I think there's an agreement between Kestas and the guy managing the facebook version.

And I think the consensus here was that merging the two communities would not be a good idea for a series of reasons.

guys... Kestas IS the guy that runs the FB version ;) these two are sister sites...

unfortunately, it seems there is a problem with 'merging' the two (I dont know what it is) but in essence we have two communities with many players who have accounts in both.

I started in FB myself (and have a damn good record over there if I may say so) but now I'm only playing here... (well, one game over on FB)

this is a superior site... the community is larger, its better, and the few additional 'bells and whistles' on this site are worth it. not to mention the FB site crashes far more often than this site.

What does this site have that FB doesn't?

I've tried the FB one but it was waaay glitchy and stuff. This 'un's way better.

The only interface difference I could see was the inability to scroll through past orders on the FB version.

"guys... Kestas IS the guy that runs the FB version ;) these two are sister sites..."
Erm, no he isn't? Or at least he wasn't last time I asked him
The main reasons against merging are that they're run by different people, there are some members who overlap, and the facebook code has slight variations

" What does this site have that FB doesn't?" Javascript map history, better community, better forum (oh yes, I mention it), no adds...

I think there's generally some influx from Facebook to here, though I could be biased because I don't get to see the people leaving... but the general pattern seems to be that people get introduced over at Facebook, but some of them eventually come over here to greener pastures. I don't think active recruitment is a good idea... because it's not a competition.

????? figles... then I'm sorely mis-informed... from my own emails to the mods and 'owners' of the FB page, I was under the distinct impression that Kestas runs BOTH.

Onar - you can scroll through the past maps on here and not in FB and the code here sychs better with smartphones... there were a few other minor differences... but the main thing is that there are 3 or 4 times as many players here...

I don't run the FB site, my main dev role over there was finishing off a very dodgy move from 0.75 to 0.8, since then Chris runs the show. I do check up on the forums whenever Julian points me at something, but the main discussion point over there are the problems caused by the move to the built-in Facebook forum, which apparently suffers lots of problems and has unfortunately just about killed off forum activity :-(

We're getting a lot of FB migrants, but it's too bad FB is having problems, I hope Chris ports the next version when it becomes available and that gets things moving agian

Kestas - Chris is a different person than 'Chrispminis' from here I take it? Does he just run it FOR you or is he running it for himself (ie - does he 'own' it so he profits from the ad revenue?)

yeah the new FB forum over there killed off much of the 'community' b/c people's FB names are different than their Dip handles...

do you have an idea of the relative size of the communities also? ie, # of 'active' players... # of 'active' games etc..???

depth charge

back to the top of forum

...

Yeah, it's not me. I've never been involved with Facebook Dip.

I believe Facebook Chris generates his own profits from the ad revenue, and I don't think any goes to Kestas. I think Kestas mostly helps out because this is the sort of thing he was hoping to see when he set his code out as open source.

oh ... well - I stand corrected in a major way. thanks Chris.

Oh, don't see this as finished. I don't actually know how things are run at Facebook Dip, and this is just based on the impression that I have. Kestas will have the final word to clarify, but I thought I'd sate your appetite for an answer for now. =)

the Julian that Kestas talks about is me, it actually spells Julien, but I will not take an easy revenge and call Kestas Kastas ;-p

Apart from jokes, there are indeed a lot of "refugees" from FB diplo to here because of a few reasons:
- this site has slightly better functionalities
- there are more players here and the average level is much higher
- the fb version used to have the same forum as here but they moved to the fb forum version, and in most people's opinion it is very bad (when u press 'post reply' nothing gets posted and u have to retype everything, there is a split of topics that nb understands, u dont see the pseudos of people posting but the actual names so u cannot relate them to the games etc..)
- here when u say sth on the forum u get an attentive ear from the developer or the mods, they are simply more active than in fb diplo

I will now post the reply of Kestas to a very similar thread on the other site:

First off let me say development on phpDip has not slowed at all. In fact I'm furiously trying to finish off the latest version, which I started over 7 months ago, now more than ever. I expect it'll take a month, and I've had to delay release ~3 times now, but rest assured phpDip is not a backwater project for me, it's just suffering from a release cycle which has been far too long this time around. Next time I'll be breaking it up into smaller pieces and adding features 1 by 1. (I also hope to have more Facebook features in future dev cycles, as quite a few 0.9 features are .net only for technical reasons)


I have to admit that Facebook phpDip does take slightly less priority for me than phpdiplomacy.net . This is simply out of practicality because I don't have the expertise Chris has in Facebook technology. This carries over to the forum, which uses Facebook code. It was Chris' decision to switch to using the Facebook forum, and I'm sure he did it for good reasons. (I definitely get plenty of slack for my custom forum code over at phpdiplomacy.net , it's not all perfect with either system.)


Pretty much all the issues listed here are on the todo list, eg variants and anonymous games, but as a student it does take quite a while to churn these changes out. You can help out if you know PHP at forum.phpdiplomacy.net

Regarding a phpdiplomacy.net merge, this was actually the initial plan when me and Chris first started collaborating, but as time went on we realized both sites were just too busy to merge. Both me and Chris use separate shared hosting accounts, and merging would double the load for one of our hosting accounts, and I'm sure that just wouldn't fly.
I'm getting enough reminders that I should move to dedicated hosting already, we're really stretching our budget limits, and we don't want to impose worse ads on you guys (or have to put ads on phpdiplomacy.net).


The big problem is that making a Facebook application that is really enticing and engaging is a huge amount of work. Successful student applications are pretty rare, compared to the viral mega-funded, super-polished, instantly-accessible Mafia wars type apps, and it's very hard to compete. I'm not sure of the solution, Diplomacy really is a hard to learn but rewarding game, and the stats reflect that.


I'm just thinking as I write, I hope this has let a few people into the mindset behind what's going on around here. Thanks for the feedback.

Regards,
Kestas

thx Julien... I do hope Kestas sees this and responds ...