This is ridiculous

[Andreas the Wise]

Your niftiness, I bring a serious and heartfelt complaint about the apalling state the Imperial Records were left in under the reign of your two predecessors. Once, if I wanted to find what I'd posted in Atterock, it was easy - I would go to the Kildare forum, then to Atterock, then to each of the counties. Now the counties are scattered to the four winds in the Imperial Lands subforum, and not even all in alphabetical order; and it took me ten minutes to find the Barony of Atterock, eventually resorting to the forum search function, because it had been filed under the very dusty file of "Fiefdom Archive - Kildare (former)" at the top of the filing cabinet when the logical place (apart from leaving it in Kildare) would have been at the bottom, near the Elwynn or Yardistan archive. In short, your niftiness, it is a mess.

I hate to namecall and accuse previous administrations of doing a hit and run on history via a massive landgrab; but frankly it's ridiculous. If there is a real and serious intention for us to have developed lands, then having half of the development of the last two years filed in bizarre places in the archives and the other third not even filed in alphabetical order is not the way to do it. I'm sure you can put your considerable mind to a way to better organise this; but at the least, can you move the Kildarian Barony Archive subforum back to Kildare? We never asked for it to be moved and at least we could find it when it was there. Maybe we don't need the Economy forum anymore, but the rest is still important.

Kind regards,
A very concerned and slightly flustered historian.

[Kaiser Ikol II]

All right.

Regarding the poorly alphabetized archives, this is harder to fix than you'd think: phpBB only allows me to move forums up one or down one, so it would take absolutely forever to get these right manually. I've found what looks like a php script to do it, but implementing it is beyond my pay grade and I'm afraid I have to put that in the Minister of the Interior's quickly growing in-box.

For now I've given Kildare the Barony Archive back, but I'm not sure on a longer-term or more general policy. For one thing, I really don't want to equate the Houses with the old Duchies by giving them all old their old Duchy archives.

Maybe organize the Imperial Lands by Duchy, and give each Duchy an archive of its own that includes all Duchy-associated archives?

If the government were to decide on such a project and be willing to give you administrative powers, would you be interested in implementing it?

[phineas elastopon]

How about a header in the Imperial Lands forum consisting of an image of Shireroth's territorial holdings plus map tags linking to each subdivisional forum?

[Erik Mortis]

I had them mostly in order... And the baronies are in the.. Barony archives.

[Icebreaker]

Regarding the poorly alphabetized archives, this is harder to fix than you'd think: phpBB only allows me to move forums up one or down one, so it would take absolutely forever to get these right manually.

WELL, NOT "FOREVER" REALLY, ONLY O(n^2) IN THE WORST CASE. SHOULDN'T TAKE TOO LONG FOR A REASONABLY SMALL n.

HERE, HOP TO IT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblesort

[Kaiser Ikol II]

Hmm...n is 41...and the forum list thing reloads after every swap, and I just timed it and it took me about five seconds to swap forums in between the clicking and the reload...so worst case is a bit over two hours, assuming I do nothing but click on forums for that time and don't lose any efficiency or make any suboptimal forum moves.

...actually, that's not the worst case. The worst case involves however long it takes me to get out of prison after going crazy and stabbing someone because I've been clicking forum names every five seconds for an hour.

I'm going with "let's wait for Ari".

[Erik Mortis]

The only ones out of order should be a small number on the bottom.

[Harvey Steffke]

Hmm...n is 41...and the forum list thing reloads after every swap, and I just timed it and it took me about five seconds to swap forums in between the clicking and the reload...so worst case is a bit over two hours, assuming I do nothing but click on forums for that time and don't lose any efficiency or make any suboptimal forum moves.

...actually, that's not the worst case. The worst case involves however long it takes me to get out of prison after going crazy and stabbing someone because I've been clicking forum names every five seconds for an hour.

I'm going with "let's wait for Ari".

So just do like 5 or so forums at a time. You don't need to get it all done at once or even all done in the same day. Get to the point where it's going to be stabbing time soon and stop for however long it takes for your meds to kick in.

[Icebreaker]

YEAH SCOTT, YOU REALLY THINK ARI IS GOING TO APPRECIATE YOU TELLING HIM "HEY CAN YOU TAKE CARE OF THIS, I'M LAZY"?

[Kaiser Ikol II]

So just do like 5 or so forums at a time. You don't need to get it all done at once or even all done in the same day. Get to the point where it's going to be stabbing time soon and stop for however long it takes for your meds to kick in.

Tell you what, Harvey. You offer to do it and I'll give you admin.

EDIT: Is what I'm tempted to say. But since we might end up organizing them into Duchies in a little while, you'd probably get pretty mad at being made to do all that for nothing.

[Icebreaker]

I'LL DO IT, HOOK ME UP

[Kaiser Ikol II]

Okay, but I'll warn you that a week from now and after talking with Andreas and others I might decide to go with some completely different scheme like by Duchy.

[Aurangzeb Khan]

Incidentally - would it be simpler if Duchies were fixed and unchanging territorial entities, an agglomeration of counties linked by geographical proximity and common history, ruled by the competing houses who can in turn rise and fall - with any aberrations being cleansed from the system by time and conflict?

No?... I'll get my coat.

[Daniel Farewell]

My Kalirion brother has many good ideas.

[Andreas the Wise]

Some of them stolen off yourself?

But yes, if possible, geographic groupings makes the most sense. Do you want me to hire Fides to do us a clickable map to each county? Something like this (I know, doesn't display the full length in our forums, but you see the basic idea).

[Aurangzeb Khan]

Some of them stolen off yourself?

Not knowingly, and if it is the case that Ric suggested something like that previously - I apologise. That was meant as an off the cuff remark - I haven't really been following the restoration of the duchies debate (not withstanding the shouting in the last reign) prior to this point.

[Harvey Steffke]

I'll do all of it if the old flag design wins

[Andreas the Wise]

I'll do all of it if the old flag design wins

Now that sounds like motivation better than money. Seriously? Including a clickable map?

@Ardy - he had mentioned something similar to me. If he hadn't to you, don't worry - you Kalirions must just have similar thinking.

[Harvey Steffke]

Was to Scott's offer about alphabetizing forums, but how hard could a clickable map really be? The FIoJ tour had one of those ten years ago. I might be able to whip one up fairly quickly if I wanted.

[Kaiser Ikol II]

Aurangzeb's idea is pretty much what I'm going for - although I want to avoid the idea of one house ruling one Duchy because it gives too much incentive to turn your House into a Duchy redux, which is exactly what we're trying to get away from.

For example, if I just restored Brookshire, Eluin, Straylight, Yardistan, and Kildare, then Houses Mortis, Kalir, T-A, Annexis, and Kildare would take them over, and there would be no opportunity for intrigue or competition - it'd be really tough to challenge a House in its home Duchy. I'm still trying to figure out a system that doesn't have this problem.

And if we do bring back Duchies as groupings of land, would people want their county in their own House, or in the Duchy where it belongs? Duchy would make more sense, but might be less accessible.

[Aurangzeb Khan]

I should have been more specific but like what the Kaiser suggests - while the Duchies would be a fixed dominion, they would not belong to a house by right - if you want intrigue leave the door open to the possibility that a House might by stratagem (recwar, alliance, defection) come to dominate more than one duchy, or conversely fail utterly and be swept into oblivion.

I'm sure the Europa Universalis series went mad at the moment it tried to turn dynastic politics into the main gameplay driver.