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Global Player List

Posted: Tue May 02, 2006 11:06 am
by Thrain II
I did not receive many responses from the Mahasamatman & GAB traders (who are not members of White Mithril Team). I sent about 200 emails and got about 20 responses so far. I think the best thing we can do is to get the data we have up to CoE homepage ASAP. This will help us to get more people to sign up if they see progress in this project. I have already spoken with Steffen (who is very busy ATM) how to display the list at the CoE page. We can probably create a sign up form at our homepage to ease signing up for the list.

Thrain II

Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 4:12 pm
by zarathustra
Sergio wrote:Oh well, let's do PM then. I will not be blocked by this, though getting the e-mail list would have been quicker.

BTW, Mark, could you tell me if a mass PMing is considered fair or not? I wouldn't like to be banned, you know Wink Wink Wink , only because this time I'm trying to help the community spamming PMs.
:(

It seems Wolfgang has found out the answer to this question experimentally... and the answer is NO!

I spent about 4 hours trying to argue Wim out of banning Wolfgang from meccg.net, but to no avail. Personally, I don't think the PMs he's been sending are spam, or, if they are, they are at worst very 'benign' spam. His Majesty the Baby would not be pacified, however.

I'm afraid this also effectively ends any negotiations I still had with Wim about sending out a mass email or PM to meccg.net members. He's threatening to ban me as well at the moment....

In any case, I don't think we need meccg.net to continue with creating this list. What we need to do instead is contact Mario Butter (the admin of silent-tower) and ask him to allow us to merge his list with ours. We can then prune out the email addresses that bounce, and with the help of our tech gurus further prune any accounts that do not reactivate after, say, 1 year.

Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 4:24 pm
by zarathustra
Draft of email to send to eBayers version 1.0 wrote: Hello!

Please allow me to apologize in advance for spamming you like this. I hope that the content of my message will show that I only intend to help.

I am a member of the "Council of Elrond" (CoE), the world organizing group for Middle Earth: CCG. We at CoE are currently re-organizing ourselves in order to make an attempt at revitalizing the ME:CCG community. Part of that effort is a project to maintain a Global Players & Traders Directory. The function of this directory will be twofold:

(1) To allow the players and traders to connect to other groups of players in their area, and
(2) To establish an email-list for the distribution of ME:CCG news about World Championships, National Championships, other large tournaments, and other information.

We would like to include you in our directory, but we do not want to spam you in the future. Therefore, we would greatly appreciate it if you could provide us with any of the following:

(a) Your name,
(b) Your physical location,
(c) Your email address,
(d) Your GCCG screen-name (if you don't know what GCCG is, you may find the information at the following link interesting: http://www.meccg.net/dforum/viewtopic.php?t=238)
(e) Whether you want any of the above information shared with other ME:CCG players (please specify which items are OK to share)
(f) Whether you would like to receive the newsletter mentioned above in (2).

We of course promise that none of your information will be shared with advertisers or anyone not connected with ME:CCG.

Thanks for your consideration; we hope to hear from you soon!

<name>

Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 4:35 pm
by zarathustra
Draft of email to be sent to silent-tower list version 1.0 wrote:Hello MECCG-ers!

We at Council of Elrond have some great news to announce:

CoE has decided to attempt to reconstitute itself. As part of that effort, we are going to write a new constitution, which will come into effect in March of 2007 provided either that

(1) at least 100 votes are cast and at least 66% of these are in favor of the new constitution, or

(2) at least 50% of all eligible voters cast their votes in favor of the new constitution. (Note: eligible voters include all active members of any extant MECCG email list, e.g., this one, national lists, traders lists, etc.)

As we collect votes over the next few months, we will also collect contact information from all active players and traders, which will go into the formation of a Global Players & Traders Directory. The function of this directory will be twofold:

(1) To allow the players and traders to connect to other groups of players in their area, and
(2) To establish an email-list for the distribution of ME:CCG news about World Championships, National Championships, other large tournaments, and other information. (Note that this email-list will replace the current silent-tower list.)

