Online Diplomacy Championship?

[Caligula45]

Hi there,

Will there be an Online Diplomacy Championship organised this year?
The last one started in March 2022 on the Play Diplomacy website as I recall.

Cheers,
Michaël

[wulfheart]

If you are able to speak German I know a good one.

[captainmeme]

Yes, there will - signups will happen in May. Unclear if it will be here or on Backstabbr as of right now - we're looking at bringing Backstabbr into the rotation (since it's seeming very unlikely we'll be able to run it on PlayDip again, given the situation with that site).

[JustAGuyNamedWill]

Yes, there will - signups will happen in May. Unclear if it will be here or on Backstabbr as of right now - we're looking at bringing Backstabbr into the rotation (since it's seeming very unlikely we'll be able to run it on PlayDip again, given the situation with that site).

Ooh do tell. What sorts of drama?

[Pengwinja]

Yes, there will - signups will happen in May. Unclear if it will be here or on Backstabbr as of right now - we're looking at bringing Backstabbr into the rotation (since it's seeming very unlikely we'll be able to run it on PlayDip again, given the situation with that site).

Ooh do tell. What sorts of drama?

DIPLOMACY LORE DROP?!?!?!

[captainmeme]

Long story short here:
PlayDip's owner is an SEO company which doesn't pay it much attention, except to plaster it with crypto and gambling ads and collect money from premium memberships (I think my opinion on this company is already well known but, that sentence should get the message across). The actual work on the site was always done by volunteer developers and moderators, primarily one volunteer developer who had worked on the site for over a decade.

Recently PlayDip has been repeatedly hacked, with the volunteer dev doing damage control by performing site rollbacks but being unable to do anything to stop this from happening. Eventually they even went as far to remove the forums, because they were a particularly vulnerable part of the site - the forums are still down now, the community uses an unofficial discord server instead.

This part is hearsay, but from what I heard, the dev was trying to get the company to do anything at all to prevent this from happening for a looooong time. The company just never replied. After this happened enough times, the dev quit and has now moved on, and the remaining volunteer mod has also moved everything they were running off the site. So the site is still up, but now has no oversight at all except for the company, which is doing nothing at all.

There's no way a tournament can be run on that - the mentioned Dev and the Mod were my contacts for PlayDip, and while the latter could still give the required mod powers, I don't really trust that the company won't just shutter the site mid-tournament (and/or that the site doesn't get hacked again). My opinion is that the site is on its last legs at the moment.

[Pengwinja]

Long story short here:
PlayDip's owner is an SEO company which doesn't pay it much attention, except to plaster it with crypto and gambling ads and collect money from premium memberships (I think my opinion on this company is already well known but, that sentence should get the message across). The actual work on the site was always done by volunteer developers and moderators, primarily one volunteer developer who had worked on the site for over a decade.

Recently PlayDip has been repeatedly hacked, with the volunteer dev doing damage control by performing site rollbacks but being unable to do anything to stop this from happening. Eventually they even went as far to remove the forums, because they were a particularly vulnerable part of the site - the forums are still down now, the community uses an unofficial discord server instead.

This part is hearsay, but from what I heard, the dev was trying to get the company to do anything at all to prevent this from happening for a looooong time. The company just never replied. After this happened enough times, the dev quit and has now moved on, and the remaining volunteer mod has also moved everything they were running off the site. So the site is still up, but now has no oversight at all except for the company, which is doing nothing at all.

There's no way a tournament can be run on that - the mentioned Dev and the Mod were my contacts for PlayDip, and while the latter could still give the required mod powers, I don't really trust that the company won't just shutter the site mid-tournament (and/or that the site doesn't get hacked again). My opinion is that the site is on its last legs at the moment.

Ah, ok.

[Caligula45]

Yes, there will - signups will happen in May. Unclear if it will be here or on Backstabbr as of right now - we're looking at bringing Backstabbr into the rotation (since it's seeming very unlikely we'll be able to run it on PlayDip again, given the situation with that site).

I’m guessing plans have changed?