Quote from: Redlynne on January 21, 2023, 09:36:38 AM
What are the anticipated (programming) problems with enabling promotion/demotion of SG members who are currently offline?
To answer your specific question, I would anticipate that it would start with one of our C coders committing to investigate the proposed new slash commands. They would likely take a half day to two days just looking at and tracing similar structures and functions in the code. And from there begin working the problem. With many similar endeavors on the CoH source code, we have so far seen a pretty wide variance with some problems taking 1-2 days of focus to resolve. While others spiral into weeks of investigation and knock-on problems.
So bottom line: we won't know until someone with the appropriate skills looks directly at the problem.
In the interest of full transparency, /altinvite is something ALL the servers inherited from Paragon. It was either a GM only permission, something that was nearly completed, or something that was functional (if problematic--see BRW's vaguely described database bug) and was held back from the public.
So despite any claims to the contrary or impressions acquired and not actively dispelled elsewhere, /altinvite was not new programming. (The bug fix is new work. IIRC this work was then shared with the wider community via Ourodev and direct messages to other teams.)
I do not know if there are any WIP slash commands or even already done features that do what you are asking for and could be turned on or quickly adapted into offline promotion/demotion slash tags like altinvite. That would come out in the C coder's investigations most likely.
Also this is not my area of expertise. (I don't code in C. I'd like to, but it feels like I always have a dozen new things I'd like to be learning for CoH!) We can raise it with our coders during a staff meeting. But I can say for certain it probably won't receive priority for at least a few months. I do know that we have 2-3 items that have already been prioritized for early issue 6 development, source code changes that would be fundamental to two specific development paths we'd like to see first included in the next issue. But as with other QoL improvements, sometimes a request touches a passion shared by one of our devs and it gets worked into the rotation by one or more volunteers putting in even more extra time than usual.
Farm Tank's work on the other slash command work during issue 5 is a perfect example of this going above and beyond. And we have something else related to UX coming in Ri6 that is already done by Jursi, another C coder who stays mostly "back of the house," that was also a labor of love that they wanted to see
fixed/improved in the live game and put in extra hours to do so during the late Ri5 dev cycle.