We would like to include you in our directory, but we do not want to spam you in the future. Therefore, we would greatly appreciate it if you could provide us with any of the following:

(a) Your name,
(b) Your physical location,
(c) Your email address,
(d) Your GCCG screen-name (if you don't know what GCCG is, you may find the information at the following link interesting: http://www.meccg.net/dforum/viewtopic.php?t=238)
(e) Whether you want any of the above information shared with other ME:CCG players (please specify which items are OK to share)
(f) Whether you would like to receive the newsletter mentioned above in (2).

We of course promise that none of your information will be shared with advertisers or anyone not connected with ME:CCG.

Thanks for your consideration; we hope to hear from you soon!

The Council of Elrond
<member list>

Posted: Wed May 17, 2006 4:40 pm
by zarathustra
Draft of email to Mario Butter version 1.0 wrote:Hello Mario!

We at the Council of Elrond (CoE) are trying to revitalize the MECCG community. With your help, we'd like to create a new email list for Middle Earth players and traders. What we need from you is the following:

(1) The list of registered accounts for the silent-tower email list.
(2) If possible, a list of which of these accounts is bouncing back emails.

With this information, we will create a new list of active MECCG-ers, and thereby alleviate you of any further duties to maintaining the silent-tower list.

Thanks in advance for your cooperation; we look forward to hearing back from you!

Best,

Council of Elrond
<names>

Global Player List

Posted: Thu May 18, 2006 8:23 am
by Thrain II
It seems Wolfgang has found out the answer to this question experimentally... and the answer is NO!

I spent about 4 hours trying to argue Wim out of banning Wolfgang from meccg.net, but to no avail. Personally, I don't think the PMs he's been sending are spam, or, if they are, they are at worst very 'benign' spam. His Majesty the Baby would not be pacified, however.
That really sucks. I am very disappointed in him but not surprised though. It was only a question of time before he would start to interfere with our work. :roll:

In order to avoid further troubles with him, I suggest not to use meccg.net as source of information ATM. Let's get this list started by the other sources we have and once it is running we might have solved that problem.

I received about 20 responses by now but I still haven't had the time to contact the members of my own team. A first batch of database entries will be sent to Sergio soon and I also encouraged Steffen to start working on the online appearance of that list.

Thrain II

Posted: Thu May 18, 2006 9:59 pm
by thorondor
i didn´t want to post anything about this matter before i got any official response from the meccg.net mod-team. now you know that i am banned from meccg.net, that´s okay.
well, i am sure you have an idea of what happened. so no need to add anything. i really don´t feel to explain matters as such any longer. no sense in doing so anyway ...


thanks, mark, for providing us with such excellent written texts. i will make use of it, though i will change the link about GCCG for obvious reasons.

Posted: Fri May 19, 2006 4:26 pm
by Earendil
Mmh. Bad faith from the Netherlands. Again.

Oh well. I guess we are able to do something even without that list.

Posted: Fri May 26, 2006 11:26 am
by Earendil
Here we go! :D :D :D

Attached to this message you'll get a first beta draft of the excel global player list.


PLEASE NOTE! This is only a draft, made with the first names contacted by Timo and Wolfgang and that gave a positive feedback to the contact. So, it is intended only to understand if:
1-The fields are overall extensive... And if they make sense.
2-Data ordination criteria are good.


NOTES ABOUT FILLING CRITERIA:
I've split many fields in order to make ordination easier later. In example, you get first name and last name separated, or you get two entries about meccg.net (presence/absence and nickname). On the other hand, also nation and location were separated to increase ordination power. See the draft: the ordination was made by NATION and then by LOCATION. In this way, even USA states are ordered. This does not apply at the moment for European Countries Regions, but, I'll soon modify the location field even for them.

When I will get enough names, I'll start preparing a sheet already divided by nations. An ACCESS file is also scheduled.


NOTES FOR THE NAMES HUNTERS (Timo, Wolfg and the others):
I already saw, even with these few names, some difficulties about filling up the fields, so I'd like to make some suggestions:

A - Always check about e-mail address presence, because this is the main field!

B - Please ask to divide FIRST NAME and LAST NAME. I got some difficulties with the spanish-speaking area guys because they often use more than one of both...

C - Please ask to divide screennames of MECCG.NET and of GCCG. Now the guys tell us only one nick, but these situations could apply:
- A player use meccg.net BUT not GCCG (or reverse);
- A player has two different nicknames.

