As you may have heard, I'm buying a house, so I'm busy as a little bee. There are papers to sign and inspections to do and eventually there will be trees to plant and home repairs and all that good stuff.
This little game is surprisingly time-consuming to run manually. At any given time I have up to a dozen corpse slices in my email in-box, each of which needs acknowledged, downloaded, cropped, renamed, assigned, filed and recorded. Anytime I assign a slice I have to juggle a number of factors, like whether the potential player has already worked on the same corpse in an earlier slice, whether they've been picked lately (or at all in the case of newcomers), and whether they are on hold. Then there are reminders, reassignments, site updates, forum maintenance tasks and corpses to assemble and post.
I've tried to do Exquisite Corpse business at least twice a week, and if I'm super duper duper busy, no less frequent than once a week.
Not that I'm complaining. I'm so excited that we've managed to form our own little post-anexquisitecorpse community!
Many of you have asked me what you can do to help, and I've been at a loss to think of something. It's hard to pass on a portion of my duties because I've got a smooth running little system with consistent naming and filing conventions, and it almost seems like as much work to pass duties around than to just do them.
But I've been doing some thinking, so if you really really want to help, here are some things you can do. The first set are pretty simple, but please bear in mind that they aren't requirements by any means. They'll just save me a few keystrokes.
Simple Tasks:
- * Crop off the bottom 15 pixels of your slice, save it, and send it along with your completed slice.
* Follow my naming conventions for your returned slice. For a whole slice, if you were slice 2 of corpse 9999, and you titled the slice "Skulls and Butterflies", here's how I'd name it: 9999-02-skulls-and-butterflies (corpse number, dash, slice number with a leading zero, dash, title in all lowercase letters with dashes between words). For the bottom 15 pixels of this slice, I'd name it 9999-02-bottom-15. This both helps me find things now and will help me manage things when they are automated.
* When you send back your slice, keep the subject line and the quoted text intact. This keeps me from having to research which slice I sent you.
* Report forum spam
* If you've noticed, by watching the stats, that a given player always fails to turn in their slices, email them and find out if they are AWOL or let me know. Believe it or not, it can be difficult for me to notice patterns like this.
Advanced Tasks:
* Let me know if you want to help assign beginning slices. This would entail helping me decide how often they need to be assigned, finding people to assign them to, sending out canned emails to them, letting me know who you sent them to, receiving the slices and forwarding them to me. I could probably give you a New Exquisite Corpse email address for this. Bear in mind that this is probably something of a commitment, though if you got tired of doing it you could just let me know.
* Write a PHP script that will validate that a file is a .jpg and is 450 x 200 pixels.
* Write a PHP script that will take a 450 x 800 pixel .jpg, reduce it to a 151 x 261 thumbnail, and resave it to a specific folder under another file name.
* Write a PHP script that crops the bottom 15 pixels off a slice, saves the cropped image under a new name following the naming convention above, and resaves it into a specific folder.
* Write a PHP script that will accept an email address and a corpse number as an argument, will find the 15 pixel bottom-15 file of the corpse in a specific folder, will attach it to an email, will choose the appropriate text of the email, and will email it to the email address.
* Let me know if you think you can edit the PHP code and/or database of this bulletin board to add some fields to the user profile database.
* Research how to solve the emailer error that people are getting in the forums.
* Let me know if you can think of other ways to help
Anyone who takes on any of the heavy-duty tasks will be paid with the admiration of the players and credit on the website. Unfortunately jewelry and power tools aren't in the budget.
I may add to this thread if I think of anything else. Thanks to all of you who have offered to help.
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