Alex Harries's diary

(This is a *really* boring blog entry, but I have to write it - sorry!)

With the impending arrival of the campaigning season, it's only fair to assume that any unfair advantage a candidate has should be taken away from them wherever possible. Unfortunately for me, given I have fairly wide-ranging access to UPSU.net, this means certain steps need to be taken to ensure I (or a "helpful friend") can't take advantage of this power by turning UPSU into a "Vote Alex" campaign.

The problem is, simply turning off my account would prevent me from writing in my blog, posting on the forums and maintaining my profile, all of which are privileges available to everyone with a UPSU account.

It would also be impractical to "transfer" ownership of my account to another - standard - account, because we don't have that kind of tool on UPSU.net, and it would make a complete mess of the auditing system I've put in place over the last couple of weeks.

So, in the spirit of fair campaigning (i.e. to make sure I can't misbehave when I come home trolleyed from a night of drinking...), I've been wandering around UPSU's code today turning off some of the controls. Here's what I can't do on UPSU.net any more:

• Edit any web pages in the elections mini-site,
• Edit any news articles in the elections mini-site,
• Log into the administration back-end at all - so I can't:
• view or edit peoples' accounts,
• change advertising settings,
• move pages around,
• add, edit or remove the SSI modules - for example, the toys which generate the "latest news articles" code on the elections homepage,
• ... and a load of other things, too,

Tomorrow my FTP access to the site will also be disabled, too, so I won't be able to edit code on UPSU. On the plus side, this means I won't be tempted to spend hours writing and tweaking new projects, which will be great for my sleep pattern (I almost *always* think of a great new tool around midnight which "will only take 10 minutes" and keeps me up for the rest of the night...).

Now I don't have anything to do, maybe I'll actually (a) get on with making My First Video Blog, and (b) start planning my campaign ... maybe!

Big love /al