I have accepted His Majesty's invitation to join this group, and I am honoured to serve my country. 

I have been a harsh critic of the failures of this Government, which has presided over a sharp drop in the immigration rate, but it would be unpatriotic to only sit back and criticize.  This is a great opportunity to help step in and fix things a bit, and I applaud His Majesty for recognizing the needs of the moment.  People from across the political spectrum must realize the extent of this crisis, and rise to meet the challenge.

Let's change the direction of things, and get Talossa humming again.  ¡Sà viva noastra Regeu!

Do we think the whole kit and kaboodle of our harassment laws should be refined with an eye towards this reform, or do we want to move forward with a new specific charge intended for this use-case?  I'd lean towards the latter, but I'm open to either possibility.

Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN-GC on July 02, 2025, 04:42:41 PMBTW, you guys may be amused to learn that an ¡Avant! legislator who's a less regular Witt follower asked me what in blazes "this word salad" was supposed to mean, referring to 61RZ17 :D

Someday, this stuff will be in history books, and it will be very funny.

Wittenberg is an amazing tool that works really well, and I am very grateful to our hardworking tech folks who have made it possible.  (Do I remember right that Etho set it up?)

I don't know what I would want it to do that it doesn't already do.

7.2.4. Contempt of court. Contempt of court is a serious misdemeanour consisting of intentional:
7.2.4.1. Misconduct in the presence of the court which interferes with a court proceeding or with the administration of justice, or which impairs the respect due the court;
7.2.4.2. Disobedience, resistance or obstruction of the authority, process or order of a court;
7.2.4.3. Refusal as a witness to appear, be sworn or answer a question; or
7.2.4.4. Refusal to produce a record, document or other object.

Yeah, I like it.  Makes sense to me, particularly looking at 7.2.4.1.

We need a fresh look at our immigration process.  To apply to immigrate to Talossa, prospective citizens must complete an expanding form that requires an enormous amount of work to fill out -- someone answering thoughtfully will end up spending half of an hour or more on their application, and possibly even longer if they are dyslexic or not a native English speaker.


The form is long and intimidating.  It's expanded over the years.  It looks complicated, and asks a lot of questions.  And it is assuredly not the best we can do.  We need to take a good hard look, thoughtfully winnow down or simplify the questions, and make it more accessibly and friendly.  We need a new approach: our immigration process can be better.

We need a fresh look at our website.  Since the wiki has become such an important part of keeping track of our national story and presenting information to the world, our website has become very limited.  Most of the information was removed, rightfully so, because it was a huge amount of work to keep updating it in multiple places.  But since then, no one's really tackled the problem of its presentation.  We need a redesign and a new look from first principles, to provide easy navigation to information and visually prioritize the most important links.

For example, almost all of the official merchandise on TalossaWare is unavailable at this point, for example, so maybe it no longer makes sense to promote it at the top of the page (or maybe it should be updated).  Or consider the page for La C'hronică: it hasn't been updated in seven months, so maybe it shouldn't be so prominently displayed?  Let's take a fresh look at how we're presenting ourselves, so we can put our best face forward.

We need a fresh look at funding.  Currently, the way to donate money to Talossa is only through a Paypal link.  But there's a host of other free options that we could be utilizing, including many that easily allow monthly donations.  Monthly donations of a dollar or two would add up quickly, and they might allow us to end the undemocratic fees required to run for office -- or pursue more ambitious goals, such as advertising campaigns on places like TTRPG websites or locally in the Greater Talossan Area.

We need a fresh look at promoting culture.  Some of the most popular things in Talossa are regular events and competitions that take place: such as Talossan Music Top Twenty, Talossachess, Ceampiunità Talossan del Rälli, and (of course) the Talossan Cycling Association Tour.  These are some of our most fun activities, all produced by reliable and wonderful citizens.  We should be meeting the people where they are, and promoting and cheering on these wonderful activities.  In addition to promoting them on social media, as is often done, a banner space should be set up on the website homepage to promote them and use them to engage new possible citizens.  Perhaps the Government might approach some of their organizers to see if there was some way they could be supported or assisted.  These are diamonds in the rough, and it will take the barest of efforts to show the world how they gleam.

The Progressive Alliance will provide a fresh look at our web presence, making sure our online tools are being used in the best way possible.

Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN-GC on July 02, 2025, 04:41:06 PMMy first impulse would be to create an offence of "disturbing the peace", which would - among other things - include wilful disregard of Wittiquette and defiance of Witt moderators

I would be open to that. The trick will be defining it in a way that doesn't threaten civil liberties.

Quote from: þerxh Sant-Enogat on June 28, 2025, 08:50:11 AMI would replace "2.2. All Immigration applications shall be written in one of the national languages." by "2.2. All Immigration applications shall be written in Talossan or in English.", as I am not sure that national languages are defined as such (see Article I Section 2 or 5 of the OrgLaw.)

