Moderation improvements, Deleted Item/World recovery, full MMC judging footage
Hello everyone!
Welcome to another weekly update! This week we look at some moderation and security improvements we have made, new tool to help recover deleted items and worlds, group management commands and some more highlights from the Metaverse Maker Competition!
[h2]Decorating the Neos HQ for Halloween[/h2]
With Halloween around the corner, we've started decorating our (virtual) Neos HQ with the theme on our last stream! If you've missed it, you can watch the video from our regular Friday stream here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]Moderation and Security Improvements[/h2]
This week we had an unfortunate incident, with user harassing deaf/mute users, posting antisemitic remarks and posting the New Zealand Mosque shooting video in another user's world under the guise of "edgy humor". While we want Neos to be open space, harassment, hate-speech and making light of terrorist attacks is something we strongly stand against and won't allow on our platform.
We're proud of our community, since incidents like this are still very rare at our platform and dealt with quickly when they occur. To help ensure that there will always be someone to help deal with such situations, we have graduated another group of moderators from our internal several-month long program.
Welcome Ryuvi, Sykes, PurpleJuice, Conduit, Cyro, Tatsu Kimiero and June as new Neos moderators! If you have any moderation problem in Neos, you can turn to them. You can identify any moderator by the silver moderator badge:
We have also improved the moderation and security on technical side as well. Neos now has a system to help detect ban evasions, both for global bans of such users and for your own, when you ban an user from your session.
We hope that those tools will need to be used as least as possible long into the future and the primary goal of our moderators is to talk to users and defuse any problematic situations, but continued harassment or breaking of guidelines won't be allowed.
[h2]Deleted Item / World Recovery[/h2]
Given more frequent requests for recovery of accidentally deleted inventory items, we have decided to extend and wrap around some of our internal recovery tools and make them available to use for our Patreon supporters.
If you're a Patreon supporter, you now have access to new function which will recover deleted items and worlds from Audit records for up to 30 days. If you accidentally delete some world or item, this can help you save it! Don't rely on this functionality though, as the recovery might not be 100% right now and it will be tedious on your end to recover a lot of items. It's not a trash bin!
To run the recovery, send the following command to the "Neos" account in your contact list:
Long term we plan to have extended functionality for recovery, such as a proper trash bin implementation and easy to use UI, but hopefully this command will help in case of emergencies.
If you're not a Patreon supporter and you need urgent recovery of an item, you can request a team member to run the recovery for you.
[h2]Managing your own groups[/h2]
In similar vein, we have made changes so Neos group admins now can manage members on their own, without having to go through a Neos team member. If you're an admin of a group in Neos (typically when you requested one to be created), you can now use following commands:
[h2]Complete MMC Frooxius judging footage + more highlights[/h2]
Last week we announced the MMC winners and honorary mentions. However because there were so many great entries, we wanted to give everyone a shout-out and spotlight for participating.
If you'd like to see me (Frooxius) going through each entry for the first time and giving first (but hopefully thorough!) impressions, I have uploaded the complete footage below. Since the overall footage is about 16 hours long (this includes going through all 81 entries) it was split into two parts and timestamps were added so you can easily find your entry (big thanks to Shorty0w0 who has found all the timestamps!).
You might need to open the videos directly on YouTube for the timestamps/chapters to work correctly.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
I've also wanted to give a bunch more entries a quick personal shout-out, since there were so few places available for winners and honorary mentions:
Anyway that's all for this week! As usual, there have been a bunch of other smaller additions, tweaks and bugfixes, you can check out the #neos-updates channel on our Discord to see more details. We hope that everyone had a lot of fun with MMC and great week and we can't waiting to bring you more the next one!
And not to forget, big thank you for supporting Neos and making it into the fun and creative place it is!
Welcome to another weekly update! This week we look at some moderation and security improvements we have made, new tool to help recover deleted items and worlds, group management commands and some more highlights from the Metaverse Maker Competition!
