Please only post here if you are looking for work, and not to advertise for your company or reply to posts. If you want to advertise your company, make a new thread.
This is just a quick addition to answer a few frequently asked questions regarding Community Events, specifically regarding the judging panel, and why we will be allowing staff entries from this day onwards.
THE JUDGING PROCESS
When we first started these Community Events, staff posted them; however, they were subsequently posted by Duke and then myself to avoid any perceived bias. While the staff who posted events in the past never had any say in the winner, I feel it is important that there is no confusion over who decides the outcome.
Torn's writing team and myself judge the events, and we often spend days or weeks going through a single set of contests to ensure we pick (in our opinion) what the best results are. These things are subjective, of course, but rest assured we debate the merits of your efforts in great detail. Chedburn is rarely involved in this process; however, if we reach a deadlock, he is always available to help - staff are not given the option to judge these events nor offer an opinion under any circumstances.
Our judging process begins by ruling out any entries that don't meet the criteria specified in the entry post. The criteria may vary slightly from entry to entry, so it is your responsibility to ensure that you are compliant with those guidelines. I am always happy to clarify if you have any questions, and I will decide alongside Sugarvalves where appropriate. If, for example, you took a picture and the ID/year isn't clearly visible, but you have sufficient photos that provide additional verification, then we may choose to allow your entry to stand.
We also rule out any entries which do not meet the social guideline requirements of Torn. This issue rarely comes up, but things like nudity or obscenity will disqualify your entry, and this includes any text present in your image that would otherwise be picked up by our in-game filter. Again, I am happy to clarify anything here, and I will also allow image editing to remove offensive content if it doesn't change the original purpose of the image itself. For example, if you took a photo that would not be feasible or easy to replicate, I have no issue with you blurring out or editing out the non-compliant parts.
Once we have removed ineligible entries, we go through each one and form a shortlist of our favourites. This list takes into account factors such as originality, execution, and how well your entry fits the original requirements of the contest. We then gradually eliminate those we feel score the lowest in these criteria. Once we have a reasonable number remaining, we determine which we think are most deserving of the top three positions. In some cases, where our opinions are divided or there are too many high quality entries, we sometimes assign more than one player to 1st, 2nd, and 3rd position.
"Special mentions" are also chosen if we feel the competition's overall level of quality merits this. Whilst we don't always specifically mention who receives these items, we often send out consolation prizes such as donator packs, boosters or masks (if specified in the original post) to those we feel were deserving of recognition. The prizes we send to "Special mentions" will never be of greater value than those awarded to the top three.
STAFF ENTRIES
In addition to there being no staff involvement in the judging process, our previous position was that staff were also excluded from entering and winning Community Events too. This ruling meant that staff could never achieve certain things, such as the Champion honour bar, so I have decided to remove this restriction. From now on, I will be allowing staff to enter all Community Events, but there will be some strict conditions involved.
This ruling covers only those who volunteer their time for Torn, including Helpers, Moderators, and Officers - admins and employees remain excluded. Staff entries will be more heavily scrutinised than player entries and need to be exceptional to place highly. If a staff member does place in the top three, we will not allow any other staff member a podium position for that contest. Staff members who place in one event will also be excluded from consideration for the top three spots in any other event. And finally, where prize pools are offered, staff members will not be eligible to pick these additional prizes - they remain eligible for the base prizes provided. We retain the right to add further caveats in future. These restrictions apply to staff members only.
My justification for this change is that I feel it is unfair that staff are excluded from certain awards when they have volunteered their time for the betterment of Torn. I hope the strict restrictions we've put in place will assuage any fears of staff favouritism, while also allowing staff members to feel like full members of the Torn community once more. My goal here is to achieve a "best of both worlds" scenario, without kneecapping my staff team too much, and ensuring that continued transparency in the voting process is evident to all. I'll be happy to answer any questions to clarify these changes.
Over the past several days, the staff team have engaged in discussions to establish a series of new, consistent guidelines for moderation in the Trading Post forum. We will start implementing these guidelines immediately.
Please note that these rules are subject to change to allow for maximum flexibility. Any updates will be posted in this thread. It is your responsibility to stay informed and comply with the guidelines, especially after updates are posted.
The purpose of these changes is to reduce spam in the Trading Post forum and to ensure uniformity in our moderation approach. If you come across non-compliant posts, please report them and staff will address the issue. For any inconsistencies or questions, feel free to reach out to me or PrincessJulie [11229]. We are here to provide clarification.
