Letter from Eingang, March 2000

Miscellaneous Ramblings & News

Yes, another month has gone by in the EinGame universe. It was a relatively quiet month after all the hectic comings and goings of February. Nevertheless, there's still news to tell.

I've been rather busy but I found some time at the beginning of March to concoct a new S&M adventure. The latest adventure follows our heroine along the bare beaches of Brighton (and we mean nekkid!). Find that on Eingang's personal web site in the S&M Files section ( http://www.eingang.org).

March saw DALnet play host to another Chaos Tournament. This time it was the Battle of the Sexes, the girls versus the guys. Unfortunately, we seemed to have a shortage of guys. Despite the lack of "manpower", the guys (Goofy Goons) made a respectable showing, though they lost in the end to the girls (Gorgeous Girls). Check out the scores at http://games.eingang.org/Information/scores.html. Thanks to all the players who participated and Eggs_Zachtly and Bronxx who covered for me when I had to arrive late. There are no Chaos tournaments planned for the near future.

Work is still continuing on the Java-based version of Risky Business intended for the kids' site. Kelleigh`, an op previously from StarLink, has been helping out by contributing new categories that are aimed at players between 10-14 years of age. Eggs_Zachtly has been roped into going through our existing category database and picking out stuff that's appropriate. If you're interested in helping us test out the interface or anything else, please drop a line to test@eingang.org.

Did you know you can have our message board (discussion forum) mail you copies of messages when new messages are posted? In order to take advantage of this feature, you'll need to create an account with the discussion forum. To do that, select the "edit profile/register" link from the left-hand menu. After that, it should be fairly straightforward how to get it to mail you messages and set up your own informative personal profile.

Do you think our prizes suck and our channel topics (the one that appears at the top of the channel when you first join) are outdated? Why don't you make some suggestions for new ones? We've put a form on the Web site just for this purpose! Check it out at http://games.eingang.org/Information/suggestsub.html.

Finally, can't find what you want on the games site? No problem! We've added a search box. Use it to search all of the documents in Eingang's games (not yet the Gazette, though).

Game Bot Development

AcroBot: Eggs and I ran a trial of my old version of AcroBot and it seemed to work OK except that it's not currently set up to handle nicknames longer than 9 characters. When I have some spare time, I'll bring it up to spec and we can start trying it out. No estimated date on that yet.

ChaosBot: All of the changes mentioned in last month's letter have been incorporated into play on the DALnet version of Chaos. We're still thinking about the multiple team thing. Nobody commented for/against on the message forum in the last month. Planned improvements in the future include changing all of the inversed text (which might appear as italics on some IRC clients) to regular bold. That would affect the category name display, the category comment display, and anything else currently in inverse text. The bold should make it easy to pick out since bold is almost universally bold across the various IRC clients.

Category News

I'm still waiting for someone to use our new Risky Business trivia category submission form that I built last month. This new form allows you to easily enter up to 30 questions with 3 answers per question and checks to make sure you haven't been too verbose or not included enough questions. You can find this at http://games.eingang.org/Information/rbsub.html. I'll expect to see lots of new categories. (We could use Great Events 1999, for example).

We saw 15 new categories added into play on DALnet/StarLink for Chaos in March. At the moment when you submit a new category for play in Chaos, it goes into our Tournament Bot set. For every new category added to the Chaos Tournament set, an old Chaos Tournament set category is put into play in regular Chaos on StarLink/DALnet. You can see the complete list (updated as of March 18th) of categories in play on the Games Web Site at http://games.eingang.org/Games/Information/chaoscat.html.

We saw 6 new categories added to Risky Business last month. Those were: Easy History 2, 2 new Potluck categories, Oddities, 6-Letter Anagrams, a category on juvenile fiction. You can check those out on either StarLink or DALnet.

Category Submission Winners

In Chaos, the #1 submitter of categories was ForrestGump with 17 new categories, including PC Monitors, Berlin Germany, Paris France, and Logical Fallacies. In second place, it was KidShrink with 4 categories, all to do with various things in psychology/psychiatry. In Risky Business, Kelleigh` leads the pack with 2 new categories: 6-Letter Anagrams and Juvenile Fiction. Thanks to all the cateory writers! Will the top category submitter for Chaos or RB be you next month?

By the way, we had a problem with the online submission script for Chaos in March. If you submitted a category and you received an acknowledgement letter immediately as well as a copy of the category, please forward the copy of the category to cats@eingang.org or resubmit it. It wasn't sent to me. Oops. Sorry...

Your Game Administrators & Channel Ops

We're pleased to welcome _Starr to the league of Chaos operators on DALnet this month. Welcome aboard, _Starr.

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

Renee told me last month that she'd heard that there may be a big Chaos category deletion vote in the near future, but only if sufficient people say that they're going to participate in the vote. Nobody commented at all last month. If you'd like to be able to vote on Chaos categories to remove from play, visit the message board and drop us a note indicating your support in the Chaos suggestions area.

Contact Us Summary

Until next month, I remain...
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