Free Allegiance Forums

R5 has been released and therefore there's a load of old players who could now play where they couldn't before. We have no way of contacting them unless they happen to browse across the forums.

What'd be good would be to ask people to sign up to an emailing list that we could spam very irregularly with big news. I'm thinking that we'd be sending emails out no more than once or twice a year (unless Dev really picks up).

Wouldn't it make more sense to just send out the News? New releases are announced there anyway and we wouldn't have to maintain anything new.

(Of course I'd prefer to just get an RSS feed from News, but... damn you, IPB 2.x!)

The news is updated about twice a week. That's not what I want to hit with this. I want to contact the people who have been forced to take some time away from the game. They don't care if there's a league match this week or not.

We can already do an admin sent mass pm spam can't we?

You name it - we can do it. We can send mail to any group we desire... or based on last visit, join date, or post count. Figure out what you want to broadcast then get back to me.

TB

some of us don't have emails on pm turned on.

I approve of rav's idea and motivation.

@cort: He is right to do it that way. I would never sign up to something that emaild me as frequently as the news is updated, especially if it's something I had lost interest in. i would only be tempted to check the box for it if I knew that I would only recieve maybe 1 or two emails from it a year, the fewer the better. There are only ever a few news posts I'm interested in, and I can see them when I'm on the forums, if I get bored and go away, I'm not going to decide to subscribe to these news posts that I've never been interested in. + people who don't visit the forums don't know about them anyway.
Also, i'm not in with these young kids with their new fangled RSS feeds, i know email, it's simple and I've used it loads, so I will go with that option thank you.

Now, on an implementation note, I think this should be a checkbox while signing up for an ASGS / CSS (or whatever it's going to be called) account (with a very short clear message that we won't send you messages very often at all - give numbers, fewer than 1 every 7 months - and not if you've logged in in the past X (30?) days.
Reasons:
1) NO FORUM MODS
2) We already have email address input when signing up to asgs
3) ASGS accounts are somewhat more unique than forum accounts
4) Adding a checkbox to the ASGS signup and an extra column to the database is easier than adding a checkbox to the forum (see (1) )
5) I'm foolishly assuming that admins can't send mail (Isn't there a checkbox to disable that?), only pms, anyway, not everyone goes on the forums.

Unless you have don't receive emails from forums (different from not recieving emails from PM) then emails should still work, admin emails should power through anything though I believe.

Cort wrote:QUOTE (Cort @ Dec 6 2009, 10:03 AM) (Of course I'd prefer to just get an RSS feed from News, but... damn you, IPB 2.x!)

http://www.freeallegiance.org/forums/index...rssout&id=1

TB

amagad! TB & Cort!

I can easily host a mailing list, software already in place. Just say the word and I'll set it up and grant control to whoever needs it.