games

FEATURE NAME
I'm not sure what we want to call it to differentiate from "Retire Game",
but here's a few suggestions:



(For now, I'll use the term "Idle," but I'm happy to call it something else)

FEATURE DESCRIPTION
Add an "Idle" toggle, labelled "Mark as Idle", to the "Game Details" page that is available for Players.
Clicking it does the following:
• Changes the "Mark as Idle" label on the "Game Details" page to "Unmark as Idle"
(so all the changes below can be reversed later, or if it was switched by accident)
• Adds an "Marked Game as Idle" badge to the Player's name on the "Game Details" page
(so others know the player is treating the game as Idle)
• Sends a notification to the GM
(so the GM immediately notices the change in status, to minimize accidents)
• It moves the game into an "Idle Games" spoiler under the "Games I'm Playing" on the "My Games" page.
(similar to what "Retire Game" does under "Games I'm Running")
• It removes the game from the "Games Forum" section of the "Forums" Page.
(similar to what "Retire Game" does)
• It removes the game from the "Your Games" section of the Front Page.
(similar to "Retire Game" does)
BUT,
New posts in the game still show up in the "Latest" feeds!
(so if the game becomes active again, the idle player will notice)

Hopefully this version is able to get consensus ?

Could call it "snoozed".

I'm not completely happy with any of these options. Snoozed works for me. Maybe muted?

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When I read this title, I thought it was about a player being able to mark themselves as idle, which might also be useful (in addition to posting in absences). I know, different topics and all but what if players could manually toggle on the "zzz" condition on their settings page if they know they have to leave for a bit?

I had considered "Snooze" but I thought because it doesn't mute the Latest feeds, it might not fit the name. But I'm definitely open to that name if people prefer.

I'll add it to the poll.

Or maybe instead of "Become Idle" it should be "Mark as Idle" because what we're really doing is marking the game as idle for ourself. It doesn't really affect others, we just want to notify others, so that they know we currently consider the game Idle (or whatever, I'm just using Idle for now to discuss).

I don't like the idea of notifying others. I think this should only be a feature for the individual users to use as a tool for themselves.

Idle sounds to me (a non-native speaker) like nothing is happening in it. But things might still happen in there. The player just doesn't want to see it. Mute seems fitting for me.
Shelve also works for me but I'm not sure it's generally the best term.

I forgot to copy the "GOAL" of the feature over from the previous discussion. (I'll edit the original post to include it as well). So the goal of this feature is to give players control to "retire" inactive games.
Idle can mean "turned on, but not doing anything at the moment." For example, an idle car engine is running, but slowly or disconnected from the load or gears. I thought that description somewhat matched an inactive game that you still have access to and could become active again at some point.

For me, mute or snooze implies the opposite function, it would turn off notifications from an active game. So to me, mute/snooze would also stop posts popping up in the Latest feeds. Snooze also implies it only lasts for a certain amount of time. This feature would be player-controlled, not time-based, so it doesn't seem right to me.

Shelved could work, I'll add it to the poll.

I don't think I really mind what it's called, just giving my two cents. I'd be sad if it's "NOPE"ed just because people can't agree on a name, so I'll go with whatever gets the most votes.

Although, maybe it's the sort of poll we need a larger base of the membership to vote on because otherwise it's just a discussion of preferred semantics. Language meanings can be very diverse and personal, so it's not surprising a small group us have very different impressions of these words, especially since we're scattered around the world!

**But before we ask the larger membership publicly, I think we need to decide if the feature is good and if so, if it can be implemented. I don't think we should get people's hopes up if this type of feature isn't possible, or is very difficult to code.**
Perhaps, I misunderstood the amount of consensus with this feature ?
In the previous thread, I thought you had said you were 100% behind this!? I'm just teasing, it's totally okay to rethink these things. Sometimes problems with a feature don't pop out or become obvious until you've sat with it for some time.

So I added the badge idea and GM notification to avoid accidents and better communication with the other players in the game. If we're talking about inactive games, I don't think there's any harm communicating that you currently think the game is idle. If you plan to use this on active games, then privacy might be more of an issue, but the goal at the moment is to deal with inactive games.

How to better organize active games is a worthwhile issue to discuss, but I think it's better to discuss that in another thread unless you think it affects how this feature works. If you think privacy of this toggle is an issue for using it on inactive games, please explain, maybe we can address that with a little adjustment.

If you ask me, we're overthinking the name. It's the "what it does and how" that needs to be more clearly defined. I'd vote for it ever if it ended up named "mint frosting lemon cake".

After all, the designer chooses the naming; the user gets accustomed to it

Added to poll ?

True
Yes, but that sounds like you want to name the feature not after what it does but what you would use it for

This is good reasoning regarding the privacy part. Especially if it's just the GM that gets notified, it makes perfect sense.

No, I was trying to come up with a word that reflects how the site treats an "X" game, regardless of how it's used.
Players can mark games as "X"
How the site treats "X" games:
-moved to spoiler
-removed from front
-removed from forum
-kept in Latest

I think the words I initially suggested for "X" sort of reflect something that's still "ON," but not fully "ON".
Snoozed, Muted, and Shelved convey that sort of meaning too and I'm sure we could come up with more (Dimmed, Muffled, Hidden, Semi-hidden, ...) Oh, the beauty of language! I think any of them will do.

If I was trying to name it based on how I plan to use it, I probably would have advocated for "Retire as Player," which I'll admit did sneak on to my list ;)

Okay, but again, that's assuming that the way you would use it is the way everyone uses it. People might have other reasons to idle it than because its inactive.
Meh, we're getting way too hung up in the details, I guess. As long as the name is something in the right direction, it should be okay.

