Global Player List

[Thrain II]

Let's have a new thread for the Global Player List as it is not exactly the same as the National Councils Help.

I think it is a great idea to establish a new player list because many of the "old" players are out of the game while there are others who started playing 1 or 2 years ago.

I believe this player list should be part of the CoE homepage, divided into countries as the player list on Chris Cable's page. I know that this is a HUGH project but I think it is worth the effort and it will certainly grow over the time.

So let's summarize the sources of information we can use to gather as many entries as possible:

1 ) Chris Cable's Player List + traders listed on his site (we have to ask Chris for permission of course)
2 ) meccg.net (can that be done by a PM to everyone? We need Wim's OK to do that)
3 ) GAB White Mithril Team + other teams (I have already contacted the head of GAB to ask for permission - basically I have to screen about 6000 members whether they collect Middle-earth or not, but I think here we can find a lot of players we do not yet know)
4 ) Mahasamatman's Trading Page (I will contact the administrator Admiral Mahasamatman to ask for permission to write to all Middle-earth traders listed at his page, about 100)
5 ) TradeCardsOnline (Patrick Gagne from Canada is leading the Middle-earth Forum there, so I will get in touch with him to use this source of information)
6 ) National Council Player Lists if available
7 ) Contact persons in the various countries who are already listed on CoE homepage
8 ) Spanish MECCG Forum (the old one had about 500 members!!!) - I will ask some of my Spanish friends to do a posting at the forum to encourage all players to submit their player infos. I think this will be a great source of information especially for the countries where Spanish and not English is spoken.
9 ) Player Lists which already exist (i.e. Wolfgang's newsletter - he could send an email to his contacts to ask everyone if he/she wants to be added to that list)
10 ) Mailing List (this is rather simple, 1 message and hopefully we will get at least some feedback)
11 ) Everyone's own contacts
12 ) We can design a Flyer which can be provided for great events such as worlds, EC, Lure of MECCG, Nationals. It will certainly take some time before we get information here, but asking all players at Lure to sign up for the player list will also reach players who can not be found by other sources.
13 ) eBay bidders on MECCG products.

Any other sources???

I can take care of 1 ), 3 ), 4 ), 5 ), 8 ) and 11 )...

Sergio, I'd suggest that I gather all the information from these different sources and forward them to you to be entered to an excel file. Later we can use that file to add all players to the CoE homepage.

All we need to start this project is to write a standard email which has to be sent to all these sources. I would like to ask one of the native speakers to take care of this.

Basically, it should include:
What is CoE? (1 or 2 sentences of general information)
What are we doing and what is the purpose of that player list
a kind of data sheet which can be sent back as reply if someone wants to be added to the player list

------------------------------------------------------------
NAME:
EMAIL ADDRESS:
LOCATION [city, state, country]:
STATUS [player, collector, or both]:
GCCG/meccg.net screenname if available:
CoE NEWSLETTER [Yes/No]:
------------------------------------------------------------

We can encourage all recipients to forward that data sheet to all other players he/she knows.

Well, let me know what you think of this project, who wants to assist and what I might have forgotten or what needs to be added!

Thrain II

[Earendil]

13) eBay bidders on MECCG products. I understood that Mark doesn't like this way, but I think it could prove useful to contact "isolated" players (players that do not have contacts with any of the community sources).

since i am keeping track of all the ebay nicknames i have been contacting (that?s necessary, since i want to avoid to contact somebody twice!), i can tell you, that i have been contacting exactly 1947 bidders at ebay germany till today, and i didn?t receive a single complain as reply. and of course i am still an ebay member

That sounds GREAT!

14) web searching for sites and addresses with keywords in search engines.


Timo, 1) was already done by me. The xls sheet I sent once to the CoE contains ALL the players from the Chris Cable list. If you can manage to get it, this is all work already done. If you need it, I can send it to you (and to the others CoE members) again.

About meccg.net e-mail DB, I know that the forum DB have the e-mail list on a access file, and it can be easily extracted and used. Once again, this list will be possible and easy to get, if there is the will to do so.

I'm not able to think at other sources, but I think that, if the recipients forward it to all the people they know, we will soon have THOUSANDS of contacts.

Maybe it could be interesting if we already add something about the possibility of creating new national councils in the e-mail.

And, yes, we need a english/american guy to write the draft.

I'll gladly keep the xls database and let CoE members know periodically the results we will obtain!

[Thrain II]

Right, I added eBay as a source of information to the list. Wolfgang seems to have the most experience with contacting eBay bidders, so maybe he can help us to set up a standard message which can be used for this purpose.

I absolutely agree that eBay can provide possible players who don't know the most important MECCG websites, so it might be a very useful source.

14) web searching for sites and addresses with keywords in search engines.

I think we can do this later but for now we have enough other possibilities to start with this project.

Timo, 1) was already done by me. The xls sheet I sent once to the CoE contains ALL the players from the Chris Cable list.

I can't remember that I have received such a file. However, good to hear that this part is already done. So you have written to all contacts listed here?

http://www.meccg.net/trading/metwplay.htm

Just to be certain you did not misunderstand me (contacting the active traders at Chris's page is the easier part of this work).

I think Mark should probably ask Wim about the meccg.net source for I am not the best person to get in touch with him...

It is hard to predict how many contacts we will finally have on that list but I assume this is rather a long-term project with no real "end". Next Lure of MECCG in example might give another boost to get more players on that list. Let's see how things will develop.

