Changes to the Call of Cthulhu character sheet; what vetting process does R20 use to ensure radical updates are desired by users?

If I could have a R20 rep respond, it would be greatly appreciated. While some of the changes that Orphs has recently made to the CoC sheet are marked improvements, other changes, such as radically altering the UI and UX of the character sheet are less than desirable.  My concern here is that it appears Orphs took it upon his/her self that he/she had the autonomy to change the character sheet in such drastic ways without any public discord. Meaning, I do not see any threads in the forums in which these changes were first discussed, much less shared with the community for opinion.

I know you are looking for an "official" comment and hopefully we'll get that as well... but I would like to offer my experience/opinion on the subject.  99% of the sheet's on roll20 are created and maintained by community volunteers. The person(s) that create the initial release of sheet should be considered that sheet's author and should have the most control on what happens with that sheet.  A sheet author should create a sheet that appeases the majority of the sheet's user base.  Any "major" changes beyond the initial release  should be "advertised" so that the community can give their feedback. When someone other than the original sheet author(s) wishes to make changes(other than the occasional sheet-breaking bug fix), they should contact the original sheet author via PM and/or forum post communicating their wishes. Sometimes the original sheet author moves on or no longer desires to be involved with a particular sheet and in those cases, someone else will need to take over to implement future changes.  That said, they should advertise their plans on the forums for feedback. There has been at least a handful of instances where these types of "courtesies" have been ignored either through ignorance or other...  In these cases, I would recommend a rollback so that a more transparent process might be utilized to get a more desirable outcome.  <inhale> ;-P

What Vince says is pretty much spot on but behind the scenes, the code has usually been looked at from a "does it improve mechanical usage" aka does it improve the function of the sheet. The looks of the sheet or the aesthetics of the sheet have been considered secondary to the function aka function over form. I have never experienced any official vetting other than a possible github merge issue or two and those were my mistakes. I always thought it was proper to include users in the creation or improvement of a sheet so the author can get feedback. The steps I used was Create a sheet thread in this forum. Create a text game with the custom sheet Invite various users that expressed interest in helping with the sheet by providing feedback and making them co-GMs This allows them to mess with the sheet and provide feedback. Create a thread in the game's forum listing your goals and notations of what is priority then marking them completed with a date included. Allow feedback in the thread while the original post is the work list. Update the sheet thread in this forum as you make milestones and become ready to push the code to the github for a merge. I did this when I was working on my sheet and will do it again when I pick it back up.

Thank you both for the replies!  In full disclosure, my weekly group tried out the sheet last night and was pleased overall.  So while I raised concern about ensuring community-driven development remains community-driven (i.e. discussing proposed changes, and not bug fixes, in the Community Forums before implementation) we were pleased with the updates.  There is no nerd-rage here, just a concern that I wanted to raise, should another user in the community also wish to implement their UI/UX. I really appreciate the forethought put into your replies, specifically the suggested guidelines.  Thank you for the clarification.

Hello Rom and everyone else. &nbsp;First of all I'd like to say I'm sorry for any inconvenience caused. As theorised by Vince, I severly overlooked contacting Roll20's broader CoC community before altering/expanding the sheets. It was not intentional, it just never crossed my mind due to rl workload. Going forth I'm going to employ Pat S.'s format (thank you very much for that), to provide access to the community to the changes pre-merge, through the Character Sheet forum.&nbsp; I am planning on making a more formal forum post about this, but for the time being here's the link to the ''Preview'' Game.&nbsp;&nbsp; <a href="https://app.roll20.net/join/4355943/nTz5_Q" rel="nofollow">https://app.roll20.net/join/4355943/nTz5_Q</a> &nbsp;I'm planning on continuing to ''curate'' the CoC char sheets to the extention of my abilities(I am not a proff. when it comes to HTML and CSS), hopefully from now on with the community's guidance. It goes without saying (but im gonna say it anyway) that any changes made will be reverted back if that is the community's wish. &nbsp;Again, sincerely sorry for any inconvenience/confusion caused , will be much more mindfull from now on.&nbsp;

Another thing you can do if planning to make changes, is do an update to the sheet that adds a single line of text to the bottom or top, saying that changes ae planned, with a link to the forum page where they are discussed. Most people who use character sheets never visit the forums, and its tricky to inform people. But they all use the character sheet, so that's the best place to notify them.

Design by committee usually results in terrible ideas and appeases no one. It would have been better to create a new sheet and offer both but at the end of the day its better than it was.&nbsp;

GiGs said: Another thing you can do if planning to make changes, is do an update to the sheet that adds a single line of text to the bottom or top, saying that changes ae planned, with a link to the forum page where they are discussed. Most people who use character sheets never visit the forums, and its tricky to inform people. But they all use the character sheet, so that's the best place to notify them. That is a nifty idea.

Pat S. said: GiGs said: Another thing you can do if planning to make changes, is do an update to the sheet that adds a single line of text to the bottom or top, saying that changes ae planned, with a link to the forum page where they are discussed. Most people who use character sheets never visit the forums, and its tricky to inform people. But they all use the character sheet, so that's the best place to notify them. That is a nifty idea. Indeed.

