(Caveat: I don't lurk in this forum, so apologies if i'm repeating something from months ago)
I'm a PBEM player, as a decent number of 'Poly members are, and we ran into an interesting (tho not technically Poly related) problem the other day: in this thread you will see the problem.
Basically, not everyone has perfectly happy email 100% of the time (in fact several players here had problems), and some people change theirs rather quickly without time to tell others immediately. All of these things involve a bit of a delay, and sometimes cause pretty serious problems in the advancing of games. People can post saves, but that gets tiresome.
Where 'Poly comes in: It would be really cool if 'Poly had, as a PLUS option, an "email forwarding" service (or heck, an actual email account, but that might be a bigger bag than MarkG wants to open). Basically, in your Profile, you set your primary email address. Then, people can send emails to "username@apolyton.net" or something similar. That email gets forwarded to your primary email service without it ever sitting in an Apolyton inbox. What it solves are several problems:
1. Apolyton.net isn't on any spammer lists (I hope), so your email gets through fine (and you can even set a filter to allow all @apolyton.net mail)
2. You can change your email address in your profile and then still get your turns (and your other Civ related email) on time.
3. You don't have to post your real email address online, thus reducing the chance of spam
4. You don't even have to post your email address at all -- ie, if I know that Wittlich comes after me and I don't have his email addy, I can just send it to Wittlich@apolyton.net, and it'll get there A-OK. Makes starting games faster.
5. It's easy to filter game turns into a folder -- just filter all incoming from @apolyton.net into one folder!
Admittedly this might increase server load a little (heck, might a lot, i have no idea what email server load would look like), but it's not going to be substantially different than posting a save (which is the option now for troublesome things), and would probably increase PLUS subscriptions (perhaps paying for better servers!) You'd not need additional storage space (or much, anyways) because it would automatically forward immediately -- or heck you could set it to forward at the next "lull" in server processing cycles slash network traffic (I presume these happen at a minimum every 10 minutes, which is a reasonable time for turn forwarding; if you want to play faster, then of course you set up direct sending w/o going through 'Poly).
Anyways ... Thoughts?? Has this been suggested before???
Thanks!
-Snoopy 369
I'm a PBEM player, as a decent number of 'Poly members are, and we ran into an interesting (tho not technically Poly related) problem the other day: in this thread you will see the problem.
Basically, not everyone has perfectly happy email 100% of the time (in fact several players here had problems), and some people change theirs rather quickly without time to tell others immediately. All of these things involve a bit of a delay, and sometimes cause pretty serious problems in the advancing of games. People can post saves, but that gets tiresome.
Where 'Poly comes in: It would be really cool if 'Poly had, as a PLUS option, an "email forwarding" service (or heck, an actual email account, but that might be a bigger bag than MarkG wants to open). Basically, in your Profile, you set your primary email address. Then, people can send emails to "username@apolyton.net" or something similar. That email gets forwarded to your primary email service without it ever sitting in an Apolyton inbox. What it solves are several problems:
1. Apolyton.net isn't on any spammer lists (I hope), so your email gets through fine (and you can even set a filter to allow all @apolyton.net mail)
2. You can change your email address in your profile and then still get your turns (and your other Civ related email) on time.
3. You don't have to post your real email address online, thus reducing the chance of spam
4. You don't even have to post your email address at all -- ie, if I know that Wittlich comes after me and I don't have his email addy, I can just send it to Wittlich@apolyton.net, and it'll get there A-OK. Makes starting games faster.
5. It's easy to filter game turns into a folder -- just filter all incoming from @apolyton.net into one folder!
Admittedly this might increase server load a little (heck, might a lot, i have no idea what email server load would look like), but it's not going to be substantially different than posting a save (which is the option now for troublesome things), and would probably increase PLUS subscriptions (perhaps paying for better servers!) You'd not need additional storage space (or much, anyways) because it would automatically forward immediately -- or heck you could set it to forward at the next "lull" in server processing cycles slash network traffic (I presume these happen at a minimum every 10 minutes, which is a reasonable time for turn forwarding; if you want to play faster, then of course you set up direct sending w/o going through 'Poly).
Anyways ... Thoughts?? Has this been suggested before???
Thanks!
-Snoopy 369
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