Hi all. As you know, published decklists on NetrunnerDB (and ThronesDB) are immutable: their author can’t change their content (only the name and description can be edited). Although it’s been that way since the beginning of the site, the model can still evolve. There’s a discussion starting about this topic on reddit. I’d like to gather as many opinions as possible before deciding anything, so if you want to participate, please do so!
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I think changing a published deck is bad idea, you could always let the derived from option link to a newer published version, or let the deck publisher add a link to a newer published version.
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The thing that puts me off NRDB the most is the fact that decks need to be published at all. I would just make accounts in general private or public and make all saved decks on that account published or something. There might be other issues with that, though, (changing decks entirely in the same save file to get views or whatever, or just changing names or versions), but I’ll be using meteor at least until I dont have to publish decks/can make a duplicate deck to someone else’s on my account. I have taken issue with other things or NRDB but you’ve made a ton of improvements in the past year or so and that’s really the last thing that’s got me holding out.
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Hi mediohxcore,
I think all the points you mention have actually already been addressed on NRDB.
If you go to Account/person menu → Edit Account, then tick ‘Share your decks’, then you can share the ‘view’ of your decks with anyone and everyone you want. Eg, here is one of my random decks [A Leela deck][1]
Also, you can ‘copy’ a published decklist, which makes a copy of that as a deck in your decks. Although I guess this ‘copy’ button is not available when you view someone else’s deck view. That’s probably an easy thing for Alsciende to add if that’s what you are missing?
[1]: Deckbuilder · NetrunnerDB
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I just want the option to permashare all my decklists and to have the exact-copy restriction entirely removed.
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I don’t think you should be able to change published decklists, though there could be an option for a tighter connection between two decks than just “inspired/derived” if you are the author of both decks.
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There could be an automatic version save I guess. Maybe my concerns aren’t really worth addressing because it’s such a look-at-my-deck sort of community-based site.
I think clicking the “share your decks button” Ber was talking about exactly takes care of your first point.
One of those shared decks could then be an exact copy of something else – it just wouldn’t be “published” and so there wouldn’t be a comment thread for it there.
I personally like the “publishing” thing, so you know it hasn’t changed along the way to mess up the discussion.
The exact copy thing – I guess I am against that. I don’t really see the point – yes, it could potentially allow popular posters to “steal” work, but changing a card or two isn’t much difference, and half the excitement of a deck posting isn’t the list but the discussion and the results the poster had with the deck.
Addendum: Rereading this post I just wrote, I’m just spitballing here. Not well thought through ideas, just a bunch of notions I thought I might as well make public.
Could we have a middle ground where you can publish decks and also make decks public? What I’m thinking is that there would be a difference in the search settings and in the comment settings. In terms of searching, ideally decks that are in testing, theoretical, or otherwise being worked on would be available as public decks. To publish a deck would be to say that you have taken the deck to the destination that you want it at. In terms of comment settings, the former would have a discussion thread and maybe the ability to link to decklists identical but with changes automatically made. The latter would be framed as a comment thread. If a published deck were changed, the changes and the comment thread would be archived and it would be on a new page. This would remove the deck1.0 deck1.1 deck1.2 thing.
I think the system as it is works perfectly well. I think that it would be useful to share decks without publishing them. I also think that the idea of publishing decks theoretically carries with it a bunch of benefits (polish, description, the ability to discuss it, etc.) and I wouldn’t want to see that eclipsed.
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this is kind of the reason I’m glad for the immutability - I think there’d be a fair amount of “changing my deck so much it really should be a new deck but this one has a ton of likes so more people will see the new deck.” I also like the ability to favorite a deck I like, or one that has interesting idea, and know I can come back to it without it being completely overhauled/etc.
It’d be nice, maybe, if it were possible to connect decks more directly than the little “inspiration for” links; I’m thinking a single comment thread for version 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 etc. of a deck, with tabs or something for each version?
I think I’m fine though with the distinction between shared decks and published decks (w/r/t exact copy rules and such)
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I think changing a published decklist is off the table. It’s kinda at the core of the social aspect. It’s also what makes browsing NRDB a more enjoyable experience: publishing a deck requires an action from the user, so there’s less junk.
I’m not in favor of listing all the private decks of a user. I think the ideas that are being discussed on reddit are a better solution to this problem. If you want feedback on one of your deck, publish it as a “work in progress”. Users can look at it and comment it. They can also look at your private deck. And once you publish a new version of that deck, there’s a link to it on the page of the former version.
Concerning the exact-copy restriction, I guess I can lift it. That needs to be discussed as well.
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One opt-in feature to address @mediohxcore’s concern could be to click on a user and be able to access his or her list of private decks (to view).
That way you could idly click on e.g. Timmy or Dan’s profile and see what nonsense they’re working on at the moment. Similarly if there’s a deck you like you could click on that user and see what else they’ve been up to.
You could also add a ‘you should publish this’ button to recommend that someone shares one of their lists with the community at large.
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I think most users want some of their decks to stay private. For example because they are brewing them for an incoming tournament.
