So it seems to me that there are two independent problems here. First: someone can upload a broken hold; second: someone can break a hold post-upload.
I feel as if there's not a good solution to the first problem; some of the ones eytanz suggests above are decent, I suppose, but in truth I feel that community pressure goes a long way.
(On further reflection, the "
ban on further Holds uploads"
may be a good idea--it'd certainly prevent a single new architect from suddenly flooding the Holds board with low-quality holds. To name names: Tokyokid's first three hold uploads came in two days in early May, one of which was the now-infamous and grammtically-incorrectly-titled Roaches Revenge, the other two of which have ratings of
5.3 and
3.0, along with much discussion of what's wrong with them.)
---
Now, for the second, however, how does the following sound?
When a hold is updated, the updated version isn't added immediately. First, the spider verifies demos for the updated version. If all existing demos are valid (including there being no existing victory demos for rooms now marked uninteresting), the update goes through.
If, however, the spider finds that an update to the hold invalidates a demo, the hold update has to be manually verified by a Holds Board Moderator. There are certainly legitimate reasons this could happen--the architect decides to mark a trivial room as uninteresting, the architect has to change a conquerable room in order to make it possible to return from the next room, etc. But in the case of accidental or malicious room changing, the HBM could say, "
Whoa, before I let this go through, let me PM the architect and check to make sure this was deliberate and necessary."
I understand eytanz's very legitimate concern that
"Volunteers have spotty records and this requires someone always on the job", though what I'm suggesting requires considerably less effort, I think, than someone checking every hold that gets posted. Perhaps someone (Schick? I lose track of who does what around here; I am a player of very little brain) can give an idea of how frequently an update is uploaded to the Holds board.
So, just throwing that out there.
