Weekly Poll 1 Results

Sorry for the delay on this, everyone.  Here are the results from our first "Weekly" Poll:

• Question: What should the status of V4 Rights be in Alphaworld?
• Total Votes: 15 
  
• V4 Rights should be available to all users -- citizens and tourists.
• 2 Votes
• ~13% of the vote 
• V4 Rights should be available to all citizens.
• 13 Votes
• ~86% of the vote
• V4 Rights should be available to users that have earned rights.
• 0 Votes
• V4 Rights should not be available in Alphaworld.
• 0 Votes

Analysis
As you can see from the poll, our readership here at AWBuilder was very much in support of V4 Rights being extended. There were NO votes in support of the existing arrangement.  At the time, V4 rights were restricted to citizens who had earned them in building competitions.  Earlier this month, however, AWI released the rights to all users in the world -- including tourists.  I personally feel this was the more prudent solution for AWI, since the existing arrangement had been broken due to a bot problem, and was estimated to have takenat least a month to repair. This also frees them from the responsibility of having to maintenance the bot (and the rights list).

The addition of tourists V4 rights was a surprise, and there still seems to be some debate on that.  The argument against tourist V4s generally follows that if anyone was to abuse it, it would be an anonymous user under a Tourist account.  There is some precedent for this, and I suppose if it does become a problem tourist rights could be restricted in the future.  For the time being, at least, allowing tourists to play with this powerful feature could be a boon for retaining new users.

Weekly Poll #1: V4 Rights in Alphaworld

For some time I've wanted to integrate viewer opinion on the blog, and I've suspected that the easiest way to do so would be through polls... but indecisive me, I never quite decided on how I wanted the polls to be formatted on here.  I did some tooling around today and I'm pretty happy with where they're at now.  It's not eating up too much of the page there. :)

I'll try to make this a regular thing, changing the poll topic every week or so.  Readers will have the chance to vote and comment on the related posts.

Weekly Poll #1: V4 Rights in Alphaworld

With the ongoing absence of Tom comes also the absence of his many services, one of which being the bot that managed special rights in Alphaworld.

The bot was well known for its dramatic setting at Pamozo Island -- where it would cycle through citizen numbers in the rights list upon request.  This is necessary because of a technical restriction in the rights list that only allows so many characters (and consequently citizen numbers) to be included in the list. The bot helped us to get around this by adding a citizen number to the end of the list when they wanted to use v4 rights, and then bumping the first person on the list off.

There's currently a debate on the forums about what should be done now that this bot is currently offline... because its been reported that it would be at least mid-July before AWI could restore the bot.  Many users feel that the right should be open for all builders, while others want a line to be drawn. What do you think?  Is what we have the best solution?  Feel free to vote, and if you're not represented in the poll... feel free to leave a comment!