DEVONIAN: "Perhaps, there should be some [rankings] penalty for inactivity. If players lost points for every month they did not participate in a game, they might join games just to maintain their position."
DR. RECOMMENDED: "Most of all, I would really like to see a “use-it-or-lose-it” component to the rankings. Players should be encouraged to play. Can we install a program that would determine whether a player is active or inactive (has been active in a game within previous 3 months, or 6 – just throwing numbers out there)? If a player becomes inactive, they lose ELO points over time. 5 per week? We could also split out a separate HoF page with players ranked by their all-time highest rating, and/or an active players ranking page, etc. Just looking for simple ways to give different people what they want. Ultimately though, it comes down to removing the disincentive for top players to join games with newer/lesser-ranked players."
The vDip HOF list is littered with frozen scores of players who no longer play here. Something needs to be done to clean this up. I like these ideas a lot. An Active Players HOF would be less preferable. On another point about ratings, I think you only hurt yourself if you're playing for ratings. Diplomacy is meant to be fun, and players shouldn't be passing up games, change their style of play, or making choices based on ratings. Ratings are a nice gauge of overall skill levels, but are by no means strictly accurate, invaluable, or what you should be working for here.
RUFFHAUS: "This is something that VDiplomacy lacks. The rules are loosey goosey about what is and what is not appropriate. For example, there is no specific rule about waging grudges or continuous alliances across games here. There is some lip service paid to it, but it's really not sufficiently explained that this behavior is improper."
The Etiquette page could definitely use an update.
DECIMA LEGIO: "I'm asking because I don't really know and I did not follow closely the website evolution in the last year: Who's in charge now? Is there an admin substituting Oli temporarily? Did Oli assign some of his functions to someone before missing from here? Who's the current mod team?"
That's a real roadblock to everything the community wants to do here. At the next checkpoint, is there anyway the Mods can be given the ability to do more than just troubleshoot?, I.e., implement new variants and add/change features.
ENRIADOR: "3) Preference-based method of choosing a power. Random have its uses but you may end up playing a power you absolutely hate (and vice-versa; you might want to try out a specific power to improve on it but get another one), and First Come First Served has the obvious disadvantage of letting the latecomer(s) with absolutely no options. By ranking your favorite powers, everyone get a reasonable chance of playing as the power they want to play as. It's a win-win in every aspect. PlayDiplomacy do this if I remember well."
Great idea, a little bit of Random and Choose Your Own really. I like it and it would make a nice option.
MAUCAT: "The score system is an impedement also to play some funny variants where some nations are unplayable in term of sopravvivence and victory, the score system creates also problems playing a non Anonymous game where the low score players team up against the higher score player."
Ratings for the "funny" or imbalanced variants, like Rinascimento, have taken this into account. Weaker powers get more for winning, and lose less for losing and vice versa than in balanced variants (somewhere in the Forum, Oli has explained this). I believe Chaos and Chaoctopi (and possibly other similar, craaazy variants) are exempted too. That said, playing any larger game will have a greater chance of having a larger effect on your rating than a smaller game, since there are more opponents to account for. And your second point is one of the reasons I almost always play Anonymous.
YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH: "I would say that the win loss percentage should not be affected by unrated games. That's the one that annoys me."
Didn't realize that. That makes no sense. This should be an easy fix though.