Dingding! We have a winner

While everyone is welcome to search for good, clear references to making heavier up-gunned "razees" prior to 1740, in all my years of studying ships I've found none. Nor have I found any reason to suspect it being done: recall that frigates of this era were, generally speaking, small and rather lightly armed. 12-pound guns were almost unheard of on anything with fewer than two decks.

But, do search on: most rules have exceptions. Take, for example, the in-progress Hercules. The ship after which she's modelled (Ilderim/Pommern) was exceptional in being armed with a main battery of 18-pounder guns. Where accurate, reliable plans can be found for such contrivances, we can consider them for the game and judge a specific project proposal on its own merits.

Better to hear the questions than to worry about embarrassment.

The forums are one source of information, but they have their own slant. We have impromptu dev chats in the game to also get info, and we often get a different set of issues from that source. I'm not saying that one is right and the other is wrong, just that it's important to have a number of different ways of listening to players so you can get a broad range of feedback.

Also, you shouldn't assume you know what our priorities are from comments on the forum. There's often a non-trivial delta between us deciding on something and when we can talk about it publically (depending on the subject). I think this week will be an example of something along those lines.

Ok, I'll check on this tomorrow.

Submissions that are consistently passed over for other User Content in the voting process are sent back to you for more work. You should receive an email to that effect. So far, we've only seen content sent back because it didn't follow our user content guidelines and would be inappropriate for the game as a result.

We're pretty well stabilised with the following trends under UC 2.0:

* User Content moves from "In Voting" to "Pending Approval" within one week, if it's not sent back automatically for more work.

* "Pending Approval" items get reviewed within a day or two of achieving that status.

* Once final approval is made, content is ready in-game at the submitter's next login.

Additionally, since putting UC 2.0 into place, we actually have resources and ability to tune the system further, ensuring flags and sails may be processed in some way within a week of posting.

Given all this, and given that much of this thread pertains to the "old system" which is no longer in place, I'm going to unsticky and retire this thread. So go and submit your User Content -- a good experience awaits you!

That is an extremely well done flag -- great job!

I'm going to repurpose this thread for you, so you can preview any other flags and sails you want confirmation on. Remember, you can submit content "In Review" and link to it using the [ u c ] item-number [ / u c ] tag (minus all the spaces, and with an actual number in place of the words "item-number"). That way you can re-upload your design as you make changes, without needing to re-post to the forum -- and you can put the final version into voting with just one click. Try it out!

One submission is always going to be a hair better than the other in some respect. And with around 200 flags or 200 sails in the system at any given time, the chances of the same two flags or sails being paired up against each other are quite low. If I'm doing my math right (no guarantees here ), the number of combinations for any pairing of 2 items out of a pool of 200 is just shy of 20,000*-- which means you have about a 1 in 20,000 chance of seeing the exact same two designs paired against each other.

Also, FLS needs to remain the sole arbitor of what content is accepted into the game and what isn't, so it's better to let submissions that are "almost but not quite ready" come up for Admin review so we can make that call and provide appropriate advice on how to get a design ready. This would not be happening if everyone could simply nay-say all but the best flags and sails.

Lastly, from what we've seen in the last week plus, the system is working extremely well to sort out the submissions that obviously don't meet the guidelines from the ones that might be appropriate for the game. We see no need to fix what simply is not broken.

* Specifically, 19,900. I got that number via this tool since I'm nowhere near caffeinated enough to actually figure out what 200 factorial is.

No. Reports of offensive material should be limited to flags and sails that don't adhere to our community standards.

Split off of the "questions about the appeals process" thread, since this isn't about the appeals process

A red "no" symbol generally means that the content in question didn't download correctly. If this problem persists between logins, please file a support request.

This situation has been resolved per Flying Lab Software's policies governing player harassment and appropriate administrative actions have been taken.

Now that this specific situation has been addressed on a more permanent basis, the time for further discussion has passed and I am closing this thread.

While it is our policy not to share specific information regarding disciplinary actions, individuals with with further comments are welcome to either file a support ticket or to PM me directly.

Best,
Aether