Comments

• 

  Micah

  Posts: 894 December 2007

  If you're like me, then sometimes it can be hard to find a suitable time to play. Families, kids, school, work, and all sorts of everyday fluff get in the way of good, hardcore gaming.
  
  For my group, several of the players are college students, and their schedules revolve around their courses, some of which are night classes or late labs. So, we have to move our game night every semester, and it's always a real pain trying to collect all the e-mails and get a clear picture of exactly which nights will work.
  
  So, starting a while back, I started using a wiki to help with scheduling. You can see an example here: http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/kensing/wiki/campaign-web/play-dates
  
  Basically, I create a table with all the days of the week. Then, players can vote for their favorite day(s) by placing an 'X' in the votes column for that particular day. If they absolutely cannot play on a certain day, then they place a '#' on that day. The hope is that after all the votes are in, there is at least one day with no '#' marks and several 'X' votes.
  
  Believe me, it sure beats sifting through e-mails and trying to remember everyone else's schedule.
• 

  Calion

  Posts: 144 May 2011

  I think a Polls feature would be a better solution to this and similar problems. Polls are probably the sole reason I'm not abandoning my "Yahoo Group":http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sydarksun in the move to OP.
• 

  Micah

  Posts: 894 May 2011

  The major problem with using a poll for this is that it's not a straight up majority-wins vote. Instead, there are 3 classes of options: preferred, optional, and excluded. You want to game on a preferred day, are willing to on an optional, and simply cannot on an excluded.
  
  The goal is to find a day that's preferred by some but optional to all. It's better to game on a day that's optional to all than game on a day that's preferred by most but excluded to some.
  
  Perhaps the Yahoo polls have a way of handling this, but I've never seen a poll that has this kind of expressive power. Most are just simple voting engines.
  
  Even still, without an explicit polls feature, you can still run a poll by creating a wiki page and asking people to edit it and place their votes. Sure, there's no guarantee that players won't vote multiple times or delete others' votes, but in practice that's really not an issue. I've said many times that if you have trust issues in your group, then no technical feature we add on Obsidian Portal will address that. It has to be handled IRL.
• 

  Calion

  Posts: 144 June 2017

  How about allowing players to show times on the Calendar when they're not available? That should make scheduling easier. Technically, you can sort of do that now, but it's not really meant for that, so it doesn't work that well.
• 

  weasel0

  Posts: 435 June 2017

  Since Micah sold the website ages ago, I doubt this thread will be of much help. I do approve of the suggestion though. Everytime it's brought up.

  ~Weasel0

  A Parade of Black | ShadowRunHack |

  Where I play with CSS code
• 

  Calion

  Posts: 144 June 2017

  Wait, he did?? 
• 

  alex_redeye

  Posts: 85 June 2017

  Indeed he did.

  -Red

  Campaigns: Dragon Age: Requiem