NationStates News

by Max Barry
Sat, 09 Mar 2013

Yes, it's all about the telegrams these days. As the new TG system creeps toward full functionality, rules and game features are changing, clicking into place—transforming, if you will, like how an innocent-looking car turns into a giant killer robot.

Today's announcement is about recruiting for regions via telegram. We've always had very restrictive rules around this, meaning that most of you probably haven't seen a recruitment TG since your nation was first deciding whether or not to make voting compulsory.

But this is about to change! It is now legal to send a recruitment telegram to any nation in the world.

So if you're ready to bask in the glory of having multiple regions compete for your presence, your time has come. If, however, this does not sound all that glorious, it's time to get acquainted with Filters, which are part of your new Telegram Preferences. Filters let you limit the number of telegrams you get and/or block certain kinds altogether.

Recruiter-Specific Info

If you're a recruiter, or interested in becoming one, please take a moment to check out the updated Telegrams FAQ.

Some new rules that may be of interest to you:

• It's now required that when you send a recruitment telegram, you must tick the appropriate checkbox to flag it as such. (For the last few weeks, this has been encouraged but not mandatory.) This is so that your recruitment TGs can be auto-blocked by the recipient's Filters.

  Please note that we now offer Telegram Templates as a way to send large numbers of recruitment TGs without needing to remember to check that box every time. Templates are free to use and have other advantages as well. More info in the FAQ.

• When you tick that checkbox, you may notice it fills in the name of your region. This is to provide a handy "Move your nation to <region> now!" button, and prevent accidental spam. It means that when composing a recruitment telegram, your nation must be a resident of the region it is promoting. It doesn't need to stay there. But it must be in the right region while writing its recruitment telegrams.

• Assuming the rules are followed, it's impossible to send more than one recruitment telegram for any given region to the same nation twice in 28 days. This eliminates the awkward situation where recruiters could accidentally double-up and break spam rules.

• The Telegrams API is now online! This provides a free (albeit incredibly slow) method of sending telegrams via script for people who want to create their own automated tools.

At this point, the only major part of the new TG system not yet online is telegram stamps: you still can't purchase or use those. They will probably become available without notice in a few weeks' time, depending on how many bugs/exploits/catastrophic server failures we experience in the meantime.*

* Facebook has been attacking us. Seriously. Twice a day, they gather an army of several hundred servers and hurl forth 30,000 requests all at once. That's a lot of requests. Not for Facebook. But for us. Stupid Facebook.