Restoring PBM services...

(here is a thread in which we can discuss what I posted in the blog)

Speaking as the assistant regional manager of Suspense & Decision magazine, I present you a quick summary of current status:

Grimfinger is still presumably on his sabbatical/hiaitus/self-imposed banishment. I have been unable to email or PM him.

Charles, I deeply and sincerely hope all is well with you and your family. Please feel free to update us or maintain radio silence, as you see fit. All is good with us, with your media empire, and with PBM in general. Having said that, I think I speak for all of us when I say "we'd love to hear from you!"

I have a full issue's worth of articles in my posession, edited and mostly formatted. I could post an interim version of the magazine using this content. Some of it is really good stuff indeed. If I had all the collateral that Charles has, I would gladly put Issue 10 together myself. What I am lacking is:
•Cover art
•Ads (we could either do an issue without ads, or rip them from last issue)
•Charles' multiple columns
•Charles' explicit permission to publish an issue
So, if anyone is reading this, what do you think we should do?
•Wait until we hear from Charles?
•Publish an interim issue without the fancy stuff?
•Try to create a full issue, filling in what we can?
•Full-on publication and here's some cover art and/or editorial ramblings to help out?
I will start a thread on the forum -- please post your thoughts there. The forum appears beset by some error messaging, but still works. You can browse threads and post while ignoring the errors. I haven't seen Charles on the list of "recently active members", but I have seen some of you. Please chime in there.

Which ALSO brings me to the question of how to help shoulder the load of Charles' large PBM media conglomerate. He has hinted that he might consider offloading some parts to other helping hands. Here are the main chunks -- please consider which of these you as a loyal member of the PBM community might want to help out with:
•Suspense & Decision magazine
•PlayByMail.net forum
•This blog
•PBM wiki
I post all this, obviously, without any consent or contact from Charles. I just thought it might be useful if we "loyal members" could try to rally ourselves to support the community and perhaps help

Hello Ixnay,

and thank you for the initiative, I was also wondering what had happened to Grimfinger, there has been no warning of this and last time I spoke to him he seemed fine. I too hope he is well and it is nothing serious.

Regarding your suggestion, if you have enough material for an intermediate issue, I suggest that you go ahead and prepare it. From my understanding Charles never meant this whole enterprise as his exclusively own work, he was pushing and encouraging more people to participate, and in the end of the day he was doing it because none else would.

If you go ahead I can help with

1. Artwork
2. Ad & some short news for Oplon Games
3. perhaps an article of EaW (cannot promise, depends on the players)

Some of the columns Charles used to fill you might have to fill up yourself (like editorial), while since you posted this others might also send you what they send to Charles, plus their advertisements, giving you more material.

In short I can help somewhat for next issue, but I guess you will need more people to reply to this.

Good to hear from you anyway,
Makis

Hi there Ixnay!

I too am worried about Charles' absence and hope that it is a temporary condition and that all will be well soon.

I would suggest trying to prepare the missing issue yourself, except that you seem to be missing some rather critical pieces. I think I'd give Charles a little more time to recover from whatever his problems are and at least give us some direction. If he could, for instance, send you what he has as far as already-submitted ads, articles, company news, formatting templates (which I may be able to help with one piece of), the cover page (if we can't do a decent rip of it), and anything else he has handy, then we could probably produce an issue without him that's a pretty reasonable facsimile of what he's been doing. Given that we can get that much information (or his return) I'd say to publish issue #10 as August as planned, and then skip September pending his return and restart numbering of issues whenever it can be resumed.

I don't have any available time myself to take on any of his major projects. I'm so behind and overloaded with other duties it's all I can do to submit ads and articles, but I intend to keep doing that as long as there's something I can say and a 'zine to say it in.

But perhaps Charles can reduce some of his own workload in the magazine itself. His assistant editor can perhaps continue to do much of the assembly work and Charles might reduce the number of articles and editorials that he authors himself. Surely such things take a significant amount of time and put him under a lot of stress. We (the PBM community) do seem to be contributing a pretty good volume of content for each issue, so perhaps not as much is needed from him on a regular basis? Maybe reducing some time commitment and stress in one area will help him better deal with any work he still needs to take care of himself.

I think it'd be great if his "loyal followers" could chip in on whatever they can and keep things going in his absence. I'm sure he would approve of any help he can get.

I have counseled Grim that he was taking too much on, with looking for a monthly with 100 pages and no revenue. A bit too ambitious a project in my view. Especially when counting on unpaid writers to supply the content on that fast of a timetable.