[h2]Decorating the Neos HQ for Halloween[/h2]
With Halloween around the corner, we've started decorating our (virtual) Neos HQ with the theme on our last stream! If you've missed it, you can watch the video from our regular Friday stream here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]Moderation and Security Improvements[/h2]
This week we had an unfortunate incident, with user harassing deaf/mute users, posting antisemitic remarks and posting the New Zealand Mosque shooting video in another user's world under the guise of "edgy humor". While we want Neos to be open space, harassment, hate-speech and making light of terrorist attacks is something we strongly stand against and won't allow on our platform.
We're proud of our community, since incidents like this are still very rare at our platform and dealt with quickly when they occur. To help ensure that there will always be someone to help deal with such situations, we have graduated another group of moderators from our internal several-month long program.
Welcome Ryuvi, Sykes, PurpleJuice, Conduit, Cyro, Tatsu Kimiero and June as new Neos moderators! If you have any moderation problem in Neos, you can turn to them. You can identify any moderator by the silver moderator badge:
We have also improved the moderation and security on technical side as well. Neos now has a system to help detect ban evasions, both for global bans of such users and for your own, when you ban an user from your session.
We hope that those tools will need to be used as least as possible long into the future and the primary goal of our moderators is to talk to users and defuse any problematic situations, but continued harassment or breaking of guidelines won't be allowed.
[h2]Deleted Item / World Recovery[/h2]
Given more frequent requests for recovery of accidentally deleted inventory items, we have decided to extend and wrap around some of our internal recovery tools and make them available to use for our Patreon supporters.
If you're a Patreon supporter, you now have access to new function which will recover deleted items and worlds from Audit records for up to 30 days. If you accidentally delete some world or item, this can help you save it! Don't rely on this functionality though, as the recovery might not be 100% right now and it will be tedious on your end to recover a lot of items. It's not a trash bin!
To run the recovery, send the following command to the "Neos" account in your contact list:
/requestDeleteRecovery
- indicates how long ago in the history to search. Syntax is flexible, e.g. "1d", "2h", "30m", "1 hour 30 minutes" will all work. Default unit is day.
- will filter out any items that don't contain given term anywhere in their path or name. Use
- to recover everything
- You will be emailed a ZIP file with special files representing items of your inventory in the same folder structure. To actually recover the item/world, you need to import those files into Neos and save them again. DO NOT CLEAR YOUR CACHE!
- Maximum recovery time period is 30 days, after this the items are deleted permanently
- This command can only be used by Patreon users directly. If you have an emergency and are not Patreon, contact a team member
- THIS IS LAST RESORT EMERGENCY OPTION! Full recovery isn't 100% guaranteed, it relies on other asset files still being in the cloud or being in your cache to recover fully. Please take every step necessary to make sure you don't need to use it in the first place.
Long term we plan to have extended functionality for recovery, such as a proper trash bin implementation and easy to use UI, but hopefully this command will help in case of emergencies.
If you're not a Patreon supporter and you need urgent recovery of an item, you can request a team member to run the recovery for you.
[h2]Managing your own groups[/h2]
In similar vein, we have made changes so Neos group admins now can manage members on their own, without having to go through a Neos team member. If you're an admin of a group in Neos (typically when you requested one to be created), you can now use following commands:
/getGroupInfo
/addMember
/removeMember
- /getGroupInfo will also list all current members of your group, along with their individual storage space usage
- If you want member's group quota to be only limited by the group quota itself, use -1 as an argument.
[h2]Complete MMC Frooxius judging footage + more highlights[/h2]
Last week we announced the MMC winners and honorary mentions. However because there were so many great entries, we wanted to give everyone a shout-out and spotlight for participating.
If you'd like to see me (Frooxius) going through each entry for the first time and giving first (but hopefully thorough!) impressions, I have uploaded the complete footage below. Since the overall footage is about 16 hours long (this includes going through all 81 entries) it was split into two parts and timestamps were added so you can easily find your entry (big thanks to Shorty0w0 who has found all the timestamps!).
You might need to open the videos directly on YouTube for the timestamps/chapters to work correctly.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
I've also wanted to give a bunch more entries a quick personal shout-out, since there were so few places available for winners and honorary mentions:
- Anywhere Door - this world was a really cool twist on the portal mechanic and really fun to play with. I think by constraining the portals to pre-made doors in the world could be used for some interesting themed puzzles
- Battle Corgis - a very fun entry to play by GearBell! The riding mechanic, customization and interactions feel very fluid and fun to play, it was one of my favorites.
