ooc scheduler

[nauta]

I know this has come up a few times, but here's an idea and an RFC (request for comments) on it.

Motivation.  You have scheduled a meeting with someone outside your clan for Friday at 9pm.  But then something comes up and you have to cancel.  Or you are trying to schedule a meeting with someone you keep missing and want to meet them on Friday at 9pm, but you can't find their minds. 

Implementation.  A new addition to the Request Tool which would work sort of like kudos -- call it OOC SCHEDULER.  You'd submit the name or sdesc, staff would redact and forward it on.  You'd be limited exclusively to scheduling/cancelling meeting times: no places,  no messages like: hey, I'm still alive!  or hey, can you log in RIGHT NOW, there's a mul here.  Perhaps it could even have limited options, such as:

1) Must cancel scheduled meeting on [date pulldown].  Sorry.
2) Would like to schedule meeting on [date pulldown].  Will this work for you?

Perhaps you could be limited to 3 per month or something, to avoid people over-using it and turning Armageddon into a job.

Cons. 

o Staff would have some extra work (unless its automated with limited options).
o Overuse of this would start making Arm feel like a job (probably?)

Pros.  More subjective here, but I think a lot more action could take place and a lot fewer plots could get lost in the missed connection void if we had the ability to do some scheduling -- bear in mind this affects those of us that don't play in the 'big clans' more than, say, someone in the Byn (they already have this ability).

ETA: As with anything like this, there probably are unintended consequences, but another motivation: I, at least, prefer to play anonymous OOCly, and this would allow me to avoid giving out a handle to schedule things as sometimes happens, e.g., you are off with a group of indies somewhere far away and have to log out suddenly, but want to schedule the return trip.

[Reiloth]

For completely OOC scheduling, i'd rather use something like Doodle:

http://doodle.com/

Invite everyone that you want to come to the party/RPT/whatever. Figure out the time that way.

I really don't want to make more paper-work/pedantic crap for Staff to have to sift through. The less bureaucracy we create the better -- I'd rather they focus on like, making the game great, animations, writing plots, enacting plots, not filing TPS reports.

Took me about a minute to make this: you don't need to get people's emails or anything, the link can be the 'invite' to the event.

http://doodle.com/poll/7ffak4qhcfa4kvmr

So you can just create the event, OOC: heres the link for scheduling a return trip, let me know the best times.