I’ve recently found and fixed some bugs in the “Don’t leave spare seat” configuration setting that lead me to believe that no one was using it - or they’d tried and given up.
I’ve taken the opportunity to change it in a way that makes it make more sense, but is not backwards compatible with the old settings.
The setting now lets you list quantities of seats to not allow to be left, qualified by exceptions based on role or user status, and the percentage of the capacity remaining.
If you set the setting to
3,1
then it won’t allow anyone to leave a block of 3 or 1 seats if it can help it.
If you set it to
3 (Operator), 1
Then it won’t allow anyone except operators to leave a block of 3 seats, and it won’t allow anyone at all to leave a single seat.
If you set it to
3 (Operator|Public<50),1(Operator<50|Public<10|Special Access Requirements)
then it won’t let anyone leave a block of 3 seats unless they’re logged in as an operator or they’re a member of the public and there are fewer than 50% of the seats remaining, and it won’t let anyone leave a single seat unless they’re an operator and there are fewer than 50% of the seats remaining, they’re a member of the public and there are fewer than 10% of the seats remaining, or they are logged in as a user with the “Special Access Requirements” status.
This is obviously slightly beyond the outer limit of “configuration that I can cram into a single formatted text field” rather than giving it a proper UI and database tables of its own. But I’m loathe to do that unless it turns out lots of people want to reconfigure this all the time. My feeling is that it’s a set-and-forget thing so it doesn’t need to be as user friendly, as 99% of the time Monad will set it during implementation and then it’ll be left alone.