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Message: <blockquote data-quote="covaithe" data-source="post: 5573522" data-attributes="member: 46559">I've been thinking about this a lot recently.  Some points:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> with the exception of DMing, character judging is by far the most labor-intensive thing we do.  It would be awesome to spread that load around some.  </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> To my knowledge, we've never had anyone try to gain an advantage in L4W by deliberately putting wrong numbers on their sheet.  I admit that when I was writing down the rules for character reviews, lo these many years ago, I had cheaters on my mind.  But that doesn't seem to actually be a problem here.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> That said, I think it's still the case that many, if not most, character sheets have minor errors that really should be fixed.  That includes my sheets, which always seem to have something wrong, no matter how I try.  </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Email sucks as a technology for handling character approvals.  It involves a lot of manual administration to add and remove people from the list of reviewers.  (And gmail has made this harder recently, requiring verification before allowing me to forward things to someone.)  I think there's still a hard cap on the number of people who can get the notifications, and while we've never actually hit that limit, we've been close.  You have to spell the subject line right, or it gums up the works.  It takes work to figure out who has been waiting for approvals the longest.  Emails can get lost or misfiled (or marked as spam), and people fall off the queue and get forgotten.  When someone wants to help out, it's surprisingly hard to point them to a list of work needing to be done.   </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> The Official Approved Character thread has fallen into disuse.  It was never terribly reliable, but in its day it was more reliable than the ApprovedCharacters category in the wiki.  Which is still not very reliable.  What I'm getting at is that there's no *reliable* list anywhere of who is approved at what level, and there hasn't been for a long time (if ever).  </li> </ul>I think we still need approvals.  I think we still need more than one person to look each sheet over.  It would be nice if we had some way to indicate that at least one of those people was "trusted" or "senior" or "veteran", in the sense that they had demonstrated the ability to find and point out mistakes and not just rubber-stamp it.  I *don't* think it's necessary to require that judges be involved.  My ideal solution would involve some kind of work-tracking software of some kind, e.g. Bugzilla or Trac or JIRA or something.  What I'd want it to be able to is something like this:  <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> When you first sign up, you put in your email address. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> When you submit a character for approval, you open a ticket, including a link to your character sheet.  </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Anyone who wants to can view the list of open tickets, i.e. approvals that still need doing, sorted and filtered in various ways.  </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Ideally, we'd be able to enter custom workflow steps for tickets, i.e. "needs two approvals", "needs one approval (veteran)", "needs one approval (any)", and "approved".  Ideally there'd be a way to assign permissions to actions, i.e. only veterans can put it into the "needs one approval (any)" state, or move it from the "NOA(V)" state to "accepted".  </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Email notification when someone comments on your ticket or changes its workflow step.</li> </ul>It seems like we ought to be able to bend Bugzilla or Trac to be able to handle something like that.  Heck, it seems like that wouldn't be too hard of a website to just write from scratch.  On the other hand, putting together a system like that sounds like a fair amount of work.  I'm not volunteering to do it myself.  (Though, if anyone put together a working prototype, I'd be delighted to look at it.)  Also, there are the standard objections to relying on external services (mainly that whoever owned them might go away, leaving us screwed).  Shorter term and less effortfully, I'm certainly open to suggestions for an approval workflow that would improve on the current situation.</blockquote>

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