amanuensis/README.AMANUENSIS.md

Technical information

The Amanuensis config directory

TODO

Life cycle of a Lexicon game

Games can only be created by the administrator. When a game is created, its name, editor, and prompt are specified. The state of the game follows a simple state machine:

• When a game is initialized, the turn.current setting is null. As long as the current turn of a lexicon is null, it is considered to be in a pre-game state. In this state, all settings can be changed by the editor. Once the editor enables join.open, players can join. While the game is in the pre-game state, players can create characters.

• When the editor begins the game, turn.current is set to turn.start. Both of these settings are locked. Once turn.current is non-null, the game has entered the ongoing state. Character creation is no longer available. Players will be given access to the editor, and they can begin writing and submitting articles. While the game is in this state, it transitions from each turn to the next turn, incrementing turn.current. The turn-by-turn state machine is covered just below.

• When turn.current exceeds turn.max. the lexicon is completed. Players are unable to further affect the lexicon.

Article workflow

The article writing workflow proceeds through the following states:

• Active: When player creates a draft, it is initialized with this state. Players can view and edit their active drafts. Admins can view all active drafts. Active drafts occupy an index slot in the lexicon, but the title is elided.

  Players can mark their active drafts as ready for publication, which transitions the draft to the Ready state. If publish.notify.editor_on_ready is true, the editor will be notified.

• Ready: Players can view but not edit their ready drafts. Editors and admins can view all ready drafts. The editor's session page lists all ready drafts for that lexicon. Ready drafts occupy an index slot with an elided title.

  A player can unready a ready draft, which transitions it to the Active state.

  The editor can approve a ready draft, which transitions it to the Locked state, or reject it, which transitions it to the Active state and includes a message from the editor to the player who owns it. If either publish.notify.player_on_reject or publish.notify.player_on_accept is true, the player will be notified in that case.

• Locked: Players can view but not edit their locked drafts. Editors and admins admins can view all locked drafts. The editor's session page lists all locked drafts for that lexicon. Locked drafts occupy an index slot with an elided title.

Turn publishing can be attempted by executing the lexicon-publish-turn command. Automatic publishing is controlled by two settings: asap and deadlines.

• asap: If publish.asap is true, when the editor approves a draft, Amanuensis will check if each character has a locked draft. If so, publishing will be attempted immediately.

• deadlines: publish.deadlines should be a crontab-format time specification. This will be prepended to the publish command and inserted into the user crontab. The command uses --as-deadline to differentiate scheduled publish attempts from manual ones. If publish.deadlines is empty, no crontab entry will be used.

Whenever publishing is attempted, either internally via asap or externally via invocation by command line or cron job, Amanuensis checks if every character in the lexicon has a locked draft. If so, the turn is published. If not, publish behavior follows two settings: quorum and block_on_ready.

• quorum: If publish.quorum is defined, then Amanuensis will check if there are at least that many locked articles. If there are, then turn publishing will proceed with just those articles. If there are not, but there are enough ready articles to make quorum and --as-deadline was specified, then the editor will be notified that they are blocking the turn. If there are not enough ready articles to make quorum and --as-deadline was specified, then players with characters without ready articles will be notified that they are blocking the turn.

• block_on_ready: If publish.block_on_ready is true, then turn publishing will fail if any character missing a locked article has a ready article. The editor will be notified that they are blocking the turn.

• --force can be specified to lexicon-publish-turn to skip both quorum and ready checks.