forum.webdiplomacy.net

bo_sox suggested this idea in the webdip forum. Add the ability for an admin to send a mass email to all players that are in active games. The text of the email would be allowed to be entered on the admin panel of course, with the presumed use being to send a notification that downtime has ended.

Thinking this through led me to several different thoughts about this...

Perhaps have options for whether to send to all users, all users in current games, or all users in current non-paused games. All users would be way too much for webdip I assume, but for smaller sites might be useful. All current games or all current non-paused games would be more usable at webdip. For the non-paused games it would have to be done before the force pauses are done of course. And maybe an option for excluding players who haven't been on the site in over X number of days.

Right now webdip reports 1491 players currently playing in games. Would sending that many emails out be a problem? Perhaps put a tenth of a second pause between each email?

Also possibly, if we ever added email notification of game messages (phase change, game ending, game paused/unpaused), which would require an opt-in option in the user settings, there could also be an opt-in or opt-out option for server-up notification emails.

If we had a mass emailing feature I would rather keep it very distinct from the core e-mail. The company I work for (with ~2000 employees) has had issues with being flagged a spammer, because certain employees had their redirects said badly (apparently), and we had to go cap-in-hand to these spam mitigation companies and pay to get off their filter lists. Since webDiplomacy is sending e-mail from a free gmail account I really want to put the minimum stress on it (this is why I've resisted calls to e-mail when phases change etc)

If there was some "cloud" service with an API to send bulk e-mails on our behalf, and it was reasonably priced, I would definitely consider building that functionality into webDip as an optional extra interface, but I think it should be kept separate from the core e-mails which need to be sent to keep the site functioning.

Maybe instead of EMail use some Twitter or RSS integration.
I do check my RSS-feed way more often than my EMail for example.