Sounds like superman is getting his fair share of all the 12 dollar/year premium memberships we're going to buy. Don't forget to list him as your refferer for extra premium credits!

playdiplomcy's map is squarish and choppy. it is vey rigid and rough. it is hard to look at the game without noticing that England isn't a rectangle.

webdiplomacy's map is smooth and eloquent, ust like the board game.

OK Let's compare feature for feature what I can do for FREE at webdip and playdip:

Number of games: At least 20 At max 3
Anonymous: Yes No
Gunboat: Yes No
Public Press Yes No
Live Games Yes No
Tournaments Yes No
Nice Map Ye No
Point and click No Yes

Now, for 12 Euros, what does playdip offer that webdip doesn't do for free?

More variants

1) I don't like variants that much
2) Other webdip children (yes, playdip is one, too) such as olidip or goondip offer tons of variatns for FREE

So, why is playdip better?

@abge: see a no in the first column! Still, exams finished yesterday, night out is just finishing now (just off to sleep @ 8 am) so I guess I should get back onto it

"ACTIVE GAMES and MEMBERS:

Playdip-More than webdip (true fact.)

Webdip- Less than Playdip"

Should be Fewer than playdip.

"TGB and his Ghost Rankings"

And "B" is two keys away from "M"! Shocking! :P

Also, one question, what has been the total amount of money raised for the two sites, and what would reasonable costs have been?

Sorry TGM, I always get you and that other player, TheGhostbaker, mixed up ;-)

playdiplomacy sucks. I wouldn't play there even if they paid me. The players suck too. I would easily be no 1 in playdiplomacy

@superman98: perhaps you should try out something different than live games. Join a tourney, or a passworded game. Sure, noobs all over the place here, but there are ways to avoid them. Get around. When you are friendly, others will be too.


I've spent some time on playdip too. Didn't like the 'point and click' ordering very much, you'd always have to check if your orders were correct. This site's better in every aspect - and this is where the developers are. As abgemacht said, playdip jacked the code from Kestas. So I guess we won't be looking at playdip for new inventions. I'd rather improve my GR here, if you don't mind :)

Why did everyone ignore when I pointed out the fact playdip was pirated (not just a child) of kestas' code? There's a whole section of the website dedicated to the fact playdip paid thousands of dollars for the code kestas made for free and was still rude to kestas about it. Not classy on their part at all - plus they're ripping off people.

Kestas: 1
playdip: 0

Yes, that is true, Playdip is the unwanted bastard child of webdip. . It was quite the story when it came out, the (previous?) admin of playdip ripped kestas code, open source code but he should have given an acknowledgment to kestas for writing the bloody thing! Then he engaged in not a small number of lies to avoid saying sorry.

Troodote had it right, Superman89 is just trawling for new recruits, his whole " lets compare the two communities" made me laugh.
disingenuous slime.

Ghost and Figles know the ins and outs of that story, I think it was before a lot of players who have posted here time's but

Now I'm considered old and arthritic on these forums :(

I read the whole section of the site that discusses that. Based on that alone I have to say playdip's admin(s) and anyone having anything to do with them charging money start with negative points in my book.

No problem with people who choose to play there, mind you, but I don't think I ever would just because of that fact alone. Also, since according to the admin it's just to cover costs, do they share income/cost information?

@Steevo

http://www.playdiplomacy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7087


The admins at playdip are either completely incompetent or criminals, lying about the costs to guilt people into paying. Either way, I'm with you and have no interest in supporting them.

@superman98: Are you aware of / Are you bothered by the ethical/moral aspects of this dispute?

The saddest thing for me in this whole affair is that playdip was knowingly & intentionally plagiarized from webdip (with things being changed/removed that made no sense to change/remove except to obscure the origin of the code), it's run by a search-engine-optimization specialist (someone who is probably not going to be duped into paying for open source software), it's being held hostage for donations amounting to ~$20k (despite running for half the years and having a well developed platform to add features to), and that it has premium accounts with features which for the most part are implemented here for free (as abgemacht pointed out above).

But more than those things its the way that users rushed to defend jan/avalanche even when it became public, with very hostile and dismissive responses, even to the author of the code which the site they enjoy was derived from


@TGM: In terms of hosting we pay ~$230USD every 2 years, both for hosting and domain fees for the two domains (phpdip and webdip). In terms of development time I'm not sure what the costs would be since I don't really think of it in that way and never kept track of time.
With big thanks to the donors and the people who run the Plura applet, the amount returned is certainly larger than the amount spent; in the area of ~$1900-2100 returned for ~$600-800 direct expenditure (not including the mostly enjoyable, even if very large, amount of time spent on development, which I couldn't put a price tag on).
In terms of money per user the donors rank highest by far, ~$200-400 total (I've tried finding an exact figure but Paypal makes it tricky) in amounts ranging from $5 to $100, all of them very much appreciated, though in absolute terms Plura makes up the most of it at ~$1700 total.