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When I built out a versioning system for a custom card website a few years ago, all of the comments got labeled with “Comment on Version #”, and then you could go back and forward and see all the different versions so that you could see the evolution of a card as it was designed. Something similar sounds like it might be possible for nrdb, where you can make updates to a deck list and it saves a copy of your deck that get’s linked in a parent-child tree and comments are specific to versions.
Complicated? A bit. But, I’m pretty sure that when something gets published the best thing is for it to remain on the website in some fashion and probably still be searchable. Once you’re within the deck page if you can navigate through the history of the deck, that’s probably a feature so you can see what changed over time. What I envision is this.
- Published Deck Page: Has [ Edit ] button
- Edit button takes you back into your decks making a new version copy of the deck you’re editing.
- Deck editing likely locks down the ID & faction options.
- When you save, it establishes the link and takes you back to the published deck page.
- Now, there’s a cell somewhere that looks like: Versions [1] [2] … [5] … [ 11 ] [ 12 ]
- You could maybe also do a summary component that just lists - card + card changes between revisions.
- Comments note which version they applied to, and that version # is a link so you can jump to that version of the deck.
- I assume your fancy symphony stuff can just load the deck versions in and refresh the relevant text without needing to reload the whole page.
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If we really want to have family/evolution tracking of decklists is it worthwhile to just implement Git on the deck files? That sounds like a really big undertaking from the outside, though I have very little insight into how the decks are actually stored on the website.
It seems to me that there would be room for an extra option to “share” a deck, to publicize it without publishing. The primary purpose of sharing would be to get feedback for works in progress, so the “shared decklist” should reflect any changes that were ever made to the deck. Some sort of tabbed version system would probably be appropriate for displaying the changes. (Highlight new revisions in each subsequent version in bold?)
Publishing a deck would only be used to publicize an established concept, so that functionality could remain unchanged. Then the site could treat the two types of public decks differently; for instance, by displaying them on separate pages, and only allowing published decks to be eligible for decklist of the week.
Perhaps there should even be an additional option for a user to only share a deck with specific people; then the shared decklist wouldn’t be posted publicly, but NetrunnerDB would still create a “shared decklist” page with version tabs and a comment thread. The site would send a notification and link to the people that the user decided to share the deck with, or the user could simply share the link with whomever they like. This would be useful for anyone who wants to privately collaborate on a deck before a tournament.
Edit: Also, I’m mildly in favor of removing the exact-copy restriction. It seems a bit silly that bblum can’t publish his winning Kate list if he wants to share his thoughts and tournament experiences. Maybe a warning would be more appropriate: “This exact deck has already been published here; are you sure you want to publish it again?”
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That’s true. In which case you could have ‘public’, ‘private’ and ‘published’ decks for each user.
If you wanted to allow discussion on public, but not published decks, you could add a list of changes as a comment on the thread every time the deck is saved. If you wanted to get fancy, you could have a link created on those comments to allow a viewer to view and download previous versions of the deck.
Maybe more effort than it’s worth. But it would be a neat feature.
I’m not sure the intended scope of this discussion but it seems clear to me that the publish-immutable model is best, just the view-private mode needs a few more features added. For example, a view page doesn’t even say the author’s name anywhere. To address Dan’s concern you could simply add a button under options, next to “let me hand out view-private links” to also “let anyone look at a list of all my unpublished decks just by knowing my username”. After that you could add a feature where published decklists link back to the possibly-updated private version, as long as the author says that’s ok (whether with that global option or case-by-case when publishing).
The two main advantages NRDB has over Meteor for me are that suggestions make deckbuilding extremely fast and that meteor’s interface is way laggier on firefox. Keep those and you’ll keep me. 
I have a handful of small unrelated complaints: I want to configure the bbcode export button to not put [color=…] tags, which don’t work on stimhack; I want to configure the mouse-over-card-tooltips to show images instead of card text (meteor does this); I want some way to disjoin or negate card search parameters; when you check/uncheck a box in the “which sets enabled” list your scrollbar warps back to the top of the page (at least in firefox); and finally, when you click to highlight a deck in “my decks” it steals the browser focus in some way that I can’t ctrl+T, ctrl+W, ctrl+tab, etc until I click off somewhere else on the page.
All in all, the site has a lot more features tucked away in places I didn’t even realize until I went scrutinizing to try to remember all the complaints listed above, and is just really mature and well designed overall. Good job dude.
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Agreed. In particular, it’s really annoying not being able to download the octgn file when viewing someone else’s deck (401 Unauthorized) or save a copy of that deck. Both of those things need to be done via copy/paste → import the deck instead.
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If we’re doing odd-ball feature requests in here, does anyone know a good way to compare two of my unpublished decklists on mobile? Traditionally you ctrl-click in the browser to select multiple decks and then compare, but I can’t ctrl-click in Firefox on Android so am unable to compare my new decklists to my old to easily see what I need to swap out when I ultimately procrastinate doing it and need to do it at the store.