Could some of us done more so far? Yes. But I find myself often working at 10pm myself, with not much revenue either. I believe I wrote an article for each of the first 8 issues.

On how to proceed, maintain momentum, my personal view is we give him some time, he regroups, and hope he goes to maybe 50 pages every other month, or quarterly, with more attention to the quality of the articles instead of the word count.

Of course, primarily I hope all is fine with Charles.

Rick McDowell

Okay, it looks like that preview of the Issue 10 cover is a full-sized image, which means I can use it for publishing.

I will begin assembling Issue 10 this week. I have a full issue's worth of articles from Grim, except for Grim's own contributions. We'll just backfill. I have the page templates. And now I have the cover art. Here's what I need to do:

- contact anyone who had an ad in Issue 9 and see if they want to run it again in Issue 10
- complete the article submissions by adding images and text callouts as needed
- draft up an editorial post

If anyone would like to submit anything for Issue 10, please alert me here asap. I expect to get a draft done by the end of this week. Those of you who are running ads, please respond when I email you for status. I will post updates here on this thread as time permits. Hopefully we'll have Issue 10 published and in your hands within a week.

Hi ixnay,

In a feeble attempt to help Charles with some article submissions I email him an article back on Aug. 12th. Not sure if that has been passed on to you. If not, and you are interested, let me know how to send it to you and I will do so. Regardless of your need or not, a big thank you for your effort in keeping this going. Truly a labor of love on Charles, you and the few others who spend time trying to make this go.

tony/nazareth

It wasn't a feeble attempt.

No attempts at this sort of stuff are feeble.

I am trying to arrange for someone to fix the forum for us.

[quote='Rick McDowell' pid='5970' dateline='1412298392']
I have counseled Grim that he was taking too much on, with looking for a monthly with 100 pages and no revenue. A bit too ambitious a project in my view. Especially when counting on unpaid writers to supply the content on that fast of a timetable.[/quote]

Pah! Damned elf lover.

But, it's still good to see you chime in, Rick. I need a Pepsi. Does anyone have one?

[quote='Rick McDowell' pid='5970' dateline='1412298392']Could some of us done more so far? Yes. But I find myself often working at 10pm myself, with not much revenue either. I believe I wrote an article for each of the first 8 issues.

On how to proceed, maintain momentum, my personal view is we give him some time, he regroups, and hope he goes to maybe 50 pages every other month, or quarterly, with more attention to the quality of the articles instead of the word count.

Of course, primarily I hope all is fine with Charles.

Rick McDowell[/quote]

It will probably be the best thing that ever happened to the magazine, but that's just my opinion. Issue # 10 will get spit out, in due time. Barring death or disaster, I suspect that Issue # 11 will follow it, thereafter.

Ixnay,

For the missing issue my cohorts and I had sent Charles:
1) An article
2) An ad
3) Episode 1 of a new story
4) Company news

If you're missing any of this, let me know (with an email address?) and I'll get copies sent right out to you.

Tony -- it's "The Librarian", right? I've got it. And just to confirm, you want to use your first name only in the byline?

Davin and everyone else -- Charles has resurfaced, and I am working with him to get all the many bits and pieces lined up to assemble. Now that he's available, I will likely not have to do my own email-contacting campaign and can just get stuff straight from him. I will in all likelihood be assembling this issue myself, and if I can get everything I need I may get it done by the end of this weekend. We shall see...

Glad to hear Grim has emerged.
Whatever timetable is fine.
I could submit News and maybe something else if not too late.

[quote='ixnay' pid='5976' dateline='1412872562']
Tony -- it's "The Librarian", right? I've got it. And just to confirm, you want to use your first name only in the byline?

Davin and everyone else -- Charles has resurfaced, and I am working with him to get all the many bits and pieces lined up to assemble. Now that he's available, I will likely not have to do my own email-contacting campaign and can just get stuff straight from him. I will in all likelihood be assembling this issue myself, and if I can get everything I need I may get it done by the end of this weekend. We shall see...
[/quote]

ixnay, Actually never gave it a thought. Put whatever you think is acceptable, doesn't matter to me.

tony

Good to see you back on-line Charles. Pepsi; good to see you have good taste!

OK, I managed to locate someone to help me get the forum fixed. He did a fresh install of the latest version of the forum software, last night, and he imported the old users accounts and the old forum messages. So far, everything seems to be working just fine, on both the user end and the admin end. If any of you encounter any technical problems or glitches, let me know. He had started on it, when I got home, last night, and when I checked it, this morning, after I got up, it was completed. I sent him payment for service rendered, just a few minutes ago, so this is one headache that has been resolved.

