Regrettably, the Universalis Arena II wiki based Universalis game has ended.

The Shard(dimension)-hopping city of Hope game was killed by wikispam bots.

On two separate occassions in the past 2 and a half weeks various pages of the game, including pages that represented ongoing scenes, were overwritten and filled with pointless weblinks so that some stupid website could rank higher on search engines.

Whatever coding they were using made it hard to impossible for the game participants to restore the changes, which should have been easy otherwise.

This killed all momentum for several days the first time it happened, we still hadn't recovered everything when we were hit again.

That killed the game.

A shame since the second Shard was getting very good, while going slower.

I look forward to doing more online play of Universalis. I'm not so sure about wiki anymore. I've found quite a few references to this being a widespread problem with the easy to edit wiki format.

Perhaps there are fixes, which would get me to try wiki again.

It was a cool game, and I'm sorry we won't get to see more of the interactions with other dimensions, like the Forest Moon of Endor.

To all the Players, active and less so.

Thanks for a cool idea to play with, I hope to play again with ya'll.

Bob McNamee

Sorry to hear that Bob. I dunno if you have to give up on wiki. There are some that are probably more secure than the way Clinton has Anvilwerks set up. Though I don't know if having to register an account to edit is prevention enough.

It was fun to drop by and watch.

Trevis

I'm not surprised it happened at all. Someone suggested using Pmwiki as my webclient for a site I was thinking about making. I immediately dismissed it as being created by total jackasses. How the heck can you run a website if you can be freely edited by any bozo who comes wandering by? Even the password protection can't fully protect anything, at least I've found. Why did'nt you just create a Forum website, like this one? That would've made allot more sense. What online service(s) do you use?

There was a fair inertia among Mike, Bob and maybe others in the online Universalis community for using a wiki of some kind. We started at another site with another wiki implementation that I think was superior, but the site was down as often as it was up. Mike secured permission from Clinton to use Anvilwerks and we did. Most of the Anvilwerks site is password protected, at least.

The advantages of the wiki are complete customization while maintaining a record of versioning without having to tack huge threads. Running in a forum is an acceptible but inferior approach for a whole bunch of look'n'feel reasons. I had to learn wiki for TUA, but I'm a convert at least in theory. It is far, far superior (until it breaks) to rpol.net, for instance.

I'm considering writing an integrated universalis play-environment engine that will also automate Coin/trait tracking and Conflic resolution. But it's a project and I'm busy. We'll see.

Chris

JackBauer wrote: I immediately dismissed it as being created by total jackasses.

How the heck can you run a website if you can be freely edited by any bozo who comes wandering by? Even the password protection can't fully protect anything, at least I've found.

greyorm wrote: Did this particular strain of spam circumvent that somehow?

Security can be set up on a Wiki so that only registered people can edit, and, more importantly, that you can't register without approval from a moderator. I know because the first Wiki I played on (JBs) was this way.

This set up, while not quite as convenient as that in which anybody can sign up, makes a Wiki as involable to spam as any other method. So if concerns persist about this, then that's what I'd do with future games.

That said, there's always a revert feature, and it's just a matter of having the mod there to fix things. In this case, Clinton's gone AWOL of late, so no surprise that it was hard to fix. What would be optimal is having a player running the wiki if possible.

I wonder if Lostthoughts or JB's Wiki are still up. I see that Lostthoughts is still running, but I can't find the IndieNetgaming link there.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before somebody came along and made open Wiki problematic.

Mike

Well I've got a Twiki Site that I'd be willing to host a game on. Its password secure and I can create groups and limitations that should make it secure enough.

http://www.wiki.trmfineart.com

Trevis

Wow, that's sweet looking! :-)

Mike

Another attempt would be cool with me.

The particualr spam gave us errors whenever trying to revert to pre-spam pages.

I wouldn't mind either starting completely fresh or trying to salvage to original idea.

