Good call. We can post a Round/Mission summary at the close of each Round, just so everyone can see what everyone’s doing at a glance. But @JonasEggeater, I believe, sent out a reminder PM or two to some of the tardy folks, and we’ll keep up that practice. Of course, we can’t make anyone read their email and send in their stuff, but we can do our best to remind them, up to a point.
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@kingannoy and @donald_petersen
I’ve been PMing those who hadn’t gotten selections in on time. The list of who had selected which mission was added to the general spreadsheet “Rank,” which is publicly available. I’ve posted the link before and will again, but I’m on my phone right now.
Thanks!
Great! I had not seen the PM’s of course and remember just totally missing one of the first Space Dragon missions because I forgot all about it somehow…
Good to know there is some sort of reminder system going on, that’s probably going to save my ass at least once. Right now I’m on top of the game and checking the board every few hours but besides that I’m not a regular forum goer, only a sporadic lurker 
Besides that I’m really bad at parsing those timezones so I can’t predict when the next thing is supposed to happen. Maybe there is some sort of widget or website that translates times to local time, I’ll have to look into that later.
Now that we have improved the Discourse PM system to remove some of the stupid we originally coded into it…
Might it make sense to start a PM with just the players of the door game? That would require some pretty good discipline from the PM participants to only let one person (the moderator) reply to the PM (and thus send a de-facto notification to all players) when the play turns are ready.
Not sure, have mixed feelings.
Hmm.
I’d been trying to keep track of things by using the “starred” functionality.
I’d just assumed that it would “subscribe” me to the particular topic, but it turns out the to just put the topic in your “shortlist” of “starred” threads. Useful, but not out-of-band notifications.
But hey, turns out there’s a “tracking” button at the bottom of each thread
As Major would say, “Jolly Good, my jolly chap!”
Also, under your user preferences there are settings to “watch” or “track” all topics in a category
I’m going to experiment with these and see whether they scratch the itch I am having.
Oh look, Jeff just showed up. He must have sensed a disturbance in the force.
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I don’t think so. I know that lots of people (non-players) enjoyed just reading along with the story, and I’d hate to deprive the general viewing public of being able to check out what’s going on.
Excellent advice ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ listen to what @funruly said.
Star (used to be called Favorite until very recently) is one of those ambiguous things. Turns out based on my experience at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange there are two audiences…
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those people that use “star” to mean “HOLY SHIT I NEED TO KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS FOREVER IMMEDIATELY STAT”
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those people that use “star” to mean “meh I might look at this some time again before the heat death of the universe, better put it in a list somewhere”
These two groups represent about 50% of the population each. And they hate each other.
So right now we’re defaulting to the safest thing, which is “dumb equivalent of bookmarking” for the star behavior. That’s also why we changed the name from favorite which implies… favoritism. Hell, I guess we should rename it to “five pointed angular thing” to make it even more bloodless.
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No, I am talking about a parallel PM used just to notify players of new moves and deadlines in the game topic. The other game topic would still exist. Sorry if I was not clear.
Ah, I see. I think I’m going to keep a PM open to remind those who are tardy with submissions, and so that @penguinchris can post the link for the new Google form for each round. (@penguinchris, what do you think?)
That’s pretty much what you meant, right?
I’m trying to think of an advantage and can’t quite. I’d thought, since there was the initial problem of a mass-PM of people being unable to “unsubscribe” if they weren’t interested in getting buried in notifications if some back-and-forth took place, that maybe we could do a throttled PM wherein, if I were the one to create a PM for my twenty players, my PM goes out to all of them, but any responses they type only come back to me. But then there’s the possibility that the question the hypothetical respondent brings up is applicable to more people than just him/her, in which case the other players miss out on the info unless I repeat it. Puts me in mind of a bad press conference wherein the President can hear everyone’s questions, but has to repeat them since nobody else can hear them.
For the purposes of the game, I think we’re best served by the current setup. The players are instructed to post in the latest thread, and when a new Round is ready (more specifically, when the Results of the previous Round are calculated) a new Round thread is started and an announcement is made in the old Round thread to move on to the new one. We have a meta thread for out-of-character game discussion (and, apparently, old car appreciation), and specific player questions have been PMed to me, @JonasEggeater, and @penguinchris. Really, all the players have to do is monitor the current Round’s thread and keep an eye out for PMs, which might not come naturally to some of our newest players, who signed up to the BBS specifically to play the game. (My notifications get sent to a Yahoo address that I don’t monitor regularly, so sometimes I have to actually manually check for PMs rather than relying on the green circle up in the upper-right corner… sometimes she don’t seem to light up when she should.) But so far, so good, as far as I can tell.
The system, I think she is working.
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Seems it might be easier and less prone to e-mail storm if there were a way to over-ride the limit on @-mentions in the initial post.
I’m not saying change your @-mention limit globally, but this does seem to be a use case where we’re developing workarounds specifically to work around that constraint.
I posted some more thoughts on this over on meta.discourse https://meta.discourse.org/t/favorite-vs-like-vs-bookmark/1444/64
Not urgent, just some ideas.
Oh, and another minor trouble I’ve had: I’ve been sending out the link to the registration via PM so as to limit access to the registration form to actual players (though nothing’s stopping them from sharing it with other people, but whatever). The thing is, since the players have been registering one at a time hours apart, I create a new PM for each player… but I can’t just copy-paste the contents each time. Discourse doesn’t want me to send multiple identical PMs, so everyone has had hand-typed unique PMs saying essentially the same thing, which is kind of a drag (especially since they never recognize the degree of artisanal person-to-person attention they’re receiving thereby). Again, no huge tragedy, but it is an additional 45-second therblig per new player for me.
@codinghorror, can you suggest a workaround? No rush, since we’re pretty staffed up now, but if door games like this become A Thing on Discourse BBSes, maybe a Registered GM could receive certain PM privileges specific to the game. Or something.
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I believe that you can add people to already existing PMs. Could you just make 1 PM with the form link, and add people as they sign up?
Would they be notified, or do they just gain access?
Good point; not sure. In any case though, you could start a PM with the first one, then do an edit with each new signup and do an @ call-out to get the user into the PM.
They are notified, though the UI does not make this totally clear. It might be safer to have individual PMs anyway just in case a reply chain accidentally starts.
You guys need to be more respectful of @Donald_Petersen’s hand-crafted PMs! there is a like button for a reason people!
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