Messaging: distribution lists?
Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 1:42 am
I often have messages I'd like to send to a group of people - sometimes these are coincident with the groups I've had set up (e.g., PPANZER.ADMINS), though it might be better if I could set up a list of active admins and just message them. I've probably got 25+ active admins (out of maybe twice that number total) or dedicated players on my servers that I'd like to be in touch with on a regular basis. Basically I'd like to be able to send PMs to these people without going through the trouble of selecting their names every time.
The messages may relate to problems people have seen, players who might have been cheating, known map issues that will be fixed, or, conversely, it'd be useful to enable an exchange of ideas among this group, so that members could easily raise issues without going through me every time. While I could set up a special group (say PPANZER.ACTIVEADMINS), I'd like anyone on it to be able to send messages to everyone else in the group as easily as possible, ideally by just using that group name as the outgoing PM address. Is this possible (well, it isn't now, but might it be something that could easily be turned on)? If not, does anyone have any ideas how to accomplish this - ideally within the BZFlag forums? I suppose I could set up a parallel forum thing entirely outside of the BZ forums, but that seems less than optimal - I can't imagine I'm the only one who might want to do this, and the user names, etc. track well with the fora.
The IRC mechanism *might* be an answer, but that assumes a level of focus and interest that this group might not (at least initially) have, so I don't think it would work quite as I'd like. I'd be willing to try it, but it seems somewhat impractical to me - and I'm not familiar enough with IRC to know if it would allow one to see, for instance, every message since they last read any messages. Most groups I've joined are basically real-time channels.
In summary, I'd like to be able to establish a sub-community that may have a free-wheeling discussion of issues, but that isn't readable by the uninvited (mainly meaning the average player; if the discussions are even marginally useful, I'd have no objection to them being at least readable by a bigger part of the community). One reason not to have complete openness is the sort of response one might get to posts along the lines of "Is player X cheating? This is what I saw", and similar such comments. (If I were to imagine an ultimate solution, the messages would be globally readable, but the names of specific players ("X" in the above example) would be redacted - but that's probably a bit silly to suggest. The value of the list discussions would have to offset the effort required to do this, and I doubt that'd be the case.)
Any ideas would be most welcome.
The messages may relate to problems people have seen, players who might have been cheating, known map issues that will be fixed, or, conversely, it'd be useful to enable an exchange of ideas among this group, so that members could easily raise issues without going through me every time. While I could set up a special group (say PPANZER.ACTIVEADMINS), I'd like anyone on it to be able to send messages to everyone else in the group as easily as possible, ideally by just using that group name as the outgoing PM address. Is this possible (well, it isn't now, but might it be something that could easily be turned on)? If not, does anyone have any ideas how to accomplish this - ideally within the BZFlag forums? I suppose I could set up a parallel forum thing entirely outside of the BZ forums, but that seems less than optimal - I can't imagine I'm the only one who might want to do this, and the user names, etc. track well with the fora.
The IRC mechanism *might* be an answer, but that assumes a level of focus and interest that this group might not (at least initially) have, so I don't think it would work quite as I'd like. I'd be willing to try it, but it seems somewhat impractical to me - and I'm not familiar enough with IRC to know if it would allow one to see, for instance, every message since they last read any messages. Most groups I've joined are basically real-time channels.
In summary, I'd like to be able to establish a sub-community that may have a free-wheeling discussion of issues, but that isn't readable by the uninvited (mainly meaning the average player; if the discussions are even marginally useful, I'd have no objection to them being at least readable by a bigger part of the community). One reason not to have complete openness is the sort of response one might get to posts along the lines of "Is player X cheating? This is what I saw", and similar such comments. (If I were to imagine an ultimate solution, the messages would be globally readable, but the names of specific players ("X" in the above example) would be redacted - but that's probably a bit silly to suggest. The value of the list discussions would have to offset the effort required to do this, and I doubt that'd be the case.)
Any ideas would be most welcome.