- Blaster Minigame - I really liked the self-contained nature of this game system. Just spawn it anywhere and play!
- Infinity Machine - A very unique entry. I love optical feedback and the effects you can do with them, but I've never seen one in stereo!
- Messenger-pigeon cross world chat - Not only you can chat with other people anywhere, but it actually has a live stream of your messages being printed in realtime in author's room!
- MMC Rap - Another very unique entry. Actual rap song about Neos, LogiX, MMC and the Creator Jam with a good production quality! I definitely haven't expected to see (well hear!) entry like this.
- Reference Clip board - this was a really cool utility that makes it easier to reuse common references and values in Neos. I always love seeing more builder tools being made in Neos itself, as it's a way for creators to empower other creators
- The CUBE - despite its simplicity and being a joke entry, it had a pretty cool atmosphere to it
- WeatherSocket GUI - a pretty cool use of websockets to connect the virtual world to the real one, even if partly broken at the time of judging. I really love the concept of connecting the world with the virtual one.
- Websocket Lights - another cool use of websockets, controlling the smart lightbulb color from VR!
- Club Intensity - a pretty cozy and cool looking club, with nice lighting effects and some controls
- DeepUmi - this entry had interesting dynamics on a fish-looking model, which would stretch and squish as you moved it around
- Domes - a very interesting aesthetic that reminded me of the ~80's 3D graphics. It even had some s simple building elements to play around with
- Floof Gang OwO! - a very sleek modern house with a nice lookout for watching videos together, with parts built with Neos primitives. I love this kind of modern aesthetic
- Golem's Gauntlet - while unfortunately very buggy, this entry showed a lot of potential and work put into it. Once finished, I think this will be a very fun asymmetric game to play, where several players have to fight a giant golem. I particularly liked a powerup that gives you strength to throw trees and containers at the golem and how different powerups actually physically modify your avatar.
- It's a Scale World - this was very clever use of the scaling portal mechanic. I loved how the view outside of the room is the bigger version of the room itself
- Laser Beam - more games in Neos! I loved the arena style and how this game keeps you playing even if you die. With a lot of the games once you die you're out, but with this one it just respawns you and counts the score, so everyone can keep playing until the end
- Leaf: Glider World - a really big world with a cool calming gliding mechanic. The only thing I wished is that it would use joysticks on Index to control, as the touchpad is a bit finicky, but I like how once you activate the glider, it snaps your hands to it and you don't have to worry about holding them up
- NeatSaber - what was really impressive on this entry is that it parses actual .dat files from the BeatSaber modding community and lets you bring lots of existing songs and even has instructions to make your own. I feel that it only needed some polish for the gameplay to give better feedback on when you hit the boxes
- Night and Day - Yet another unique entry! The author has rendered a day & night cycle into series of lightmaps and made them into a video. Lightmaps aren't commonly used in Neos yet, so seeing one that's animated was really cool technical achievement!
- rkgk Museum - Another unique entry! Museum of cool art created by rukigaki. I love how the author is looking forward to the Neos Store to sell their art before we have even finished implementing it, makes us really excited to see artists looking forward to it.
- Sparring Program - A Matrix inspired world! This is one of the most visually impressive entries, with nice volumetric lighting. I love how it expanded a bit on the scene from the movie, making it more open.
- Starry Lookout - A really beautiful chill world inspired by the Vincent van Goth's famous painting. It had lots of nice details and ways to expand the painting itself.
- The Ranch Dimension - RANCH! We'd definitely need a meme category in the future MMC's
- The Shattering - Another cool narrative entry. I really liked the visual style of it and how it forced some exploration
- Viking climb outpost - Another climbing map. I really liked how this one was nature based, giving it interesting visual variety. It even had a really challenging section, with an easy option and hidden TV room
Anyway that's all for this week! As usual, there have been a bunch of other smaller additions, tweaks and bugfixes, you can check out the #neos-updates channel on our Discord to see more details. We hope that everyone had a lot of fun with MMC and great week and we can't waiting to bring you more the next one!
And not to forget, big thank you for supporting Neos and making it into the fun and creative place it is!