Yut Put wrote:

solution: stop mass paging

Falacy wrote:

Mass paging should either be completely removed (preferred), or fully allowed. The half functional system that it has been updated to is just foolish.

I actually like that it is met halfway

Falacy wrote:

Mass paging should either be completely removed (preferred), or fully allowed. The half functional system that it has been updated to is just foolish.

I question the intelligence and wisdom of removing a feature that allows people to communicate on a massive scale when used properly. That's shooting yourself in the foot to spite someone else, in all essentiality.

Just because a bunch of rips abuse it doesn't mean that others inherently use it improperly.

For example, I sometimes use it to page people on my friends list/list of testers about test server updates so that we can quietly test things without having the greater whole of the populace bum rush the server.

Losing that functionality would create another layer of tedium in designing updates that I have to work around by dropping the current method that actually works and finding another easy to use method that everyone commonly uses together.

Which means that I essentially have to herd these people onto a new communication service if I want to get in touch with them in a sane and timely manner. Or just stop doing closed testing sessions using the list I have until I can find a completely different pool of testers that do use whatever new communication method i'd be using.

Or just stop closed testing altogether. Which would quite frankly be dumb from a developer friendliness point of view. The moment you start removing tools developers can use to help build games and communities, is the moment you've made their job harder. Which, depending on the scale of the difficulty and tedium imposed by the change is possibly also the same moment those developers will look at other services when working on their project of interest.

Or, just add an option to the site/pager, something like, "Accept Mass Pages?" anyone that has that option checked would receive any mass page sent to them. If you uncheck the option, anyone sending you a mass page should see a "KeyName does not allow mass pages." message. With an option like that, everyone could chose for themselves whether or not they want to accept them.

Of course, that wouldn't stop someone from individually paging out an announcement, but, as Calus CoRPS mentioned, that is what the ignore feature is for.

OrangeWeapons wrote:

I actually like that it is met halfway

Well then, I guess you represent the most common BYOND users, who somehow seem to appreciate and/or prefer half broken features that seem to almost maliciously never work the way they should.


SqueakyReaper wrote:

At the very least, inform people (either through a quick tip system, or something) of how many pages they're allowed in a short period of time.

If the restriction is even time based?


Archonex wrote:

I question the intelligence and wisdom of removing a feature that allows people to communicate on a massive scale when used properly. That's shooting yourself in the foot to spite someone else, in all essentiality.
Just because a bunch of rips abuse it doesn't mean that others inherently use it improperly.

I question the intelligence and wisdom of a community that is built on terrible quality rips. Considering your game IS a rip, your entire argument is ridiculous. Even if there ever was a legit use, (as you claim, inviting friends to a test), then there should at least be some vaguely competent standards applied to mass paging, like you can only send mass pages to people who are on your friends list and who already have you on their friend list (aka mutual friends). I doubt a single mass page in the history of BYOND has ever met such simplistic mutual friendship.

Then again, almost any change they make to mass pages should be irrelevant. If they would take 10 minutes to turn the pager into a messaging program that wasn't completely worthless (something like Steam's), mass "pages" wouldn't even apply. The closest thing would be persistent chat rooms, and those would require the acceptance of an invite, and probably require mutual friendships in the first place too.


Calus CoRPS wrote:

You might as well place a limit and display it.

Having a limit to begin with isn't the proper way to handle the situation, not displaying it is even worse, but displaying it isn't much better. That would turn into "Oh, I can only page X people at a time? Let me just awkwardly count that many in sets and send the same mass page 20 times". Which would probably just lead to even worse spam and more traffic due to overlapping duplicate messages. The current system also has an issue of, if it says "Too many recipients", does that mean it didn't send to any of them? Or did it send to the first X and then stop?


SnipeDragon wrote:

Or, just add an option to the site/pager, something like, "Accept Mass Pages?" anyone that has that option checked would receive any mass page sent to them.

That could be one solution for the time being, not that I expect anything to be done about this in any case. However, there may be some people you want to receive mass pages from, while only avoiding random spam from random strangers about random rip #9999, which is why a mutual friendship restriction would probably be better. Also, should such a setting be on or off by default? Either way, most people would probably never know about such a setting. So, on by default would leave us with the spam we have now, and off by default would give us no mass paging at all; which is basically back to what my first reply was suggesting: all or nothing.

Deathguard wrote:

If you need a way to contact a specific group of players for a test or something, surely you should know those people well enough that you have an e-mail address, an IM address or some means of contacting them outside of BYOND?

If we're going to use that as an excuse, why not remove the pager as a whole? If you want to contact a specific person, you should certainly have some means of contacting them outside BYOND, right?


In my opinion, the pager is a quick and easy way of contacting people you may not be specifically close to. The way messages, mass or not, are displayed is just ugly. This is my belief as to why many bypass it and opt for a messenger program, as you've stated. If the pager became modernized, I am sure mass pages and pages would be used more effectively.

Sure, the pager is quick an easy way of contacting someone you may not be close to, Calus. But it's completely inappropriate to be sending out mass-messages in the first place. None of us like spam, and that's all mass-pages are; spam. Especially if I don't know the sender on a personal basis.

They're also a burden on the server, what with being essentially a waste of bandwidth and traffic.