Try out my pickup-game site?

[mindloss]

As is mentioned in another thread, I wish there were more (or fewer?) options for finding games with strangers. At any rate, I started on a very barebones one tonight, and if anyone feels so inclined, please give it a try:

http://mindloss.com/cgi-bin/aiwars.py

You give it your email address, tell it you're looking for a game and how many players you want, and when enough players sign up, it will email you all. That's pretty much all it does right now. But, the idea is if you have an afternoon or evening open, you log on there and don't have to worry about watching IRC or anything (don't get me wrong I love IRC) -- instead, it'll just ping you when you've got a group. The way it's set up now, it's also important to tell it when you're done looking for a game so it takes you off the list... otherwise you'll keep getting notifications that players are ready.

I have lots of ideas for improvements if there is any interest in this approach. (If not, no hard feelings; I got to learn some stuff about CGI and sendmail.)

[Mayjori]

i like it , there a way to make it send an instant message of some sort, i dont check my email that often?

[x4000]

Nice, that's coming along.  One suggestion: make sure that you're not letting people's emails get harvested by spambots that might sweep your page once it's been linked enough times.  There are various methods out there for obfuscating email addresses in the page code while using javascript to actually make them visible properly; I use something like that on my own email address on the contact us page on the main arcen site.  I suggest taking one of the commonly-available methods and then tweaking it slightly so that your solution is slightly unique, thus hopefully making it harder on spambots to reverse engineer in an automatic sense.

Another thing you could do would be to never show the emails, and just show the name, and let people send messages through your service without ever knowing the email.  Some folks would prefer that, anyhow, and then even manual spammer harvesting doesn't work.

[mindloss]

i like it , there a way to make it send an instant message of some sort, i dont check my email that often?

Sure, that's do-able. That falls under "things I'll improve if people show interest in the site".

So far, as I sort of expected, there is not a lot of interest (read: nobody has tried it yet). On that note, if anyone would be interested in something like this, but there's some crucial feature you'd like to see first, by all means let me know. Until I see some peeps actually try it out though, it seems a little silly to dump much more time into it.

One suggestion: make sure that you're not letting people's emails get harvested by spambots that might sweep your page once it's been linked enough times.

Point taken. As it is, so long as people don't check that checkbox, their email address stays hidden. Seeing as there's no compelling reason to actually allow that in the first place, I should probably just take out the option to show email address altogether. 

[x4000]

Cool stuff!

[Lancefighter]

I will try to recommend it to people trying to pickup games in the IRC as well, hopefully that should help a bit