With that in mind I would be interested to see the breakdown of the $20,000 figure that playdip is trying to recover, because according to jan/avalanche the hourly rate of the developers hired was really miniscule, yet the changes made to the preexisting 0.78 code-base honestly, as objective as I can be, just wouldn't require that much work (even including the work involved in systematically changing things around needlessly and removing all references to the existing code, if you think they should be compensated for that aspect of the site)

I think if I put out a $20,000 figure for development costs, and insisted people reimburse me before I continued to work on the code, people would quite rightly demand a lot more detail about where such a sum came from than the users of playdip seem to have asked for, and I don't really understand why they are so unquestioning and trusting about a search-engine-optimization professional's motives


That having been said I understand that users aren't impressed by morality and ethics as much as features, that people typically only make moral/ethical justifications after having already made their preference, and as with SteevoKun I have no problem with people who choose to play there.
But that's my take and I'm curious to know whether users have a moral justification, whether they aren't aware of it, or whether they're aware but it just doesn't factor in

The whole business has at least been informative and eye-opening, even if a little bit soul-crushing initially :-(

I went on the internet today, and I found this:
http://www.playdiplomacy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=12272
The berks at play diplomacy obviously don't have anything better to do than spend hours discusing which diplomacy site is best! Pah!

Well Play Diplomacy is too slow i like the Live Games.!

@Octavious well played, but to be fair my post and many others didn't consider which is best, and you can probably find less worthwhile threads on either forum

@ kestasjk

Many many less worthwhile threads, in fact. Which is why we all keep coming back for more :p! To be honest though I found myself surprised, while glancing at play diplomacy's version of pointless chatter, at just how much I prefer this style of furum. There's a lot to be said for the more chaotic approach.

@Octavious Yeah I think the forum makes the best of the constraints the server's resource-limitations place on it, but don't let me draw you into comparing the two sites :-)

What I find incredibly pathetic is that playdip has designated moles that keep harassing us. With regards to that thread Octavious posted: wtf? Do they have nothing better to do than have a dick measuring contest with themselves? We're only talking about it now because someone from their site wants to start something.

I like that their thread says that we can't play gunboat games. And the only variants they have are still based on the original map. Woo fleet Rome games. Now there's an innovation!

"I wouldn't play there even if they paid me. The players suck too."

- in fairness if they paid me enough i'd play there.

Let the bidding start at 40 Euro an hour!

TheGhostBaker +1

"playdip ripped kestas code, open source code but he should have given an acknowledgment to kestas for writing the bloody thing!" - actually (and someone can correct me if i'm wrong) since it is open-source they are entirely free to code and use the code, there are even entitled to change it and charge for it. (and i could do all that)

What they are not entitled to do (in most open-source licenses) is to close the source for it. So if it is copied from here the source should still be available.

As for 'acknowledgment', while not strictly required it is written into the code where it came from (which could be found by anyone who looked at what legally should be open source code...)

So this breach of license is fundamentally the same as any such breach. (if it can be proven that it was this code, as kestas claims.)

Also as for variants, there are more than 30 available for webdip, and i can run my own server on my computer (to play private games with my friends) if i want. That is a big plus to my mind.

@abgemacht You can probably draw many comparisons about the respective communities of each site, I don't think one site has a better set of users than another, definitely neither set is flawless, and I don't want to foster an us vs them attitude between their community and ours. They have threads on playdip vs webdip, so do we, we both have users that go over to the other site and wind people up, etc.
But one definite and, in my probably biased opinion, important distinction is that their site is based on pre-existing code which had all trace of its origins removed, was passed off as an original work, and a lot of money was requested and received from its users based on that premise. That is a definite difference between the two sites, which I think is pretty important and goes beyond a lot of the community vs community us vs them stuff that gets mixed up with it

But anyway I had better get back to studying for an exam

Briefly; @orathaic You can check http://playdiplomacy.com/LICENSE.txt , or their about page, it's not disputed that their code is a derivative, and since the license and acknowledgement got reincluded (after they were confronted about it) they do now comply with the BSD license which phpDip was published under at the time, which doesn't have a share-alike clause.
The AGPL license we've used since 0.8, which does contain a share-alike clause enforceable for web apps, wasn't available in the webDiplomacy 0.7 days when playdiplomacy forked it

hellalt +1 for dissing PD on their own site!

hey kestas, why don't you learn your own situation first?

Playdip was UNKNOWINGLY plagurized by the programmer...his programmer did it. The owner (goes by Avalanche) did NOT know of this issue until you brought it up to him . (which was the right decision; but don't go blaming somebody that had actually nothing to do with it)

The programmer was then fired, and a new one was hired AND he fixed the issue by adding the appropriate pages.

Let this die.