I'd lean toward a completely fresh run, myself. I'm not seeing a reason to structure the game to encourage new players anymore (like we did), since we only had maybe two people sign on after start.

edited in: Wiki had advantages of being able to structure pages like Locations and Scenes to suit the game we were playing...that a forum would be a bit more unwieldy doing.

Edit 2: I would be willing to try other types of venues also, if someone likes another method.

I was sad at its passing too. While I'm all for tilting at windmills, I'm probably going to hang back, since work has intensified and I'll be missing a week near the end of the month.

Not that I actually expect that I'll be able to resist, mind you...

--Scott Martin

I'm not sure which TWiki you're referring to, Mike; basically my home server isn't being a server anymore.

I'd like to register my own displeasure at your words, JackBauer. There are many good reasons for using wikis for all sorts of things, and it is hardly the only web technology out there to be vulnerable to misuse. As a concept it has been working amazingly well for years now in many areas. I would prefer it if, when you find some idea doesn't work for you, you would be explicit about what you find hard to accept, rather than calling names.

That aside, yes, TWiki is probably the most security-rich wiki currently in existence. I don't know much about pmWiki, but my current favorite is MoinMoin, which has some decent security one can turn on as well. Ideally I'd like to see wikis that use registration also incorporate a system where a human has to read some "noisy" text when joining, to verify humanness (anyone working with Yahoo! groups has seen this). At any rate, Trevor's is TWiki too, so that should do the trick. Sorry to hear you got stomped by spammers & best of luck with the new incarnation.

So, um...Did you guys want me to set up a web and group for you?

Trevis

I'll play if something starts up. But I'm still suffering residual malaise or something from our last failure.

Chris

I've got a question for UniWiki players: was it all tedious (ever) to include links & wiki formatting and the like when posting play? And would Universalis-specific tools be at all helpful in Actual Play?

Dev wrote: I've got a question for UniWiki players: was it all tedious (ever) to include links & wiki formatting and the like when posting play? And would Universalis-specific tools be at all helpful in Actual Play?

Ok then. Well the offer stands. Let me know if you want to set it up.

One bit that might be helpful in twiki is it can do an automatic table of contents that is anchor linked to the headers. If you use a low level header for the complication, etc, it can take you right to it. YOu can also display the contents of one twiki page inline with another. In other words you can edit one topic and have it be updated in all instances across the board.

regards,

Trevis.

Actually that sounds pretty cool to me. Is this what you're referring to as "Uni Specific Tools" or did you have something else in mind? I'd be very interested, actually.

Mike

Mike,

I'm not sure if you're talking to me or not since it was Dev that mentioned Uni specific tools, but TWiki is a pretty heavily developed wiki so there are all kinda little bits to it that I think may be helpful. I'm investigating show/hide functionality at the moment to see if that one is possible, but I thought the indexing and inline display capability would help a lot.

Is anybody else interested in giving it another go then?

Trevis

Oops, yeah, Dev, what were you thinking in terms of tools? Are Trevis' examples what you're looking for? Or did you have something else in mind?

I think that I'm potentially up for another stab at the game. I agree with Bob, I think, in that I don't think that all of the overhead that we put in to make the game more accessible was a good idea. That is, I agree in general that it would be nice for the game to be accessible, but it has to be something simpler, IMO.

And, as usual, I'd ask for a more sim game, but I'm not sure if anyone is interested in that. I still think it has the most potential for play on Wiki.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: Oops, yeah, Dev, what were you thinking in terms of tools? Are Trevis' examples what you're looking for? Or did you have something else in mind?

Interestingly, I actually did start coming up with an application that would do what you describe, using Lotus Notes as the basis. Maybe I'll look back into that (it was a long time ago).

Anyhow, I think I'm definitely going to take Trevis up on his offer. Next week. :-)

Mike

Mike,

Talk some more about making it a more sim game. I know one of your beefs is multi-genre...what else?