Do you vote to approve the bill now?

@Dr. Pôl dal Nordselvă , what do you think?

Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN-GC on June 30, 2025, 08:43:08 PMI would just like to tag on here a reminder that this isn't over, not by a long shot.

I've restarted the discussion, both in the interest of pursuing this further and as a constructive way to move past the immigration discussion that we're both in right now.  Please check out the summit forum.

Quote from: King Txec on May 23, 2025, 02:54:53 PMAbsolutely.

• First offense: A written warning / post may be locked or removed
• Second offense: Account locked from posting for 24 hours
• Third offense: Account locked from posting for seven days
• Fourth offense: Account permanently locked from posting except for X boards.

-Txec R

This seems reasonable for the most part -- anyone have any disagreement with this basic approach?

I'm not sure about permanent consequences without judicial proceedings.  Perhaps the fourth offense should be criminalized somehow?

It's only been half an hour since you asked about this. Please give him a chance to respond.

Quote from: Sir Lüc on July 01, 2025, 09:15:08 AMRight, I have implemented virtually all of the proposed/requested tweaks.

Thank you!

Quote from: Sir Lüc on July 01, 2025, 09:15:08 AMThe lone outstanding issue is to perhaps collapse all provinces into a single board right below the main Wittenberg one. I am somewhere like 75%-25% in favour of doing that at the moment.

The provincial boards all have posts from the last few months, and that's why I didn't recommend that.  I don't think it would be outrageous, but there has actually been a good amount of local activity lately, so maybe wait on that and see how you feel in a few days?

Quote from: Sir Lüc on July 01, 2025, 09:15:08 AMAdditionally, I am pondering whether we should split the Chat Room into a Hobby/Offtopic board, which would now be public, and an all-purpose private board (for personal stuff and also threads like the recent immigration thing).

That makes sense -- I'd suggest the Chat Room (perhaps renamed "Private"?) could then be a sub-board of that Off-Topic board?

It would be good to get the Government's opinion on this (maybe that already happened in private?) as well as His Majesty's, too.

Quote from: Mic'haglh Autófil, O.Be on June 30, 2025, 11:33:11 PMFor us, a free-for-all approach accomplishes exactly one thing: a ballooned citizenship roll with people who do nothing for two years, don't vote, and then lose their citizenship.

That doesn't... seem very bad?  Casting a wide net and getting a smaller percentage of a larger number often yields a better outcome, in fact.  It's not like we need to feed the spreadsheet.  There's some slight problem with inactive citizens on the roll, but also it's an opportunity for people to circle back to what interested them initially -- maybe get involved in some way.

Beyond that philosophical difference, I think it's good that you guys are doing some stuff.  The self-promotion channel post and the questionnaire post you did this month and in May are good -- there have been zero dividends from the micronations promotion so far, but it's a good effort.  And it will be good if you do end up doing things like advertising in shops.  But this is thin gruel... and it doesn't seem to have worked.  If the Government had succeeded in managing this crisis, then the immigration rate wouldn't have dropped so dramatically.  I mean, one of those posts was only made the day after this thread started and pressure began to build on this issue!

We need to draw attention to the problem.  If you guys are engaged in a lot of secret efforts to fix this, but telling no one and not getting others engaged, you can't blame the people for ignorance of that. The Government is silent on this, and it's taken a full-court press by the Opposition to try to draw attention to this.

We should be trying lots of new things.  The main policy announced by this Government was to "raise the bar" by making it harder to immigrate.  Those paltry five minutes.  Okay, that seems to have failed.  Those five minutes might matter.  But more than that, we should be trying lots of things.  The only thing you could offer that has actually happened was some posts on Discord... does that seem like it's meeting the moment?  Why is the Seneschal saying that her entire focus is on reducing spam?  Is that wise?

We should set goals.  If this actually matters and we want to improve, then the Government should set a target for improvement.  Ideally, the Government could try to improve things, but maybe just set the target that the average immigration rate for the rest of the term will just be back where it was?  If not improvement, maybe the status quo?

Or maybe... maybe we just need a new approach.  Maybe the country deserves a new approach.

Can you point to some examples to help us out?  I would really dislike if that were the precedent, personally, since it seems like a bad idea.

I very much do not want to set that precedent, if possible -- I have several times suggested changes and then had people need further changes (or needed to clarify).  A rule of "you said something and I tried to do what you said, so therefore you approve" seems like a bad rule to have.  I have tried generally to be explicit about my vote in the CRL.

The A-X hasn't commented at all.  Maybe he could chime in tonight?

This bill doesn't seem time-sensitive, and it was only sent to the CRL a few days ago.  Let's not set a rough new rule in its favor.