As part of the Ship Vacancies discussion I had discussed implementing a centralized, automated ship vacancies/available positions list. After good feedback from the Cabinet that is ready for rollout. I have emailed all Fleet staff, COs, and XOs with a basic primer of how the system will work (please check your spam folder if you haven’t seen it; I used the group contact forms, so the subject line starts with [STF]) but thought it pertinent to post about it here as well.

The new system relies entirely on empty positions in your roster - positions to which no character is assigned. If you want to advertise you want a JO in Engineering, for example, you would make sure you have an empty position with the name “Engineer” or “Engineering Officer” in your roster. You can hide it to keep it from displaying on the MOTD, and it will still show up on the vacancies list. This makes it relatively easy to keep up with - when you have a player leave, simply remove the character from that position (by deleting the character ID from the Character box), save, and that position will now show as vacant and available on the new available positions list.

Please note: deleting/removing positions means they will not display on the list, and neither will hidden positions that have a character assigned to them. Hidden, empty positions with no character assigned to them will display on the list; the “hidden” checkbox applies only to display on the MOTD roster.

The new available positions list will be available to all logged in users and will display the position name (ie Chief Engineer, Doctor, Counselor, etc), the ship name (linked to the ship MOTD), the fleet name (linked to the Fleet MOTD), the ship speed, the AWOL limit for the available position, and a link to the ship CO’s contact form to apply for the position. The list will be filterable by ship speed, by position type (Department Head, Junior Officer, and Swing Position), and by department (Engineering, Medical, Science, and Security). You’ll want to make sure you have appropriate position names and the correct AWOL limits for positions set up so players have the correct expectations being set. The filters determine a “DH” position by the presence of the word “Chief” along with one of the following indicating the position is in a standard department:

• Doctor
• Engineer
• Medical
• Science
• Scientist
• Security

A “JO” is any position with one of those words without the word “Chief”; and a Swing Position is any position which does not have one of those words in it - due to the freeform nature of the position name field, this can lead to some overlap but it gets 90% of the way there.

If you don’t want any positions to show as available on the list, simply make sure you have no empty positions on your roster.

The list will look approximately like this:

A link to the list will be added to the Resources menu tomorrow.

If you have any questions before or after we roll out the new available positions list, please let TECH know using our contact form.

Nathan
TECH Lead