Administrators

[Programmer]

Is anyone interested in helping out by being an administrator? I remember asking this about a year ago - before there were any mechanisms in place for administrators to do their job - and there were a few volunteers. So is anyone still interested?

I am asking because at the moment there are three of us doing this job (Purple Scorp, WebWeaver and me), but we all have busy lives and we don't get much chance to log in and do this. So I figure if some more people can join in it won't do any harm.

The main part of the job consists of doing internet research. Somebody uploads a deck to the exchange and nine times out of ten they don't know who published it, so the challenge is to do a bit of research and find out who the publisher is. Then it can be moved from the In Tray to the Deck Exchange, but appropriately flagged so that if the publisher has not given permission it shows up as being for comments only.

The second part of the job is processing any comments that are made about publishers. Here is a description of how I envisage this working:

We have a database of 170 or so publishers, and we (as a community) need to contact these people and ask them for permission to view their decks. Anyone can do this - I suppose really it should be me but time is so short for me at the moment that it is not practical. As I do get some free time over the next weeks and months I really want to spend it working on the program itself, which is something I have neglected to do in recent times, precisely because of this bloody annoying Exchange business. Maybe nobody will be bothered to contact these publishers, and that is fine too - the only thing I want to avoid is that we go along duplicating each other's efforts.

For example, you see (or anyone sees) that there is a deck in the exchange that really interests you. It is published by Foo, but then you look on the publishers page and see that nobody has written to Foo. So you spend half an hour on Google and eventually find Foo's web page and you send them an email telling them about the Orphalese Tarot and saying, look, can we see this deck... The idea is that you then post a comment to the administrators using the handy form at the bottom of the Publishers page (this is new). The administrators job, then, also consists of reading these comments and updating our database of publishers so that nobody else had so spend half an hour on Google looking for a website that has already been identified. If you spend an hour looking for Foo without success then you can also post a message saying look, I think these people have gone out of business or don't exist. If that is the case we might decide to make the deck available in the meantime until we can find out more about Foo.

Is anyone still reading this? If you are and you are still interested in being an administrator then drop me a line!