Never hurts to repeat myself on the blog. To force some differentiation between the two QS branches, Quantum Star SE Main branch is now known as “Quantum Star SE Evolved”. Hopefully this will send out a message that QS2 is older, and therefore not actively developed. There’s a common misconception for players especially that the new versions are a continuation of QS2 – they’re not. QS2 was an extremely buggy, server intensive, insecure pile of code. QS Evolved is designed and written from scratch, and avoids those problems – at least it better ;-).

There are still some sideline areas I need to address to QS before releasing the future stable versions. Problems fall into three camps; PHP Source, Licensing and Intellectual Property, and Transparency. My groupings might not be intuitive, but for what its worth Transparency applies to the internal running of the project, its policies and practices, and its financing (in a fit of optimism I declared QS a non-profit project). I’ve looked at a few areas, and had a go at implementing some solutions.

For example, the current available code carries both a human readable, and XML P3P Privacy Policy (not integrated into the HTML yet). It’s a nice idea, and the policy validates even on quite strict restrictions under IE6 (strict due its bugginess no doubt). As a result of that initial review, I removed the collection of demographics (one of those QS2 hack ons), sex, age and the requirement that was there for real names. I think this might even get us past the COPPA requirements – possible, but needs to be confirmed.

COPPA is a US Law governing access by under 13′s to registration on websites – basically if the website collects certain information, or targets certain age groups, it is required (internationally – don’t ask why) to collect written permission from the child’s parents or guardians. It’s a good-feeling policy – not well implemented (the child can simply lie obviously). It is still in force (unlike the much confused COPA).

Anyways, before I went on a rambling spree I was where again? Ah, policies, transparency, etc.

My current bright idea is to look into formalising the management of the project. The problem with a democracy of one, is that its suspiciously like a dictatorship. One man development holds a certain risk of losing sight of what your community wants, rather than what you think they need. I’m looking into the possibility of an initially informal arrnagement where two or three long time groupies and developers would have a little more power in how QS is run. If it works well, and smoothly, I might consider transferring a little more weight. That of course means we would need rules, and some long term goal in those rules (so there’s no sudden policy shifts down the line). I’m not up to paying solicitors, so an imperfect custom agreement is in the making

Related posts:

  1. Quantum Star SE 3.1.0
  2. What next for Quantum Star SE?
  3. The quest for Quantum Star SE 1.0.0 continues…
  4. Quantum Star SE in development again!
  5. More on Quantum Star SE 0.11 (of v3)