Suggestion for a new Realm Role - "Observer"

[JustinThomason]

So, I had a thought the other day. With all of the users in the community banging away on Realm Works, I think it would be very instructive to have a way of soliciting feedback and critiques. I'd be very interested to see what other people are doing with the product, and would be willing to show what I've done if others are interested.

I was trying to figure out an elegant way to do this. My first thought was requesting a new subforum for realm critique, but that seemed like it wouldn't be terribly useful. Then it struck me that we can already share realms with other users.

However, a "player" role wouldn't really get to what I'm after because the user could only see what's been revealed, and a second "GM" role could be problematic because of the possibility of data being changed. However, if a third role was developed - tentatively called "Observer" - that could view all the data and interconnections within a realm, but had no write access, that could fill exactly the niche I'm talking about.

From a community standpoint, I see people either asking for advice or offering to show off their work on the forums. Interested parties could PM to get usernames and whatnot situated. The Observers would have full run of the realm as a ghost who can't change anything, but then discussion and critique could happen either through the forum's PM system or standard email depending on how the individuals want to handle it.

What are the communities thoughts? Would any one else find this useful? Do you think you would use it?

[mirtos]

Yes, and yes.

Seems like it could be done one of two ways:

1. Make a new role as you suggested, that has no edit capability but sees everything as GM does.

2. Make a new way of syncing, a "download only" sync.

Seems like the "simplest" way to do that would to be able to create a "download-only" sync, and make it a GM. So they could edit locally, but not reupload their changes.

This way rather than having to create whole new roles and dealing with changing the UI, all the team would have to do is allow people to "checkout" realms (Im using source code analogy here) and not "publish" changes via their syncs.

I put "simplest" in quotes, because i imagine its still a fair amount of work....

[Vargr]

An interesting idea.

Maybe coupled with "see only what is revealed" and "see all".

When individual character reveal comes maybe "observer" could be added to the reveal list - but reversed (possibly an option) so that I can choose to "unreveal" specific topics.
For me that would be useful - I might not what any random guy to be able to see all my thoughts and topics.

[DMG]

I like these ideas.

+1 from me.

[Imper1um]

+1 for observer. Yeah, I like it.