Maybe it could be interesting if we already add something about the possibility of creating new national councils in the e-mail.

Well, I think for now it is the best choice to encourage people just to copy/paste us their infos. People tend to be lazy and a short email which can be sent in a few minutes seems to be the better choice for a good harvest.

So basically I thought that my part of this work is writing emails, collecting information and send the new entries to Sergio from time to time. He can put all the infos to that xls-file and keep us updated on the results.

Thrain II

[thorondor]

well, the text i am sending to bidders at german ebay is in german naturally. no problem to post it here, but maybe someone else wants to translate it. really busy here. sorry ...

hallo METW freund!
ich erlaube mir, dir diese mitteilung zu schicken, da du dich offensichtlich f?r dieses kartenspiel interessierst, sei als spieler oder als sammler.
ich helfe mit, die METWgemeinschaft weiter lebendig zu halten, egal ob f?r fun- oder turnierspieler. vor allem bem?hen wir uns auch, neueinsteigern zu helfen (die regeln sind ja nicht gerade einfach). Einmalig dazu gibt es im deutschsprachigen raum eine j?hrliche grossveranstaltung: www.lureofmeccg.org.
aber auch f?r sammler gibt es viele interessante infos.
wenn du also interesse hast, 1x im monat ein paar infos zu allem, was METW so betrifft, zu bekommen, dann schreib einfach zur?ck.
und auch wenn du tolkienfan ganz allgemein bist, hab ich ein paar brauchbare infos f?r dich!
liebe gr??e
wolfgang >thorondor< penetsdorfer

also no need to contact the eamiladdresses at chris cable site. i have done that in agreement with chris about 2 years ago. of course there might be a few more in the meantime. i will check this later.

[Thrain II]

Great!

I just got the OK to contact the traders at Mahasamatman, so I will start my work with GAB, Mahasamatman and TradeCardsOnline (I think I have the best access to these pages, so I will go for it).

Thrain II

[zarathustra]

Great work guys!

I'm sure it would not be a problem to contact people through meccg.net

[Earendil]

I can't remember that I have received such a file. However, good to hear that this part is already done. So you have written to all contacts listed here?

http://www.meccg.net/trading/metwplay.htm

Just to be certain you did not misunderstand me (contacting the active traders at Chris's page is the easier part of this work).

Yes, it's that one. I only added the non-US players at the moment, but I'll easily add also them. This is a work I can do.

[tharasix]

I'd like to point out that as soon as we have some sort of list going, we should set up a policy to keep the list accurate. Lack of data maintenance is what kills most player lists. I think a annual email checking if the information is still accurate would be a good way to keep it nicely up to date. In order to do this, we should track the date that the person was added to the list, and have some program send an email every year on that date.

[zarathustra]

That is an excellent idea, Chad. Do we have the technical ability to do that?...

[Thrain II]

I just got the OK from the head of GAB to contact the ME traders listed on all the different teams.

All we need to start this project is to set up the standard email which we want to send to all the players/collectors/traders. Can anyone of the native speakers post a suggestion how this email could possibly look like based on what is written above?

I'd like to point out that as soon as we have some sort of list going, we should set up a policy to keep the list accurate. Lack of data maintenance is what kills most player lists. I think a annual email checking if the information is still accurate would be a good way to keep it nicely up to date. In order to do this, we should track the date that the person was added to the list, and have some program send an email every year on that date.

I will add month and year to each entry which I'll forward to Sergio. I agree that it is important to keep this database updated - hundreds of entries with more than 50% not up to date does not help players to find someone to play with...

Thrain II

[Earendil]

I think we have two tasks here:

1) collect ALL the addresses we already have here and there (i.e. from Chris' site, as I did)

2) check those addresses with an e-mail and ask them for other addresses.


step 1) can be done and, in fact, we are already doing it.

About step 2), we need the help of some english-speaking for the best e-mail style. thank you in advance a
BTW, I suggest that the e-mail for the players of the various sites and the e-mail for the eBay bidders should be different.
eBay bidders need some more basical info, while the others need some info about the project for the database.

[tharasix]

That is an excellent idea, Chad. Do we have the technical ability to do that?...

Maybe Josh can answer that better than me. I know that phpBB requires a database, and I HIGHLY suggest that we keep this data in a database rather than in flat text files or in static HTML pages. From there, we just need a scripting language like Perl (which is very common) and a program that will periodically execute the script (like some version of cron).

I can write the script, but I have no idea about the setup of our server.

[jhunholz]

We can definately do this with the e-mail list. Let me know what type of things we want to track (e-mail, name, location?, others?) and I'll make a database for it. After we get it in the database we can work on a script to send out the yearly "are you still there" e-mail.

[Thrain II]

I will start working on this project within the next few days. I decided to set up a standard email for the GAB traders and Mahasamatman traders myself. It remains to be seen how much feedback I will get - any results will be posted to this thread to keep you updated. I will also check for MECCG traders at TradeCardsOnline but I doubt that there are many...

Can anyone take care of the meccg.net contacts? I think that this will be more time consuming but promising.

I think Steffen can implement the player list to the CoE page once there are enough contacts to work on it.

Thrain II

[Earendil]

Can anyone take care of the meccg.net contacts? I think that this will be more time consuming but promising.

If Josh or Mark could give me the e-mail list of the meccg.net members, I could do it.