Web Fed News Yearbooks - August 2000

THE MONTH IN BRIEF

Federation received an award! Suite 101, a directory web site, voted us one of their top five games. You can see the Suite 101 logo on the ibgames top page, and click on it to go to their site.

Moria stepped down as the head of the Fed Events Team, having done sterling work for a long time. She passed her mantle to Gaminglady, who became the new Queen of Events.

We started recruiting Navigators again, and the training courses got under way.

Triton won a prestigious Walrus of Merit award for his planet Thera. You can read Alsatian's review at http://www.ibgames.net/archives/fed/
webplanetreviews/2000/thera.html.

WHAT I DID ON MY HOLIDAYS

I understand it is traditional that when children return to school after their vacations, the teacher gives them the task of writing an essay describing what they did on their holidays. Since I think of my newsdroids as my children - not ones that literally sprang from my loins, of course - I thought perhaps they should be given the assignment of describing just what they got up to on the weekend when the Fed Chronicle didn't publish.

I envisaged receiving charming little essays describing such things as a day at the beach; the new fibreglass bodies of my droids allowing them to paddle in the ocean and enjoy the splashing of the waves. Or perhaps a tale of a few days spent camping out in the hills on some remote, unsullied planet, communing with nature, gazine at the starry skies, while roasting alien lifeforms over a campfire. Or a visit to the Museum of Old Earth and its famous exhibition of 21st Century Political Figures - President Clinton and her husband, President Schwarzenegger, and first android to be elected to office, President ZX81 (or Buzz as he was known affectionately by the populace).

In short, I anticipated several stories I could print in the Chronicle, grouped together in a feature about how your basic working droid spends its time off.

What I got was a collection of sordid tales of wild parties involving the consumption of huge amounts of intoxicants, the deployment of enormous vats of whippy cream, and enough jello (of all different colors) to fill the cargo holds of an Imperial ship, not to mention leak out of the portholes and form messy puddles on the LP.

Olias even followed up his wild-party-story with a description of his hangover the next morning, which made truly disgusting reading and made me feel quite ill.

So all in all, none of my fine upstanding team of newsdroids conducted themselves in a manner which can possibly be described in public. Oh well, scratch that idea!

TALKING KLINGON

Following a number of recent incidents in Fed, I would like to take this opportunity to explain our policy on the use of foreign languages in Fed.

We do not allow conversation in foreign languages (real or imaginary) on the main comm channels. Fed is an English-language game, and the majority of players don't speak other languages. Therefore, messages in foreign languages are meaningless to them. The rules on scrolling and comm disruption come into play because seeing foreign words scroll on the screen is just as annoying as seeing absolute gibberish.

The odd word or phrase now and then is acceptable, but full conversations in foreign languages are not.

So if you want to talk in a language other than English, you should take it to another channel or to TBs.

ANNOUNCING THE MARTIAN GENOME PROJECT

Scientists from the Galactic Administration today announced that they have made a start on the project to sequence the Martian genome. They hope that within a few months they will have the full data describing exactly how Martians are put together. This knowledge will have consequences in many areas, but the most immediate benefactor is likely to be the Imperial Navy. They will be keen to use the data to come up with new and more spectacular ways to kill Martians.

In a separate announcement, an independent commercial company based on Betelgeuse IV also announced that they will be sequencing various genomes. Not only will they be aiming to beat the Galactic Administration to the complete Martian genome, but they also intend to sequence the Rigellian genome in an attempt to find out what makes Bella tick!

THE CARE AND FEEDING OF GROUNDHOGS

Myth Number One: There are no new players in Fed.

Not true. Yes, the game is top heavy, with far more players at high rank than at low rank, but that doesn't mean there are no new players.

Myth Number Two: The only new players are alts - there are no genuine newbods.

Not true. Thanks to sites like Suite 101 and other game sites, we are getting a trickle of real new players, who are interested is seeing what Fed is like.

I agree that we don't get an enormous flood of GroundHogs ever hour of every day, like we used to back on AOL, but it's worth remembering that of those hundreds of new players, only a fraction ever did anything past their first few seconds in the game.

These days, the new players tend to be people who already have experience with playing text games, and are therefore much more likely to stick with Fed beyond the first few minutes and thus become regular players.

