(Quotes here belong to Alan Husscroft)
I am brodcasing this in the hopes of some real discussion of this.
:Hmm, I've just been reading that discussion with Mark Cook about how
:much PBEM mail should be kept private and how much should be widely
:broadcast. Not having had the chance to interact with any other
:characters yet, I don't know how big a problem this is going to be
:for me when the main party hits R-alpha. But it did make me realise
:that life might become more difficult for me later on.
Me, too. Sending lots of mail to lots of people lots of time every
day gets outrageous.
:I'm not sure that it's going to be practical for me to broadcast
:messages to the whole PBEM list (or a large subset thereof), for
:two reasons:
:
:1. It's going to take up a large amount of transatlantic bandwidth.
: It strikes me as being very wasteful sending dozens of identical
: messages across the ocean, and I'm concerned that the powers-that-
: be might take a dim view of it.
I agree with your concerns, just in general. I believe in conservation
of whatever resources we have. Especially in this case since the mail
of a lot of the players is paid for by their employers.
:2. The bugs in my mailing system mean that if I send mail to a lot
: of people all at once, some of it will probably bounce. It
: depends on whether people's usernames need to be explicitly given
: in lower case, since I can only do 2 such names successfully in
: any one posting. The rest get automatically translated into
: upper case. You and Carl are already taking up those two slots,
: so anyone else who needs to be addressed in lower case is out
: of luck.
My experience is that some of it will *certainly* bounce. This
rapidly multiplies headaches for the originator and bandwidth, too.
As for R-alpha posting, I can handle that.
:All this led me to thinking: Do you know anyone with the facilities
:to set up the PBEM as its own mailing list? ie. so that I would only
:have to post a message to one address and it would automatically be
:distributed to all PBEMers. I imagine that quite a few people would
:find this useful. There would be an added advantage that you don't have
:to worry about individual players keeping their mailing lists up to date.
:
:What do you think? Would a PBEM mailing list be possible, or even
:desirable?
I can think of a couple, but won't mention names.
Right now I think it's NOT desirable. We get a lot of good TML
traffic out of the PBEM and vice-versa. It would become a supreme
headache for whomever is doing it (unless they like that sort of work)
and whoever does it will have to work intimately with me about some
of the PBEM secrets.
We might discuss changing rules around so there are two or three main
distribution points (these already exist, for the most part), I think
the big problem would be having people limit the number of messages
they send, 'cause of the overhead for the official forwader.
I started out the PBEM trying a double-blind gambit with me doing
all the echoes between characters. Almost instantaneously I was geting
80 - 160 messages a day. Typically, 40 or so needed to go to three or
four other people, and 10 or so needed to go to everyone. I gave up in
about two weeks.
As for the trans-Atlantic bandwidth problem - I'm open for discussion.
Your particular problem, I'll take up with Carl and John and see what
we can do on this side of the pond.
BTW - thanks for forwarding my stuff to Arthur - I *still* can't
reliably get to Ireland. Go figure.
:Alan
- - --
"If I get murdered one more time, I'll scream!" // Richard Johnson
`Mary' from the movie "High Spirits" // [email removed]
\X/ [email removed]