NOTE TO RICK MCDOWELL: Rick, since your forum runs the same software, if you ever encounter problems of a technical nature with the forum that we can't resolve, ourselves, then this guy might be a useful resources for you, for future reference. He was very reasonable on the price for fixing it.

[quote='ixnay' pid='5971' dateline='1412610209']
Okay, it looks like that preview of the Issue 10 cover is a full-sized image, which means I can use it for publishing.

I will begin assembling Issue 10 this week. I have a full issue's worth of articles from Grim, except for Grim's own contributions. We'll just backfill. I have the page templates. And now I have the cover art. Here's what I need to do:

- contact anyone who had an ad in Issue 9 and see if they want to run it again in Issue 10
- complete the article submissions by adding images and text callouts as needed
- draft up an editorial post

If anyone would like to submit anything for Issue 10, please alert me here asap. I expect to get a draft done by the end of this week. Those of you who are running ads, please respond when I email you for status. I will post updates here on this thread as time permits. Hopefully we'll have Issue 10 published and in your hands within a week.
[/quote]

Good news. It would be helpful, when the time is right, to give us all a deadline for Issue 11.

Hope all is well with Grimfinger, too.

Nice to hear from Grim.

Any time table and issue length is fine.  The main thing is what you do for the hobby.

[quote='GrimFinger' pid='5980' dateline='1412942569']
OK, I managed to locate someone to help me get the forum fixed. He did a fresh install of the latest version of the forum software, last night, and he imported the old users accounts and the old forum messages. So far, everything seems to be working just fine, on both the user end and the admin end. If any of you encounter any technical problems or glitches, let me know. He had started on it, when I got home, last night, and when I checked it, this morning, after I got up, it was completed. I sent him payment for service rendered, just a few minutes ago, so this is one headache that has been resolved.
[/quote]

The new website looks great, even better than before!  I am glad it is back up and that you (Grim) are ok.

Now if you are still having issues with Takamo...

I agree, very good new look for the website

Hey all -- quick update. I am still working on Issue 10. I decided to use a page-layout tool rather than MS Word. (In researching options, I found a post where someone was asking about tutorials on how to do multi-page layout in Word, and the first reply was something like "Yeah, you will never hear the words 'MS Word' and 'page layout' uttered in the same sentence by professionals...") Scribus (the new tool) is open-source, free, and works well with Open Office tools (which I often use), and is fully capable of handling magazines. But there is some initial investment required in setting up my templates.

The plus side is that it will be far easier to do Issue 11, when the time comes.

Thanks for the update, Ixnay. Please let the advertisers know if the new tool has different sizes available for the images. (I try to size mine to precisely fit the bits available so the page layout doesn't automatically resize them and end up blurring the edges of the text.)

I tend to do likewise. If I have an image (jpeg, png, or whatever), I tend to resize it in GIMP first, which can do a much better job of rendering than a layout program can. Better solution might be to send the original, but that might be vector art in something like illustrator or freehand that I can't process. This first issue will be a learning experience, but I will say this -- given that we're publishing in PDF format, I will absolutely go back and redo the published version if errors arise or image quality can be improved. Pixels are magic.

HI All,

I have been totally immersed (overwhelmed) in new product creation for the last few months and have only become aware real life issues impacting on Charles.

I hope things are slowly getiting better for you.

Ixnay/Charles, feel free to re-run any previous Harlequin Games/Middleeartgames Ads.

Any idea on the real deadline for the next issue, I will be wrtiting an article soon.

Thanks for the efforts of everyone.

Harlequin

If you want something to appear in Issue 10, I would get it to me by this weekend.

Sorry for delays, all! I am committed to getting this issue out by Monday 11/3. Possibly earlier. After that we'll return to an end-of-month publication schedule.

Is there any way to get back private messages? I could really some of the info contained in them...

Gahh! I didn't realize all the PMs are gone! I saw my message counter total still reading 93 messages, and just assumed all was well.

Grim -- any chance you can ping the hosting company and see if they can restore the PMs?

Hey folks, Issue 10 is still underway. A tree branch fell on the cable wire to my house, so I've had no internet for a few days. Should be fixed tomorrow. It's been a hindrance...

[quote='ixnay' pid='6000' dateline='1414597947']
Gahh!  I didn't realize all the PMs are gone!  I saw my message counter total still reading 93 messages, and just assumed all was well.