Chris

although I was very bad about not posting to TUA2 in a long long while, I'd been keen to join in another wikigame of uni

tools: tools that I have thought up previously have centered on having mandatory fields (frex, every scene has a location and time) - but to make this usable in uni you'd have to be able to make field templates on the fly (for non-core rules that are tenetted in)

I think tools could be built around a particular framework (eg, core uni, shards) but at some point you're going to be relying on the users again

A framework of consensus for how to run Complications is probably the most important thing for running the game in wiki (or other internet form).

With that, and perhaps an agreement on how, or if, an Active Player or Scene Framing Players is determined is enough to get going.

Personally, for the next game, I'd rather do just the barest framework of rules in pre-game discussion...then dive right into play, perhaps with multiple scenes, and flesh everything out as the needs of the scenes require.

Well, maybe a "Once around the table Tenet setting", but no world building beyond that. If its needed Component, Location, Gimmick or Tenets...add it in play.

[edited in: and most of the remaining pages got spammed again over the last couple days :> )

The multi-genre thing isn't a big deal, and a separate consideration from the idea of a more sim game. I've gone over this before, but one of the problems that I see is investiture in the stories that are being told as a result of play. What I'd like to see is a game where people weren't so interested in making stories as much as making a world.

When a person jumps into playing Everquest, they don't worry about the "plot" to date because there is none. Instead there's just this world that you wander characters around inside. That's what I'm looking more to do. Skip the storytelling (well, to an extent) and just make people, places, and then have "stuff" happen.

I think that overall it would be a much more viable model for play, and is what I had in mind for Wiki play from the start.

As a history, while creating Universalis, I was involved with JB on a Wiki on which the activity was just creating this world. I had a problem with it personally because there were no rules about when something could be discredited by another participant, and when it could not. At the time I thought that Universalis would be the way to solve this problem.

What happened, however, was that in the first attempt at Wiki play of Universalis, I didn't make this at all clear, and kinda lost sight of it myself. We started playing, and it turned into just an online way to play Universalis like normal. When what I wanted was to use Universalis to do something fairly different from standard Universalis play.

And I've never been able to get back to the original idea. People interested in UniWiki want to play standard Universalis for the most part. When I mentioned this idea last time I had people threaten to back out of play because they were expecting normal play.

What I'm saying is that I'm really only interested in joining up with a wiki that is going to be set up by people who are interested in this idea. I don't want to just shout "another uni wiki!" and have people come running and then find that the game isn't what I want to play yet again because most of the people involved want to play standard play.

Now, that shouldn't stop anyone from starting another UniWiki on their own that's like the previous ones have been. But is anyone interested in the kind of game that I'm proposing? No "plot" just worldbuilding, and stuff happening. I'm not selling it well, but it's hard to explain just why I think it'll work without a lot more text. But I think it would be really fun.

Maybe it's just me?
Mike

Mike, I'd be up for that kind of play actually.

I'd be interedted in a game where you can't return to a scene with the same characters for at least two scenes or something.

Where there's a wedge against plot.

I'm a bit burnt out for continuing-style gaming right now. A Uni world where scenes are occurring all over the place in order to fill out many varied aspects of the world/universe/setting would be fine.

Might need to tweak Coin refresh, but maybe not.

It would be fun to build a really lush world, a little at a time.

I'm interested in playing because I'd like to see what Universalis does with a different set of parameters. But honestly, without story, it's hard for me to envision the point.

Maybe it works like this(?): We're still building stories, but they're really small, kind of ordinary stories -- stories that don't typically span scene breaks. And as we accumulate tons of those stories, the world emerges as a semi-coherent thing with complex topology.

Is that how you're seeing it?

Whether or not I pegged it, as bob suggested a wedge against plot, what starting gimicks would you be imagining for kicking this thing off?

Chris (wondering if this should be split off)

Okay guys.

I've gone ahead and set up a new web for the online Universalis game on my TWiki site. You can find it here. Everyone who's interested in playing go ahead and register there.

best,

Trevis