Admin Manual

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This is meant to be a brief tutorial on basic admin tasks for new or forgetful admins.

Becoming an admin

If you want to become an admin, just make a proposal to that effect. Rule 1.2 requires you to have a wiki account so that you can update the game as required. Players will also probably expect you to have played at least one full dynasty, and to have shown that you generally understand how the game of BlogNomic works and how to apply its rules correctly.

Adminning Proposals

You'll find an edit button in the top-right corner of a blog post. In the screen that pops up, you'll have to do two things:

  • In the admin text box, report your name and the vote count (e.g. "Reaches quorum at 8-1. Adminned by Bob") or the fact that the proposal was withdrawn or vetoed, as per rule "Enactment".
  • Under the Options menu, update the proposal's status (enacted, failed etc.).

Now all you have to do is update the ruleset and gamestate if the proposal passed.

Creating a new player account

  • Ask the player for their requested username and email address
  • Check that the username is valid under Ruleset#Names (at time of writing "between 4 and 30 characters in length, and may only include the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, numbers, underscores, hyphens, full stops and apostrophes")
  • Go to https://blognomic.com/update/index.php?/cp/members/new_member_form and fill in the form. (Note: Make sure that the Member Group Assignment is set to "Player" - it may default to "Administrator".)

Adding/unidling a player in the sidebar

  • Enter the Templates menu (it should be in the sidebar under "Admin Things"). We'll be editing the 'playerlist' template.
    • To add a new player, simply add a line to this list, keeping the syntax intact. Make sure the link points to the correct user page.
    • To unidle an existing player, simply copy their entry from the idle list to the active list. Be sure to remove the comma.
    • Update the player count and quorum, and press "Update and Finished" to save your changes.
  • If the game is using any sidebar gamestate:
    • If adding a player or unidling them for the first time in a dynasty, add them to the gamestate wiki page and check the ruleset for default starting values.
    • If the player is returning after going idle earlier in the dynasty, they may have an earlier gamestate to restore - check for commented-out data at the end of the wiki page, and reintroduce this accordingly.

Notice: Always try to keep the lists of players in the sidebar and gamestate in alphabetical order, for convenience's sake.

Idling a player

  • Enter the Templates menu and select the 'playerlist' template.
    • If the idled player isn't listed in the idle list, move them there; otherwise just delete their name from the current roster.
    • Update the player count and quorum, and press "Update and Finished" to save your changes.
  • If the game is using any sidebar gamestate, take the player's data from it (if any) and put it at the foot of the wiki page surrounded by "<!--" "-->" comment tags (so that they stats they left with can be easily restored).

Changing a player's name

Superadmins can change a user's screen name on the account view (eg. https://blognomic.com/admin.php?/cp/myaccount/username_password&id=2); regular admins cannot. Players can change their own screen names, however.

Historically it seems like when we want to change a player's "name" in the game, we just change their screen name.

Deleting a post

Under current blog settings, admins cannot delete posts by other users: posts can only be deleted by their authors, or by EE-level superadmins.

Dynasty Changeover

  • Templates that have Dynasty info include
    • dynastic_banner (usually an h1 until an image is provided)
    • index (in the title tag)
    • sidebar, if there are Current Documents other than the ruleset
    • emperor_tag (swap the name between the /^ and the $/ in the first line for the name of the new emperor)
  • Don't forget to take us out of hiatus, in the sidebar
  • Update the main page's dynasty index, if not done
  • Update the Template:Dynastic_Histories box
  • Move Current Game Documents on the wiki front page down to Older Core Game Documents

Changing the sidebar, site HTML, etc.

All of these are found under Templates in EE. The list of players is under the Template 'PlayerList'. If you want to idle or unidle someone, move their line from one column to the other. If you want to change the colors, fonts, and such things, look under the stylesheet for the appropriate data--and change the CSS. Don't go plonking colour and style exceptions in the individual templates. Again, backups are useful here. If you are adding image files, stick them in the image directory--you can use FTP for this if you have a lot of files to transfer.

Server access

(Only a couple of very trusted players currently have shell access to the blognomic.com server.)

Shell scripts

You can run shell scripts as a cronjob if you like. If you upload CGI or PHP scripts, make sure that the ~/.htaccess file is updated to reflect your directory. Similarly for applets. Stick javascript in the appropriate template.

CAPTCHAs

Blog

[ This is obsolete as of 2019, as the blog captcha was retired some years ago. ]

To change the CAPTCHA trivia question, edit mbr_captcha in ee/system/language/english/lang.member.php, and edit the answer in ee/system/modules/member/mod.member_register.php.

There's also some commented out code and messages for ReCAPTCHA, which we tried using for a while but which didn't do anything to stop the creation of spam accounts (it seems likely we're just dealing with human spammers who can jump through a few simple hoops to set up an account). If you reenable ReCAPTCHA, the system messages you need to change are captcha_required and captcha_incorrect in ee/system/language/english/lang.core.php.

Wiki

The BlogNomic wiki poses a CAPTCHA-style question upon account creation, and (unnecessarily, since spammers can't create accounts) when a user adds URL links.

This can be changed in the wiki's LocalSettings.php on the server.

Don't Break Anything

As a general rule, don't mess around with things unless you know what you're doing.

If you do manage to break something, or find something broken by someone else, you should either post a blog entry about it or head onto Discord to discuss it with other players, so that we know who's broken what, what they were changing when it broke, and can coordinate our efforts to fix it.

Making new admins

1. Go into your control panel, then "Admin". Click on "Members and Groups", then "Member search". Search for the member you want to make an admin. Under "Member Administration", click on Member Preferences, then change the Member Group Assignment to "Administrator".

2. Go to the player list. Find the member to be made an admin, then add ' class="admin"' to the end of their member link, and an asterisk to the end of their name (so <a href="/member/15">Josh</a> would become <a href="/member/15" class="admin">Josh*</a>).

3. Anything else?

Known ExpressionEngine bugs

This hasn't been tested exhaustively for similar edge cases, but it seems to be the case that writing flavour text which contains a link with a title tag that contains an apostrophe, such as:

<a href="http://blognomic.com" title="it's this">test</a>

... causes the blog front page to crash displaying the error message "Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /home/blognomic/www/ee/system/core/core.functions.php(634) : eval()'d code on line 66"