Ok, some more info, and then a question. You guys found the info on naming your region--it's based on how long your nation has been around/population. You'll notice that everyday your population goes up by at least a million. And when you reach 100 million you can then give yourself a custom name, as long as it doesn't offend the game's obscenity filters. Blatant use of four-letter words won't fly, but I had an ally a while back whose nation was called "Phukface" who was a UN delegate. But then he had some employment issues, and lost his internet, then his nation was deleted for lack of participation. Which brings me to the next topic.
Inactivity and Deletion
The game automatically deletes nations that are inactive for 28 days. However, if you put your nation's settings on Vacation, your nation has a 60 day period before getting deleted.
If your nation does get deleted from inactivity, it isn't the end of the world for your citizens, just as long as you registered an email address when you founded your nation. Contact an administrator
here, scroll the "Problem Description" menu down to "restore a deleted nation" and tell them the name of your nation and your email address. They will email you and reactivate your nation free of charge.
It will come back in the Lazarus region, land of the resurrected nationstates, at which point you can have the helicopters fly you back to 0000 Freethought.
Adminstrators and Mods
If you are getting abusive telegrams or the region gets crashed by unwelcome migrant states who hijack the UN delegate chair then start illegally ejecting people, just contact a
mod and they'll usually straigten everything out in a day or so.
Invaders, Defensive Alliances, and Griefing
Invading a region and taking over is a time-honored tradition in NationStates, and there are entire regions that specialize in that. As long as the invading force doesn't eject/ban the original inhabitants, or illegally gained access somehow to the delegate position or the password (i.e. griefing), swarming a region and hijacking the delegate position via legitimate endorsements does not constitute a violation of the game's rules. Meanwhile there are other groups of nations who have dedicated themselves to forming defense alliances that try to oust the invaders and restore power to the original regional inhabitants.
In other regions I belong to that aren't terribly active, several times the region has been invaded, counterinvaded, and restored in about 2 or 3 days--and no one even notice since everyone there only stopped in to check on their nations once or twice a week. Once we were all ejected, sent to the Rejected Realms by the invaders, then the incident was reported by a defensive alliance who had the invaders banned and gotten the admins to restore us--before any of us even realized it. Kind of like coming out of a blackout to find out you were married and divorced over the weekend...
It is part of the gameplay (if you want to) to form alliances with other regions for the purpose of mutual defense and for mutual support of UN proposals--this often takes place through the medium of telegrams. Also, recruiters for other regions may send telegrams or even temporarily join in order to spam the Civil Headquarters with adverts for their regions. This used to be a time-honored means of building up new members, but recently the powers that be limited Civil Headquarters Spam to the Pacific and the Rejected Realms. Still, some people still do it. There are also bizarro nations, like the NationStates Bunny, whose entire
raison d'être is to briefly visit every single region in the game, but otherwise are mostly harmless.
Like joining the UN, all this is left up to the individual. As individual states you can respond to offers to form alliances or join another region, or not, and the same goes with our region. We can form alliances and even go off and invade other regions if we want to. Or just stay at home and spam the Civil Headquarters. The game doesn't place many demands other than just showing up once a month to keep the place open.
Regional Influence
The "Regional Influence" monitor was a recently added innovation, which makes it a bit more difficult for renegade invader nations to oust entire communities of longtime inhabitants of a region or seriously mess things up. With the exception of the founder, UN delegates use up a certain amount of influence in order to do anything in the "Regional Settings," like change the World Factbook Entry (which can be easily vandalized by invaders) or eject member nations with significant regional seniority.
At the moment, no one else can "Enter Regional Control," which means that even if we did get swarmed, invaders wouldn't be able to do much, or anything, actually. However, I would be happy to open up the regional controls to our UN delegate if you guys want me to.
Informal Poll:
___Yea to opening regional control to the UN Delegate.
This will allow the delegate to be able to set a password, eject/ban member states, and change the World Factbook. It also means that should we get invaded, the new UN delegate chosen by the invaders would also have this access.
___Nay to opening regional control to the UN Delegate.
This would leave things the way it is, with only the founder (myself) having access to the aforesaid controls. It would make our region unappealing to invaders since the whole point of invading a region is to gain access to the controls, but also means that no one other than myself has access to them.