We will issue warnings for repeat violations, followed by bans if necessary. We initially intend to be lenient as these rules are newly implemented to allow players to become accustomed to them. Please let unnecessary threads naturally fade away and focus on keeping your two active threads compliant.
Trading Post Guidelines:
- Max two active posts - Must be notably different content. Duplicated content will be subject to removal. e.g. you are allowed to have one selling thread and one buying thread, OR you can have a basic trading thread and a thread to advertise buying/selling a specific item - Any new thread that is not clearly different will be removed - Additional threads made may be graved unless its clear the old one is dead and expired. We recommend editing out the content - no need to request to have it graved - Do not bump unless it is at least off page 1. Excessive bumping is subject to warnings at staff discretion
Some context. This guy and his buddy are salty because they named themselves pedo and rapist and went around being obscene and harassing players in new player chat and had their names changed due to it being an extension of their actions and for some reason thinks he has a point here.
Considering we know that D3vl does the exact opposite of what he posts in his GD threads, I for one am deeply pleased that D3vl has finally accepted me as a good and unbiased CM. Thank you.
I would agree this is a factor, they had us in a difficult spot but since we weren't really what their system was made for it was likely taking up a lot of their time to be debugging things too.
We are grateful to have had the opportunity to have a chat system in this time, but we are also glad to be back on our in house system.
A lot of effort went into getting this chat into a usable state.
Some history of the chats for those who don't know.
In the beginning there was chat 1.0, people like to look at this through rose tinted glasses but the reality is it got to the state it was after a long and painful road.
Initially it was buggy, laggy, messages would take 5-10+ seconds to arrive at times - but most people don't remember that, since this was eventually resolved.
However as Torn grew it rapidly outgrew that legacy chat system, when we began to approach 40-50k players it was hitting hard limits due to its setup and we had no simple means to rectify this without a full rebuild.
This is when we had to switch it off and switch to Sendbird's system.
People complained, saying why not keep that chat, it's right before Halloween etc etc! Not realizing that the new chat was practically unusable for any "new" accounts, it had reached the limit on how many people it could support, any newbies joining Torn had no chat, players were regularly getting kicked out of chat and we needed a quick replacement for Torn's rapidly growing playerbase (now 110k!)
Sendbird was that solution, it was not ideal, we do not like relying on third parties for systems but it offered something we could quickly port over, although not without its limitations. Sendbird's chat system was not really designed for the kind of chat that a game like Torn requires. We managed to hack it together best we could, paying various third party fees, charges for usage and over usage, constant negotiations and back and forth with the sendbird developers about fixing bugs and making improvements to their system.
The biggest limitation many would see came in how players could interact with certain chats like global chat. The way sendbird worked with these chats is that they had a limit on how many could join a room at a time, and if this limit was reached it would make a "secondary" chat and then merge them together - this was not ideal for Torn and resulted in the missing messages people would regularly experience and complain about, having it only resolved with constant refreshing.
We wanted out, and wanted our control back. We hired an amazing developer who threw his all in to building the new chat system.
We had Sendbird running still, it was "functional" but not how we wanted - but the contract for this was also running out. Due to expire on October 1st 2026...
Sendbird knew this, and wanted some extortionate rates for us to keep this system for another year, this put us in a very difficult spot and we went back to them with numerous negotiations which they continuously refused, before eventually saying we could have a 4 month contract (again at an extremely high price). So, knowing this, we put all our effort into geting the new chat system over the line and we are delighted to have had this pay off - there are still a few minor bugs that we can work on - but it is definitely in a state we are happy with, and certainly better than having to pay the extremely high cost of keeping Sendbird for another few months to a year. However, if it came to it, we were ready to sign that deal to keep the Sendbird chat for another 4 months, so it was a little bit of a relief knowing we had that backup... but if we could avoid it then all the better.
We plan to keep the momentum going that we've had over recent weeks, rapidly fixing any bugs and getting chat into a better system.
Group chat systems have alerady been tested and work, and once we have things stable enough we'll likely be bringing that to you soon too and can continue work on our own chat system once again, bringing you features we know you want, without the ever looming issues of third party reliance.
Yes, that is why it is literally explained to you WHY this happens even with a gif! How did you manage to copy from the announcement and ignore that?
If you're that blind then this chat update is irrelevant to you apparently.
Read state couldn't be carried over from Sendbird. Opening Chat Settings and choosing Mark all as read clears it, and you can reopen any chats you want from the chat list. It's a one-off and only affects the initial move.
