GZG Players Club now online!!!

God help me, but I don't know what I'm getting myself into...

Yahoo! has a new feature called Yahoo Clubs. It's a place for cyber
communities that anyone can set up. You can set them up for your
friends, your
family, or allow pretty much anyone in. Along with leaving messages, it
also
has a chat capability.

Well, as an experiment in cyber community building, I set up a club for
players of GZG games. To go to it, you need a web browser. The URL is:

http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/groundzerogamesplayersclub

If you go to the club listings, it is under Games. Within Games, it is
under
Wargaming.

The club is open to everyone. I'm the founder and administrator.

So, what's the charter for this thing, and why do we need it when we
have the
mailing list?

The club is for the players of Ground Zero Games games and related
games. This
includes Full Thrust 2, Full Thrust Fleet Book, Dirtside 2, Stargrunt 2,
and
the B5 Project Earthforce Sourcebook. It does NOT cover FT3 or FMC
discussions, as these are works in progress.

Yeah, but what's the point?

Well, first off it allows web-based chatting. Considering the IRL and
ICQ
discussions from a little while ago, I thought that this would be
appropriate.
Even if we don't use the club for anything else, it would be well worth
it. No
fancy chat clients are needed, just a web browser.

Second, there are a number of people out there who have web access but
not
e-mail access. In particular, there are people who have web access from
work
but can't participate in mailing lists. This club is for them.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, I'm going to take a bit more of a
liberal view of "on topic" and "off topic," at least to begin with. The
idea
of the club is NOT to supplant this mailing list. Due to the nature of
the
club, though, I believe that it will be easier for it to handle off
topic
discussions such as the recent combat engineering, star map, terrorism,
etc.
topics. This should ease the strain on the mailing list. That way we can
be
far more draconian about what is and isn't on topic on the mailing list
as we
now have an alternative forum.

Finally, I'm not sure how much space we have in the club (Yahoo is a
little
vague on some of this stuff), or how long messages will sit there, but
it
would make a good place to post the FT FAQ, as well as longer term
messages
(such as Dean's fleet descriptions from the GenCon tourney). 

At the very least, we'll have a place to go to ask, "Is the mailing list
up?"

Anyway, I hope you guys will check it out. I suppose if it doesn't fly
I'll
just close it up. I suspect that the chat capability will be worth the
price
of admission. 

Let me know what you think of it. If you have any questions or concerns,
or
(even better!) ideas on what we can do with the club, please let me
know. 

Allan Goodall	       agoodall@sympatico.ca

"We come into the world and take our chances
 Fate is just the weight of circumstances
 That's the way that Lady Luck dances
 Roll the bones." - N. Peart