Messaging/Notification Feature from GMs to Players #11175
Description
This would be a major lift, but I wanted to drop the thought here.
Every year we have the issue of "chasing down signups", for a variety of reasons. The most insidious situation is where both the player and GM are following protocol, with the GM sending emails, and the player looking for an email... and not seeing it, because it went straight to spam. Gmail is especially bad here, and likes to toss emails from "unfamiliar" email addresses, especially those sent BCC, especially those with links to google forms or emails, into a black hole.
Players then, unless they are watching the #signups channel in Discord like a hawk, don't know that information has been sent out. They don't know to check their spam, and go about their life thinking they have done what is required and it is the GM that is potentially being slow about reaching out (or have forgotten to expect comms from the GM at all).
Solutions in the discord have been discussed about migrating surveys to being hosted within Intercode, or about various forms of GMs setting LARPs by-player to display if they are missing surveys, etc. These solutions are either huge lifts, or, run into the issue of GMs themselves forgetting to update the player status when they've gotten a survey, leading to players thinking their survey wasn't received.
In many of these "missing surveys due to spam canning" circumstances, a single notification getting through to the player in arrears is enough.
Thus the suggestion: what if Intercode supported a very simple messaging system? A GM can "blast" messages to their players, which would:
- Send an email from the convention email, which bypasses spam-canning (hopefully) by coming from an email address the player has interacted with before (Even if just to verify their email with the con)
- Send and leave a notification on the convention website, which would bother them until they read+dismiss it.
The messages must be simple, without links (not a substitute for the casting survey email), but can have information like "check your email for the survey and email foo@bar.com if you don't have it".
Email blasts from the con would be batched, e.g., nightly, so that a player in 6 games with 6 signup surveys whose GMs send them out on the same day doesn't get 6 emails, and more importantly, the con itself doesn't rate-limit itself terribly on email sends.