Spamming and possibly methods of avoiding, (plus homage to the Williams)

[Unknown,Unknown]

Hail Ken Williams,
First I would Like to say that as a 21 year old who grew up playing your games, I have to conglatulate you on everything that you and your fellow members at Sierra did in creating so many awesome RPGs, especially your wife Roberta, who wrote the storylines to some of my alltime favourite games. Compared to today’s games visually they don’t compete, but for myself personally, awesome graphics don’t make a game, the gameplay and storyline make the game. And the Sierra programmers and storywriters understood this (not saying the graphics were not good for their time, as you shouldn’t compare things written so many years ago with the products of today). I credit the problem-solving tactics the games encouraged as being one of the reason’s I did so well at school (dux, OP1(best final mark in Australian schools)) and for this I thank you eternally. Today’s games are often very repetitive (Diablo, Diablo II, Nox, Ultima Online, and other similar RPG’s for example (not ‘Morrowind’ however – it is repetitive in many ways but the sheer size of the overall map and number of quests and unbelievable graphics make it perhaps my favourite game of all time, well worth the money to buy, or download time for free (Kazaa)), though the original Ultima 1 through 7 & 9 games stand out in my mind as another great RPG series), and the emphisis is on raising your characters abilities throiugh repetitive tasks rather than relying on the actual player’s intellect to solve puzzles or mysteries.
I have bought (or my dad) and lost (corrupted disks, fire, theft) most of the Sierra games over the last 20 years, especially the Quest for Glory, KQ, LSL and SQ series, and seeing as they can no longer be repurchased I am extremely grateful that they are being made available for download. And just incase you didn’t know, manuals for most Sierra games can be found at
Link: http://www.replacementdocs.com(http://www.replacementdocs.com) 
, while most of the games are available at
_______(look up later – should I forget to , the link to the Sierra Collection is somewhere on your site, I think).
I would never label you a spammer (I respect you too much) and no one else should, but in setting up the email-system for the website the way you have you, you have left it open for spamming. You’ve set iy up so any email is automatically trasmitted to the mailing list, instead of setting it up so that the messages are only transmitted if you approve them (fairly easy to do, depending on how your site is set up – database driven, just store new messages in a seperate table until you move them yourself or have a program set up to do it, textfile driven – similar, store the new messages in a offline folder until you check them and move them to the online folder, also several other options. Admittedly this is more work for you, but I’m sure that if you don’t want the responsibilty (probably not right word) of checking every email there are enough true fans that you could invite a couple of dedicated fans to become casual administrators with the ability to veto new emails (with you making the ultimate decision, if you wanted to overrule them). Also, the ability to allow users to specify whether the messages should be sent to the site forums only instead of to everyone’s email (though this wouldn’t stop spammers, and maybe you have stopped spammers and I haven’t fully explored it). But I have to admit that I was surprised at the amount of mail I recieved from the site in just a couple of days, all with the same author, when I thought that I had originally turned off the automatic sending of messages about new emails/updates and thought that when I agreed to recieve email from fellow members that it would only be emails in direct response to messages I had posted, not any and all emails to the site. Maybe a message to this effect on the sign-up screen would help.
I admit that some of the messages I recieved from the site were interesting, but all the messages with “Unsubscribe” as their title, as well as some of the responses to previous emails, were irritating and the email’s are space absorbing. And most likely even if you didn’t want to change the way you have your email set up, you should be able
to put a filter on it to block out some of the more pointless emails.
Also, I am a recently graduated software engineer, currently taking Microsoft’s MCAD training online, and while I have no game programming experience, if there is anything I can do for you in VB.NET, C#.NET, or ASP.NET, or some of the older languages then just let me know. (*Java, C++, and several others) just let me know, although I know the newer languages much better. I would love to be involved in the experience of programming a Williams/Lowe/Sierra like game. If you or anyone else requires help in any aspect of this website or a new “Sierra like” game, I would be happy to help if I can.
Yours faithfully,
Blake Whittred
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

[Unknown,Unknown]

(Re: Spamming and possibly methods of avoiding, (plus homage to the Williams))

I think what our fellow Sierra fan here is trying to say is, we love you
and all, but please fix your mailing list as it is sending e-mails to
everyone who signs up, even if we said we don’t want to receive
e-mails. Or perhaps it is ONLY e-mail people who said they don’t want
to receive e-mails? Anyways its rather annoying as Im sure you
understand so please correct it, thanks!

P.S. glad to find this site, glad to see you’re interested in keeping
computer gaming history alive, having been such a big part of it!

Sierra On-Line Fan Site wrote:
>
> Hail Ken Williams,
> First I would Like to say that as a 21 year old who grew up
playing your
> games, I
> have to conglatulate you on everything that you and your fellow members
at
> Sierra did in
….
—
———————————————-
Howard Feldman, Author of The Search for Freedom
A Computer Fantasy Role-Playing Game
Visit its Homepage at http://home.golden.net/~feldman/SearchForFreedom/ 
Visit the Computer and Book RPG Museum at
http://vgmuseum.chaoticmonkey.com/ 

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