The Foundry Maintenance and Republishing Timeframe

simplyshawn

Hey, so this is a random thought I had while writing a reply to another thread, but I want to ask the devs:

If one of the reasons The Foundry always has to go offline after a new module is because all the Foundry Quests need to be republished, and the reason it takes so long is because there are so many... would it speed things up if people who have old or unfinished Foundry quests deleted them from the Catalogue?

Or even better, a way for a player of a Foundry Quest to "suggest an edit" to the author, where they can point out a bug, a plot-hole, etc... then if more than 5 or so players suggest edits, the quest would be unpublished, and the author would receive mail saying that their quest has been temporarily sent back to the drawing board, with a list of those suggested edits. The author should, of course, just be able to republish it to avoid trolling, but, a system like that would both get rid of quests that the author doesn't support anymore, as well as provide insight for authors who do support their Foundry Quests and want to improve them. All in a semi-automated way.

Or would less published quests actually shorten the down-time? I'm not gonna pretend to really understand how it works on the back-end lol, but if there is something us authors could do and/or encourage other authors to do in order to help, I'd like to try, and I'm sure others would too.

melinden

There are a lot of problem quests in the catalog and I think this might be a nice solution. Some quests are exploit quests, some are broken in that you can't complete them anymore because of some error along the 13 modules. Others are from Authors who are long gone.

I understand that all the Featured quests should be republished (although some of them might be broken) but I think it would clean up the catalog considerably if Authors had to republish themselves after a module. Not only would the catalog be cleaned up but it would allow some of the newer quests to come up to the top. Right now there are five year old quests with so many thousands of plays that even the best new author will never get close to the top of the Best list.

iandarksword

Not to discredit the older quests, but I kinda agree here too. We need ways to discover newer authors, and keeping the same 5 quests at the top of the Best tab for what will soon be 5 years doesn't allow for that. However, this may require a UI or organizational change as to how quests are arranged in the catalog, and I'm not certain how much time the UI team has to work on something of this nature. I do know one of the top 5 authors does login to check the status of his quests, so the idea of a manual republish does seem viable.