inform alliance tech of changes

[Will]

Since it's a somewhat recurring theme, I'll give this it's own thread...

Please can there be a flow of information somewhere regarding what PA Team might consider to be "minor" changes to the game. The following are merely examples of situations that would have benefited from the aforementioned flow of information, had there been any.

Today the official #Scans bot had its IP address blocked due to an unknown requirement to use so-called "lightweight" URLs when parsing scans. If this restriction had been publicised to alliance techs, there would have been no problem. [edit: Thank you Fiery for clarifying the situation, it was not my intention to specifically blame PA Team for this as I hope can be seen from my careful wording.]

It also turns out that many alliance techs are even unaware of these lightweight scan URLs that could save them all plenty of bandwidth. I have been using these since November 2009, not because of any bandwidth concerns or any announcement from PA Team but because I happened to notice them being used while I was scanning. To those that want to know, you just add "&inc=1" to the end of scan and group URLs and all the HTML surrounding the scans will be omitted.

As I suggested in another post, an RSS/ATOM feed would be nice so people can subscribe to it if they're interested (I believe this would be easy to achieve by creating a new section in this forum for tech announcements) although actual commit logs from version control might be less prone to missing anything. Alternatively, a mailing list, moderated IRC channel or even just more detail on the "Changes since last round" page of the manual. [edit: maybe not mailing list or IRC, archived they are not.]