Sunday, November 8, 2009

Fun With Alpha Waves

I'm starting to enjoy myself on Wave now. At first I couldn't find anything to do that kept me interested for very long, but finding the roleplaying waves gave me something to explore further. And, a few friends are finding their way on the system, and everything is better with good friends. But, this is alpha (maybe pre-alpha ^_^) software, so there are a few humorous quirks. Well, maybe not so humorous...

For example, once you add a person to a wave, you are stuck with them. That's right, you can't delete them. I discovered this after I accidentally added someone to a wave. Fortunately it was a scratch wave, and I know the person well, because any wave member can change that wave, including adding new members. Wave has no access control yet. After a while I decided to add others the wave and just turn it into a sandbox for all my friends to play in.

I decided to do that because of another funny flaw: you can't empty the trashcan so you can't delete a wave. It gets even more strange because waves in the trashcan are still "active" so bots can find and act on the junk waves. I discovered this little quirk when the DiceLink bot seemed have difficulty finding the correct character record sheet. I remembered I had stuck an older record sheet the trash, and when I tried to empty the trash: oops, there's no option to do that yet.

Although these are serious problems, I'm making light of them because Wave is still alpha software, so some things just won't work properly yet. Now if this had a 1.0 sticker on it, I'd be slightly less forgiving.

The astute reader will have realized that the problems are linked. You cannot delete the wave unless you can also delete a user from the wave. And deleting a user from a wave raises whole bunch of other questions. What do you do with all their blips in the wave? Do you just remove the wave from the user's inbox as well? And so on. Isn't software development wonderful?

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