COREY: Sounds like a great idea. I see it in two parts: (1) ability to select users from the database and email them a tournament announcement/invitation/RSVP;
ANSWER: All is true with the exception of the RSVP part. I will answer the RSVP part with the second part of your response
COREY: and (2) the ability for the program to receive responses from those invitations and automatically add/remove appropriate players from the tournament (or have I inferred too much from your post?).
ANSWER: This is would be in my humble opinion overkill. I was thinking on the lines of when emailing from the database it could be just the basics of a txt formatted email to contain for example:
(Their Name) you have been invited to (name of club or organization) Poker Tournament
Date of Event
Cost
Venue
Yes No Maybe
Everything that is sent could be variable based and the yes no maybe can be they just hit reply and respond yes no or maybe. In no way would I want to have the responses automatically sent to the TD program because too many things change and people don’t show up and then I have more work.
COREY: Well, in fact, I have considered part 1 before. But let me tell you why I have decided against it. First, while the software has taken on a lot of functionality beyond strictly running a poker tournament, this is another area where other software has already been there, done that, and works much better than I could ever hope to incorporate into the TD. Should the TD have a sophisticated email editor built into it? Will it send emails in plain text or HTML? If HTML, do we build a fancy designer so the emails can look nice? I'd much rather spend time working on other features than an email editor. Then there's the problem of actually sending the emails. Do you have your email server configuration information?
ANSWER: I say plain text emails. As far as the server config, most if not all are sitting on their own domains, so I would not think this would be all that big of an issue only because of what I stated above in that people would hit reply to commit or decline the invitation.
COREY: The TD will need that. Many users already have a hard enough time setting up their home email clients, I don't want to add that frustration to the TD software.
ANSWER: What I proposed it not a fit for everyone, I agree whole heartedly, but as an option or add-on for people who are handling large events, I think this would be an amazing time saving kick A$$ addition.
COREY: But we could go another route: we could avoid using the user's email server, and have the software route email through the TD website email server. That would avoid the configuration problem altogether. Until same j@c#@$$ decides to use the software to route their spam emails. Then the TD email server gets put on a major email server blacklist, and then every tournament invitation anyone sends using the TD gets routed to spam folders - everywhere. Feature is now useless
ANSWER: I agree 100% and that would be a bad solution that would do nothing but open you up to headaches.
COREY: After brainstorming that nightmare, I decided to add only a simple feature: export email addresses, which can be done from the Players tab or the Database tab. This will export names and email addresses to a file. You can simply copy what is exported right into the "To:" line in any email and send something out to all of your players.
Of course, part (2) in your suggestion pretty much depends on part (1).
ANSWER: As it is right now I use Rank em software to try to accomplish this task and it does it somewhat half baked and doesn’t always work. I have 171 players in our database and when the email goes out half get the email, the other half get blanks. I tried to purchase rights to the software from the developer but he was in fact way out of line (in my opinion) with his price.
I would be more than happy to give you admin permissions to the program to show you how it works if you like.