We have staff whose job it is to greet new players and help them get started, but although we're recruiting more Navigators, we will probably never have complete 24/7 coverage. So why not keep an eye out for GroundHogs to see if you can help them yourself? If you're always worried about the lack of haulers, then cultivate your own... take care of the GroundHogs, and they'll grow up into players who will be loyal to you.

FIBER CUT CAUSES INTERNET LAG

Once again, some idiot sliced through a cable last Thursday causing delays on the Internet. The cut fiber was in a major telco in Georgia and could potentially have caused lag for Fed players. Engineers jumped into action and spliced the break back together again in a few hours. So that was all right, then.

The Internet was designed to be able to cope with this kind of problem, re-routing data around the "hole", and by and large that works well. Perhaps there's a little lag, because information takes a little longer to reach its destination, but it will get through. However, there are certain choke-points where a lot of routes come together to connect different parts of the world. An example is the cables across the Atlantic linking Britain with America. If they were to be cut, it would cause big, big problems.

The telco companies who have been laying new cables to cope with increased demand often cooperate to save money, by laying cables from different companies in the same trench. This minimizes the disruption caused by digging up the road, of course, but it does create more of these choke-points. If all the cables are in the same place, they could all be affected by the same disaster, and then it would be hard to route data somewhere else. You can imagine whole cities being cut off from the rest of the Internet if all the cables connecting it go along the same stretch of road.

So despite the increase in the amount of fiber taking our data around the world, I think it's likely the Internet will continue to be fragile.

WHY SOFTWARE FILTERING DOESN'T WORK

A lot of people who set out to write their own multi-player game - whether coding from scratch, or using one of the existing game engines - decide to put filtering into the parser, so that rude words are rejected. Fed does not do that, it never has done and it never will, because we firmly believe you cannot use a technical solution to solve a social problem.

Here's one example why. Last week, a woman was banned from joining an online service, because the software wouldn't accept her name. It thought she was typing in a vulgar word. What was her name? It was Babcock.

Similarly, when AOL first opened up in the UK, one person found they couldn't subscribe because they lived in a town in the North of England called Scunthorpe.

In both cases the software was not able to distinguish between a legitimate use of four consecutive letters, and an offensive use of the same letters. Software filters are not sophisticated enough to be able to work out the context and make judgements; they can only follow strictly laid down rules. Both these examples demonstrate major flaws in the software design, but no matter how clever the programmer is in writing the rules, it's all but impossible to program computers that can cope with the complexity of the English language. Until computers can actually understand conversations and take note of the sense of a whole sentence, rather than just identifying strings of letters it has been told to look out for, you'll never get software able to perform successfully as a censor.

That's not to say that human-run systems are perfect. Humans given a set of rigid rules to enforce can be just as dumb as computers; look at AOL banning the use of the word "breast" even when the discussion was about breast cancer (or, presumably, a recipe calling for chicken breasts).

Any rules on acceptable and unacceptable words have to be flexible and context sensitive, and they have to be applied using human judgement, otherwise they just won't work. That's why the IB game rules (http://www.ibgames.net/ibinfo/language.html) don't include long lists of words that should never be used; they accept that context is everything.

GENETICISTS IDENTIFY THE DUMPING GENE

Scientists working on decoding the human genome have now identified several genes which they believe cause different kinds of behavior. The most controversial is their claim that they have discovered the gene which causes dumping. If true, this might lead to tests to identify potential dumpers, and perhaps an eventual cure.

A Galactic Administration spokesthing tried to play down this discovery, saying it was much too soon to know whether the gene identified was the whole story. "It may be the interaction between a number of different genes that causes dumping; there may even be environmental factors. At this stage, we just don't know."

This cautious approach, however, was enough to spur lobby groups from all sides of the debate into action. Mothers Against Dumping (MAD) called for the testing of all GroundHogs, with any found to have the dumping gene banned from ever owning a spaceship. In contrast, United Free Trade Dumpers of the Galaxy were appalled at what they saw as discrimination against their members. Their press secretary as usual spoke at length about the appalling limitations to their rights to dump anywhere and everywhere whether they were welcome or not, and concluded by calling for the Galactic Administration to be dismantled and all rules abolished.

The human genome project has been making many remarkable discoveries since it started. Last month, scientists identified the brackets gene and the pottymouth gene, but today's announcement about the dumping gene is likely to prove the most controversial yet.