Letter from Eingang, June 2000

Miscellaneous Ramblings & News

June is already past us with my birthday and my 1st-year anniversary almost a dim memory already. Thanks to Kelleigh` for posting her best wishes as a message and as a channel topic. Nice not to be forgotten! June also saw me returning from my "two-week" vacation back to the United Kingdom where I promptly was thrown into the rat-race of finding a new place to live. Cross your fingers for me that everything works out or I could be typing next month's version from the local park.

Another month goes by and we're still talking about what to do about Chaos categories. I'm leaning towards putting them into play for a period of time and rotating them back in at a later date. Lots of categories aren't really time dependent, like Ancient Peoples. Time-dependent categories could be rotated out permanently after their exposure. Do you have an opinion? Let us know what it is by visiting http://www.eingang.org/cgi-bin/discus/show.cgi?29/80

Last month I mentioned that I was working on upgrading the message board software. The upgrade is complete. If you're a registered user of the board, you can visit the "Edit my profile" section to indicate which areas you'd like to receive e-mail copies of messages from and you'll then be able to reply by e-mail. Check it out at http://www.eingang.org/discus/.

We're still having a problem accessing the game bots that run on Starlink. That means that we haven't been cleaning out the scores at month end and we can't restart a bot that doesn't come back on its own. I've written again to my admin contact for that machine, asking for the problem to be remedied.

It's the summer and we're starting to take vacations. Eggs is gone for the last week of June. Chatter and I are going to Venice for a week from the 20th of July (my anniversary present to him). I'll be out of e-mail contact probably while in Venice. You can, however, as usual, send urgent problems to problems@eingang.org

Game Bot Development

No news is not good news. I didn't have any time again this month to do any bot development at all although I have a huge list of things to do.

There's probably a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes that you don't realize. For example, this month I've made a little program that analyzes any given scores file and produces formatted HTML output for The Ein-Gang Gazette of the top ten scores or the top ten number of wins in that month.

Tip of the Month

When writing Chaos categories, try to include as much information as possible. For example, if you're writing a category about films a certain actor/actress has appeared in, include the name of the film and the year it was released in North America (this info is easily obtainable from the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com)). You would then have a set of answers that would look like:

Good Will Hunting (1997)|Good Will Hunting

The first answer is the answer that's displayed on the screen either when nobody has guessed a correct answer or when listing correct answers at the end of a round, so the first one should contain all of the information and the second answer should be a shorter form of what's actually acceptable for someone to type in. Keep this in mind and we'll all learn more!

Category News

Luckily for me, June has been quieter in terms of category submission. We received only 27 this month for Chaos.

Category Submission Winners

In Chaos, the #1 submitter of categories was zzwi with 11 new categories submitted. In second place, congratulate nearlywild who submitted 4 new categories. Finally, in third place, it was JazzTon3_Girl with 3.

Risky Business was mostly quiet last month, so we don't have a winner to report. Thanks to all the category writers! Will the top category submitter for Chaos or RB be you next month?

Your Game Administrators & Channel Ops

No new channel operators this month although we did have a few applications.

If you know anyone who might make a good channel operator for one of our games, encourage them to apply. You can apply via an instantly marked application form on the Games Web Site at http://games.eingang.org/Information/operators.html.

Finally, did you know that there's a list of channel operators on our Web site? You can find it at http://games.eingang.org/Information/operatorslist.html. If you're an active operator and your name isn't listed, send some mail to eingang@eingang.org.

Rumours

Rumour has it that we don't have any rumours this month at all. Must be all that hot air!

Contact Us Summary

Until next month, I remain...
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