Names matter. The name helps define the functionality, and help users understand the functionality.

There's an old CS joke: "There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.", but yeah, naming things in CS is generally understood as hard enough to make the joke work.

To me...

Snooze - Snooze is like an alarm clock. I tell it to shut up for now, but I know it'll go off again.

Mute - Mute is like a TV remote. Shut up - you're bugging me. I'll unmute you when I'm ready.

Idle - Idle is ....? Dunno. Cars idle when they're on but not moving. OSs have idle threads waiting to take on tasks.

Mint frosting lemon cake - is something I want nothing to do with. I'm not keen on cake, and adding mint frosting seems abominable.

Shelving - puts something out the way for a short period. I'll get it back when I want it.

Archiving - is like shelving, but expected to be longer.

Retiring as a player - I'm not sure how many players also GM, so they won't necessarily be able to draw on their experience as to what happens when a GM retires something.

This seems to be trying to cover a lot of different use cases with one feature:
* Hiding a game that's not active (which maybe vague's ordering fixes)
* Letting a GM and the players know we're on holiday (but that's not a player-game link thing, that's a player thing)
* Semi-quitting a game

The original idea of snooze was to hide the game until someone posted. I understand why this might not be desirable - sometimes a game needs a nudge, not ignoring.

Now I don't really understand why is going on.

Then let's break it down and start with The original idea of snooze was to hide the game until someone posted?

I am not caught up with this whole thread, but it does seem wise to first work out what we are doing and only then deal with the hard thing of naming it. :)

"Retiring as a player" sounds more like the player is retiring, hopefully to becomes a full-time-GM. :)

"Mute" describes what I am most interested in. I.e. Hide any noise from them in my feeds.

Yes, but as (I think) BoS pointed out - if you snooze a game then you forget about it (to nudge it along). Out of sight is out of mind.

I'm coming around to Vague's idea of just sorting and grouping them better.

At the moment I see this:


Let's say that it grouped active and inactive, and highlighted if I wasn't the last to post.


The ones highlighted in the top section are probably what I should be looking at (but I can still see the others).

I'm not saying it's the right solution, but it's better than my current "order by creation date".

It's a great start I think.

Highlighting if you weren't the last to post seems like it might get annoying. Especially because sometimes, you don't need to post even if someone else posted after you...

Yeah, sure, highlighted doesn't mean that you need to post, but "not yellow" is a good indicator that you don't need to post.

But highlighting seems to indicate that you do need to post.
If we do want something like this (which I don't think we want), I'd prefer to grey out the ones where you were the last to post

Okay, fair enough. This is still a discussion. e.g. the ordering within a group is still creation date (which I'm not sure about). Also is the date-time helpful? We're using moment.js so perhaps a human timespan makes more sense (e.g. "3 days ago", "1 hour ago").

I know you don't use the homepage, but I do. I'd be interested in hearing from people who use the homepage.

Agreed. This seems unnecessary, and also annoying. Fading out the ones where you were the last to post maybe better, but still seems unnecessary to me. The more visual noise there is on a page, the less value it has.

Personally, I prefer dates and times to '1 hour ago'.

What you call visual noise, I call useful visual cues. Potato, potato.

Personally I like the date and time but I'm not wedded to it if others preferred a particular time span.

I didn't say you can only use it for inactive games. You can use it however you want.
What is does is this:
-moved to spoiler
-removed from front
-removed from forum
-kept in Latest

How you use it is up to you.

I said the goal of the feature is to deal with inactive games, so the minimum requirement is to do that. If it is also useful for something else, that's great! If it needs to be tweaked or expanded to do something else, that's a different discussion, or at least I don't think we should throw out the above functionality if we can't get consensus on the extra functionality.
This would limit the feature to inactive games only, but since the design goal is to deal with inactive games, that's fair. Basically, it's the feature I'm describing, but automatically reversed if there's activity. I would prefer it to be user-controlled, but I would rather have an activity-reversed feature than no feature at all!

RE: Reading through the rest of the posts
Reminder:
Okay, I'm getting the impression that I was wrong, there isn't consensus that it would be nice to have a player-controlled way to organize the visibility of inactive games (sort of like the way "retire" works - i.e. moved to spoiler, removed from front and forum)

Sooo, I think this feature is in fact ...I'm sad, but that's life.

We should probably move the rest of the discussion to a thread about site-controlled game organization.

I have no preference between time span and date+time. Either works equally well for me

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I agree with vague here. Unnecessary stuff going on

Unnecessary to you. You don't use that page (much). I use that section all the time.

Sure, I don't use it much. Just sometimes. But even I can imagine getting really annoyed at constant highlighting on that page.

This is the kind of change I'd be very hesitant to implement because it's a lot of annoyance for very little gain.

I find visual cues to be helpful actually. And since the revamp, homepage is my go-to. I think what Adam suggests is a start, with Bowl's remark on greying out instead of highlighting.

Like, @Chalrytharendir, I''ve lost the will to push this. I'm filing this under bollocks to it (again).

We do keep getting sidetracked by features other than the ones being addressed.

Yeah. In the end, I just wrote a Tampermonkey script for myself.

I know this is in "Nope", but after a week, this is what I found works for me.



* Old games (dead?) and manually snoozed games go in the bottom bit in grey. e.g. Candlekeep Mysteries is manually snoozed as it is being DMed by Koldik for this chapter, so I don't keep a close eye on it from the home page - I use discord for that.

* I highlight active games (but not the tavern) where I didn't post last. Because I have only a few games it doesn't take long to scan the yellow.

* Case insensitive alpha sorting (ignoring emoji) in the two sections gives me muscle memory.

* Games Tavern goes at the end of active games.