Letter from Eingang, October 2000

Miscellaneous Ramblings & News

Dear Eingang, Dear Eingang,
I am in distress.
I spend my life in #Chaos
And my stats are a mess!
Oh, listen to me closely,
And listen to me long,
I need some advice,
Do send it along!

Signed, Chaotic

Thankfully, it's November. With the advent of cooler temperatures, your Games Gang has been busy dreaming up new activities to keep you entertained and amused. Immediately above this paragraph, you see the initial "poem" from our new Dear Eingang, Dear Eingang section on the message board. Yours truely, if approached properly in meter and rhyme, will dole out advice in a similar form. Already the call has been taken up by the likes of Spiritually Licentious. Check it out for a good giggle or two (and maybe compose your own ode!) at http://www.eingang.org/cgi-bin/discus/show.cgi?98/98

The message board is also home to an additional two new topics in October: How Do We Choose Our Nicks and What Is Cheating. In the first, you can learn the origins Eingang's nick as well as GrenouilleVert, _starr, and several others. Stop by there ( http://www.eingang.org/cgi-bin/discus/show.cgi?26/94) and have a browse and let us know how you picked your nickname! In "What Is Cheating," players have a forum to discuss what constitutes cheating in the various games. You'll find that at http://www.eingang.org/cgi-bin/discus/show.cgi?26/95.

Our other online forum, The Ein-Gang Gazette, didn't go to press again last month. Editor-in-Chief Eggs_Zachtly is to be whipped and then tied to the yoke of his computer to produce this month's issue on time.

Just as I was about to give up hope and pull the games from StarLink, we can again access our account there to upgrade the bot software, restart the game bots, etc. Thanks should go to Siegfried, admin of /server denver.co.us.starlink.org, who has been diligently restarting the ChaosBot and pressing the owners of the machine to fix our firewall access. Now that we have access again, all of the StarLink bots will be upgraded to match their counterparts on DALnet. The upgrade will take place during November.

Last month we reported that the Fraser Valley Distance Education School was getting their own version of our MadBot. That project's almost out of beta-testing and about to go live. Their version isn't quite like ours, but is close. You see, we can use the games to improve ourselves. (:

Were you one of the top visitors to Risky Business trivia games on either StarLink or DALnet in the month of September? You can see the full list on the the games.eingang.org site, but here's a listing of the top 3 for each. Notice we have a new person on DALnet, making it into the top 3! Welcome to Risky Business, DebraLee!

Closing words: check out the heads up in the tournaments/contents section below to find out about the upcoming Chaos tournament and our MadLib graphics contest. November is the month of thankfulness; reflect on all the important things that you have. Be well until next month's edition!

Game Bot Development

Thanks to the people who have visited #madlib. We're slowly but surely ironing out the kinks. Please continue to play with him and point out problems and then we can prepare for our Big MadLib Launch!

October saw me tweaking with the beta BogBot on DALnet. The bug that allowed your scores to be entered into the score list as your name was currently typed has been fixed and I amalgamated all of the scores properly. Next fix is to make it display your names as you've really typed them rather than just in plain lowercase.

Contests/Tournaments

Woo-hoo! We have both a contest and tournament to announce! We're pleased to announce the first ever 30 Above Versus 30 Below Chaos Tournament! It's time for the young ones to strut their stuff against us golden oldies. Players 29 years of age and younger play on the 30 Below teams and players 30 years of age and older are on the 30 Above teams. The tournament will take place on Saturday, November 11th with registration open between November 1st and November 10th. Check out the rules and sign up today on the Chaos tournament page at http://games.eingang.org/Information/chaostourn.html.

Fancy yourself an artist? We're looking for players to submit designs to top the MadLib FAQ and other MadLibParphernalia. Those pages are feeling lonely without a mascot/logo. You'll find the rules and instructions at http://games.eingang.org/Information/madlibtourn.html.

Tip of the Month

This is our third installment into how ChaosBot decides whether an answer is correct. This month we'll talk about punctuation. Yes, you know that stuff like commas, apostrophes, periods and suchlike. You've no doubt noticed that some answers contain apostrophes or periods. For example, the Sonny & Cher song "I've Got You, Babe". What happens when the answer the bot has looks like that? Puctuation like apostrophes and commas are simply removed. Dashes are turned into spaces and periods (so I just discovered by looking at the source code) are not touched at all. What this means, is that, at the moment, you can type an answer with or without commas or apostrophes and it will be OK. You need to include periods, if they're appropriate, unless the category writer included an answer without them. Stay tuned next month for our last installment!

Category News

Whew! Almost double the number of Chaos category submissions from last month, a whole 51! Most of those were received during the first half of the month and have already been processed, resulting in 22 categories being moved into regular play from our Tournament Set, including: Czech Hockey Players, NHL Top Scorers, Contains Pass, Aerobic Steps, Dollar Countries, Stones and Metals, Digimon Monsters, Burials, and Land Places. Look for those on a server near you!

Category Submission Winners

So, with all those category submissions, who submitted the most? It was Reebs with 17! IForget tried to keep up and managed to submit 10. Keep us the good work, guys!

Your Game Administrators & Channel Ops

We have two new #Chaos ops on DALnet: GrenouilleVert and IForget. Give them a warm welcome. GV's written a little story about the origin of her nickname. Check it out on the message board.

There are no operator applications currently being considered but we saw the reappearance of ops who have been gone for a while: MARSIAN (from our GalaxyNet days) and Obie and Buca... The missing guys! Welcome back!

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 there will be an Ein-Gang Gazette for November. Cross your fingers!

Contact Us Summary

Until next month, I remain...
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