Hello, Runners and Corps!
This is @plural (Jason) from the Web Dev team.
As online play has dominated our play for such a long time, many of us have been talking about things we would like to see to make events big and small run smoothly. A critical piece of online tournament play has been cobr.ai for many years now. I reached out to Johno about contributing some patches and to run some ideas by him. Our discussion led to a different plan, though, and from October 2021 onwards, cobr.ai will be run by the Web Development team here at NISEI HQ.
cobr.ai is fantastic and we are all so very grateful for Johno’s work on it over the years. In fact, we were so grateful, Johno was one of the first two Community Champions!
Now that the move has happened, we are sorting through some of our ideas to separate out the trashable assets from the real choice agendas. Things we have kicked around are streamlined registration processes, integration with jinteki.net and yes, even improvements for in-person events large and small!
Additionally, we are looking to standardize some of the frameworks we use to build netrunnerdb.com and cobr.ai, so we will be making some visible and behind the scenes changes. If you have requests or want to contribute, please reach out on Slack or Discord, or file feature requests or bug reports at the new repository.
Now, let’s hear from Johno himself:
First I’d like to thank NISEI for agreeing to take ownership of Cobra and provide its ongoing support. In particular I’d also like to thank Jason for his efforts in transferring ownership so painlessly. I believe that Cobra remains a great tool for TOs and players alike, but I’ve been unable to dedicate the time it deserves. Under NISEI, I am very hopeful for its future.
Occasionally over the last few years, and very kindly, complete strangers have approached me to thank me for my work on Cobra. I always tell them the same thing: my motivations for creating it were entirely selfish.
At the time of its inception I had organised a number of tournaments and played in an even greater number, and standard practice was to gather in a sweaty mass around print-outs on venue walls or look for badly cropped photos of standings updates on some Facebook group or another. I believed that there had to be a better way!
For me at least, Cobra was that better way. Even better, the community liked the direction too, and it became widely adopted at most tournaments. The bad old days were far behind us! Sometimes it’s good to be selfish.
I hope our wriggly little pal will continue to run many a tournament on our behalf for years to come.
🐍
