[thelist] Administrative Stuff. Read Me.

[Daniel J. Cody]

Hey Folks -

Just wanted to drop a quick note here to ask for your help. Since I've
switched our mailing lists over to a different server about two weeks
ago, I've also been making some improvments in how thelist and the evolt
website interact with eachother.

To do this, I've been making some changes to a number of things. One of
them is http://lists.evolt.org/mailman/listinfo/thelist - its our main
interface to subscribing and unsubscribing to thelist. What I'm
attempting to do is create a single record in our DB when a person signs
up for thelist or when a person registers on our website instead of
having a seperate database of users on thelist and a seperate database
of website members. It will(and is beginning to) allow us to do some
'really cool things' ;) between thelist and the website.
(A good example is the current 'last five articles on thelist' column on
the evolt.org website. Another is instead of just listing the last 5
articles a person has wrote for the website, we can list their last 5
posts to thelist as well. You can see the possibilites here :)

At any rate, integrating two different DB's that share about 65% of user
info while trying to make sure new people that are registering are only
getting signed up for what they want, but making sure the two seperate
DB's can each have that info so they can continue to work smoothly in
the meantime can be a bit daunting(its even hard to explain it!). Mix in
the fact that myself and the people that work on the evolt backend are
all doing this in our freetime and without compensation(except the look
on those kids faces when they learn that there's more than MS frontpage
out there!! *sniff* *sniff* ;) ) and between our real jobs, personal
lives, and various alcohol and/or/but-not-limited-to 1st person shooter
dependancies and/or addictions. Sometimes we make mistakes. And
sometimes, not everything is working exactly perfectly. 

If that is the case, and something doesn't work perfectly for you during
this time of changes and mergers, *please*, dear god please, email
myself or another adminion with your problem and we'll try to fix it for
you. In the case of http://lists.evolt.org/mailman/listinfo/thelist -
I've been working on that *alot* this week, and while I'm working on it,
mistakes on my part can happen and you might have a problem
subscribing/unsubscribing/etc. If you do, just drop me a line with whats
happening(thanks to the many of you this week that have done this! I
appreciate!) and I'll take care of things ASAP. *Don't* get discouraged
and leave/forget about it. *Don't* send bitchy emails.(Not all emails
are bitchy, some are actually quite nice and I'm glad to help those of
you that have needed help this week(Barb, Mahdu, Gina, Chris to name a
few :) ))

Sometimes I miss things in the code when it gets as complex as its
getting, and something I may not have thought of will happen. Sorry this
has to happen, but I alone can't test everything due to its complexity.

So, if you're still reading lets sum up: Email me(or another admin) if
you have problems, I'd appreciate knowing if something is broke for you.
Be nice/Continue to be nice. :) Thanks for sticking through these
problems.

Well, this turned into a slightly longer email than I planned. If I
tacked on a couple more paragraphs, this would start to equal the girth
of an email from Rudy explaining an inner join in SQL ;)

Thanks for your time, thanks for your patience, and thanks for your help
in making evolt into the sexiest bunch of Web Developers on the planet
:)

.djc.