Web pages, procmail, and auctions! Oh my!

[Gandalf Parker]

Web pages, procmail, and auctions! Oh my!
Web pages, procmail, and auctions! Oh my!

OK personaly Ive rarely heard an auction arrangement for deciding starting nations that I could follow, and never one that much interested me. But it does seem to come up quite abit and an easy way of managing it does seem to be a wishlist. So my mind has wandered in this direction and has belched out some thoughts on it.
Lets talk.

[Gandalf Parker]

Quoted from the "On The Fence" thread where game variations get listed.
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=35083

Ive worked with ProcMail in managing the latest game of "Newbies and Vets"
It should be fairly easy to setup an email box on my server then process emails. Such as
YARPbids@dom3minions.com

Incoming emails would be processed for
From:
Subject:
Body:

Something like
To: YARPbids@dom3minions.com
From: gandalf@example.net
Subject: game=YARP
Hinnom=30
Man=50
Ctis=10

This could be processed into just a display page with all email addresses being displayed underneath the nations.
YARP
................................Hinnom......Man... .Ctis
gandalf@example.net....30.........50........10

Any email with a new game= would create a new page.
A webform would be simpler but awfully anonymous which could run into problems. I could do either method and it would quickly lead to a very impressive bidding page.
Thats because my efforts are dirty and ugly and quickly make someone else do a much better version.

So do I really need to do a dirty ugly proof-of-concept page or does someone want to whip up something now?

[Gandalf Parker]

New thought.
Does anyone have any experience with online collaboration sites?
Maybe something like Google Docs? Or Google Wave?

I was looking into some but mosly along the lines of a White Board. I was going to find one for recommending to team games. One that allows uploading a file then everyone editing the image. What I pictured was that they could upload the games map and then scribble their attack plans on it so that it would look like one of those big strategy boards in a war movie. I wish whiteboard was added to the chat here.

Anyway does anyone happen to know one that supports a shared editing of a spreadsheet or database type file? It seems like that might work for an auction-bidding to get choice of nations.

[Gandalf Parker]

Crossposted from the "Sitting on the Fence" thread.

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

Wow.. I'm interested...
Gandalf wouldn't awk be a better choice?

Probably awk would work well for turning the email info into formatted display.
Or for turning the data put into a form into a table.
If anyone wants to jump on that it would be great.

But if I did one to run on my server Id probably wimp out and write it in basic.

[chrispedersen]

I haven't written anything but db programming in 20 years
I would essentially let every player propose one nation.
and then bid on any of the proposed nations

it would be cool if it had a screen appearance like the domininons message screen but any kind of screen would do.. even a webpage would work great.

Essentially you're talking about 3 bits of information -
player or team, nation, amount bid.

actually, in thinking about this I could probaaly do this in my sql... Not very portable..

Can you host mysql?

[Gandalf Parker]

Id rather not other than official OS packages. It can be a security problem.