D - There were some answers that let me think that a lot of 'Nay' to the CoE newsletter do not mean 'I don't want to get it' but probably 'I do not receive it at the moment'. So please be careful explaining what we are meaning when we ask them about CoE newsletter.

Posted: Mon May 29, 2006 12:42 pm
by thorondor
there is still no area here to start any topics with various stuff.
since the topic has been raised here already, i am also posting here again:

i received an official email from the meccg.net mod-team (represented by wim heemskerk), that my account is suspended indefinately. i didn´t get to know any arguments except that expectations and interests of both parties didn´t coincide.
i wanted you to know this, since many discussions here are also part of discussions at meccg.net or have it´s beginning there. and i won´t have all the informations now any longer.
also i won´t be able to send out any news in my newsletters, that have anything to do with meccg.net, since i am not able to have a look at it.

finally i ask you not to discuss about all of this ad infinitum. just let us be things as they are. thanks!

MECCG Playerlist

Posted: Sat Jun 03, 2006 10:10 am
by DainII
hi@all,

i have some suggetions to make a playerlist more easy & comfortable.
first of all a question to mark: i guess www.councilofelrond.org supports php4 or php5 and has a mysql database. is there only one database? do you have root access to your server (important for backups / scripts)?

i think a centralized web-database would be more easy to use and update.
for the user table i suggest following datafields (nearly the same as in the xls file):

------------------------------
TABLE USER:

UID: We need a primary key to identify a user (=player)
firstname: string
lastname: string
eMail: string
newsletter: boolean :
true: user wants a coe newsletter, false otherwise
nation: string
location: string
meccguser: string
only set if user has a meccg user name
gccguser: string
only set if user has a gccg username
isplayer: boolean
iscollector: boolean
permission: integer or bitcode
normal user have no rights (=0). some user in the database have rights to edit the playerlist (=1). later we can define new permissions for file access, posting articles and so on...
example: permission = 3 => (binary) 011
=> 0 : send newsletter no
=> 1 : create article yes
=> 1 : edit playerlist yes
md5pass: the checksum for the password of an user if permission is not 0. if permission is 0, there is no need for a password.
----------------------
thats only a suggestion how a system can work. the advantage is that this webbased database is extendable, so we can add other entities like artikles, guestbook entries aso. on the other hand function like send newsletter to receipiants in user database are possible.

feel free to contact me.

steffen

Posted: Sun Jun 04, 2006 5:57 pm
by thorondor
today i started to contact ebay members, that have been bidding on MECCG auctions. i wanted to use marks draft, but the communication system at ebay is limited to 1000 letters. so i had to cut the message very much.
maybe mark (or some other native speaker) has some free minutes to do the cutting? i am sure this will be better than my version. thanks.

or maybe its better just to try to establish some first contact and make them curious about what we are doing. no specific questions yet. if someone replies, we will ask for all those infos as mentioned in the draft now.

Posted: Mon Jun 05, 2006 2:51 pm
by jhunholz
Steffen: we do have root access to the server, and I can create another database if we want to store users as you suggest. Would you suggest creating a front-end to enter/view the data? Or just use something like phpmyadmin (which we have installed).

As far as specs on the server, it does have php5 and mysql 4.1 (I will be upgrading this to mysql 5 in the not too distant future).

Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 7:43 pm
by DainII
jhunholz wrote:Steffen: we do have root access to the server, and I can create another database if we want to store users as you suggest. Would you suggest creating a front-end to enter/view the data? Or just use something like phpmyadmin (which we have installed).

As far as specs on the server, it does have php5 and mysql 4.1 (I will be upgrading this to mysql 5 in the not too distant future).
that's cool. i'll design a database and a user interface as i mentioned on my test server. if this work is done, i can install the system on this server here. i will post the current status from time to time here in this thread.

greets, steffen

Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 10:04 pm
by zarathustra
Wolfgang:

Perhaps the best way to make the message shorter is to include only the part up to "We would like to include you in our directory, but we do not want to spam you in the future." Then add: "If you are interested in this directory, please contact me so that we can discuss the details."

Does that make it short enough?