Grim -- any chance you can ping the hosting company and see if they can restore the PMs?
[/quote]

It wouldn't be an issue for the hosting company. They didn't fix the last issue. Not sure if this can be fixed, now. I'll check into it.

I have announced publication dates before and let them slip, but this time I mean it. Issue 10 will go up on or before 11/30/2014. Just in time for the holidays. Just think of the joy you'll see in the eyes of your loved ones as they open up the hard-copies you will be able to print out and stuff in their stockings.

Glad to hear things seem to be back on track.  I would say I would have new company news, etc, but lots of family and friends in for Thanksgiving wearing me out.  Alamaze has 20 games going now, we've made lots of processing improvements, are running our 2014 Championship games.

Mainly, just happy Charles and company seem to be back, re-engaged.  I repeat my recommendation for a more humane schedule like bi-monthly and 50 pages instead of monthly at 100. 

Looks like I picked the wrong weekend to switch internet providers! 

Due to some points-of-confusion I had about 2 days of internet downtime while switching to a far-cheaper-and-somewhat-better service.  So I am granting myself a 2-day extension on getting Issue 10 out...

Sorry to hear that, Ixnay.  Change is often difficult and Murphy directs it to come at the most inconvenient times.  I hope you're up and running soon.  I'm sure everyone is still looking forward to that next issue (and that it'll be much easier to produce in the future).

[quote='ixnay' pid='6000' dateline='1414597947']
Gahh!  I didn't realize all the PMs are gone!  I saw my message counter total still reading 93 messages, and just assumed all was well.

Grim -- any chance you can ping the hosting company and see if they can restore the PMs?
[/quote]

See if you can access those private messages, now.

I got my private messages back, thanks.

[quote='Rick McDowell' pid='6008' dateline='1417233219']
Mainly, just happy Charles and company seem to be back, re-engaged.  I repeat my recommendation for a more humane schedule like bi-monthly and 50 pages instead of monthly at 100. 
[/quote]

This was an old message from Rick, one dated several years ago, but as good of a point to engage in dialogue, as any.

A monthly rate of publication, in and of itself, largely misses what makes publishing a PBM magazine problematic, at times. Additionally, an issue with more pages is not, in and of itself, "harder" to publish, compared to one with less pages. Neither of those things are primary factors in rendering publication problematic.

Real world issues (such as a computer dying), and time-consumption issues (such as trying to raise awareness by going forum to forum to forum, or trying to persuade a PBM company or game moderator to take a more active interest in ancillary issues, such as creating ads and submitting them or taking a new approach to the way that they offer their games), take a much bigger toll on the publisher - at least, that's been my experience with Suspense & Decision magazine. Real life has a way of throwing endless distractions - one right after another ad infinitum - at you. More people seem inclined to read a PBM magazine than to actually submit material to it. That said, a PBM magazine can get published with a relatively small amount of material.

By and large, publishing a PBM magazine is an exercise in trying to herd cats. Invariably, one ends up wondering whether there's any real point in it all. People who focus upon frequency of publication and number of pages do not see the forest (of real reasons) for a couple of trees - not on this particular issue, anyway.

Ultimately, no future issues of Suspense & Decision magazine are ever guaranteed. Publishing it emanates from my hobby interest in the PBM gaming hobby. So, as with players who fall away from particular PBM games, I sometimes "fall away" from publishing this PBM magazine. Others are always welcome to continue publishing it, in my absence.

This time around, I am going to try to implement a variety of process differences. Utilizing MailChimp this time around, to grow a PBM mailing list, is one of these changes being implemented by myself - to try and yield better results, while simultaneously making things easier and less time-consuming for myself.

One thing that some do not seem to realize that publishing a PBM magazine also has a certain recuperative quality to it. Portions of the overall task are actually quite relaxing for me. I miss it, when I don't do it. Reallocating HOW I spend the time that I spend associated with this overall project means that I will, this time around, spend far less time trying to persuade those who do not want to be persuaded, regardless of the particulars being bandied about. I will reduce my overall "footprint," and instead focus more attention upon those areas where I seem to be making some real inroads - at least, insofar as I perceive inroads being made.

Various process differences will manifest themselves in due time. I will be doing some experiments in a number of different ways and areas. In some instances, wholesale changes will be made, where and when I deem necessary, and as frequently as seems necessary.

Some changes will be data-related, very glamorous stuff. Others will be of a more "tangible" nature. Some will play a behind-the-scenes role, whereas others will make for nice little surprises for affected individuals.

My time, for today, has expired. On to other things, now.