4AcrossIsEmu said: Design by committee usually results in terrible ideas and appeases no one. It would have been better to create a new sheet and offer both but at the end of the day its better than it was.&nbsp; Unfortunately that's not an option we have. Roll20 doesn't allow game systems to have new community sheets when a community sheet already exists, at least without some convincing reason it should exist. It wasn't always the rule - that's why some games do have multiple sheets. But now, if you want to make a sheet different to the existing one, your only option is to edit the existing one. There's good reasons for this policy, but it can obviously create problems.&nbsp;

Greetings Rom E., For the "by Roll20" sheets we have a process as those are owned &amp; maintained by us. The community sheets such as the CoC sheet do not have this level of oversight by Roll20. Given that such sheets are community driven and made by generous people volunteering their time they are given a wide measure of autonomy. Vince &amp; Pat have offered replies on that topic from a sheet author's view. As the repository curator, I generally look through the pull request to ensure there is no radial disruptive change such as a deleting a significant number of attributes without forethought but when it comes to aesthetic/UI/UX changes that is generally left for the sheet authors.&nbsp; For this sheet in particular I encouraged Orp to integrate his changes with the current sheet rather than making a clone. This can can cause some growing pains but it is a beneficial at the end of the day to improve a single/small number of sheets rather than continually creating new ones for the same systems. My conversations with Orps gave me the impression that this was some one who would keep trying to improve on their creation so I trusted them to make this change and offered to help deploy a hot fix if anything went wrong. The question of how to tackle the balance between user experience and sheet author autonomy has been on my mind since I took over maintaining the repository. We have investigated other open source projects to try to address this. If anyone has experience and feedback with large scale projects such as this I'd appreciate your input. As of the time of this writing our repository has 594 contributors and 635 separate character sheet folder. :) Thanks, Cassie

Cassie said: Greetings Rom E., For the "by Roll20" sheets we have a process as those are owned &amp; maintained by us. The community sheets such as the CoC sheet do not have this level of oversight by Roll20. Given that such sheets are community driven and made by generous people volunteering their time they are given a wide measure of autonomy. Vince &amp; Pat have offered replies on that topic from a sheet author's view. As the repository curator, I generally look through the pull request to ensure there is no radial disruptive change such as a deleting a significant number of attributes without forethought but when it comes to aesthetic/UI/UX changes that is generally left for the sheet authors.&nbsp; For this sheet in particular I encouraged Orp to integrate his changes with the current sheet rather than making a clone. This can can cause some growing pains but it is a beneficial at the end of the day to improve a single/small number of sheets rather than continually creating new ones for the same systems. My conversations with Orps gave me the impression that this was some one who would keep trying to improve on their creation so I trusted them to make this change and offered to help deploy a hot fix if anything went wrong. The question of how to tackle the balance between user experience and sheet author autonomy has been on my mind since I took over maintaining the repository. We have investigated other open source projects to try to address this. If anyone has experience and feedback with large scale projects such as this I'd appreciate your input. As of the time of this writing our repository has 594 contributors and 635 separate character sheet folder. :) Thanks, Cassie Conversations with new contributors seem to get isolated to github with no referral to&nbsp; the character sheet forum. As this is not the first time this sort thing has occurred it would be really useful if new contributors where&nbsp; encouraged&nbsp; to post something on this forum.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Cassie, Thank you for the thorough reply, it is sincerely appreciated. As I noted above, there is no 'flip the table' rage on this end. I am encouraged there is dialog today on the topic of sheet management for community-driven sheets. When considering sheet changes, perhaps there is something to be gained by first determining if the changes to the sheet are functional enhancements (new features or extending an existing feature) or functional aesthetics (layout of components or color scheme). Surely it is well within the R20 team's rights to be the definitive 'voice' on what are good vs bad functional enhancements. You and others on the R20 team have shown to be diligent and pragmatic in review of proposed changes. With regards to functional aesthetics, however, one (wo)man's trash is another (wo)man's treasure. Meaning, there is simply too many opinions (some quite toxic) to find a suitable median 'happy place'. While functional enhancements are easy to define and scope, functional aesthetics have more wiggle room and thus should be changed with judicious forethought.

David said: Conversations with new contributors seem to get isolated to github with no referral to&nbsp; the character sheet forum. As this is not the first time this sort thing has occurred it would be really useful if new contributors where&nbsp; encouraged&nbsp; to post something on this forum.&nbsp;&nbsp; That's a great point, and good advice.

Thank you Cassie for replying and sorry for creating this mess. For anyone interested, I have created a forum post listing the changes accompanied with the link to the preview game. All feedback would be much appreciated.

Orp said: Thank you Cassie for replying and sorry for creating this mess. For anyone interested, I have created a forum post listing the changes accompanied with the link to the preview game. All feedback would be much appreciated. Orp, please do not see this as 'creating this mess'.&nbsp; Far from it, my friend. If anything, your changes bring to light a gap in the process and allow us to determine the best way to resolve this gap with civil discourse. As I posted earlier today, my CoC group were overall pleased with your changes. All is good!

I am glad to know there werent any major issues caused (to you at least). As you say, hopefully this will work in favor of all of us. Please let me know of any suggestions you or your players might have, or if you encounter anything malfunctioning.

Greetings dear commenters, I have updated the GitHub Pull Template based on feedback. This is a small step toward us moving in the direction of a more open communication this post is encouraging. It will be up to sheet authors to elect to use this template and leave comments referencing the questions as is requested in the template. Ultimately there is only one of me to assist the vast number of sheet users and contributors so I can make no assurance that I will be able to throughly review every functional change in detail for quality. I will do my best to continue refined this process and encourage contributors to attempt to communicate with their audience when making significant changes. As for sheet users keeping an eye on the Character Sheet forum especially around Tuesday code pushes to provide possible feedback will be very helpful. :) Thanks, Cassie

I'll just kick in that I think the changes are big positive. Way better than the last round where someone decided bonus/penalty dice weren't necessary and broke the functionality.&nbsp;

For what it's worth, I think the new sheet is fantastic.