Frequently Asked Questions
Messages
- What is the message system?
- So, when I send a message....
- Why wouldn't I just email them?
- Hey! I got a message from some random player...
- Ok, I want to send a message...
- How many people can I message at once?
- Can I message myself too?
- Can I see what I've sent/received?
- How do they reply?
- This seems a little unweildly...
- Er, it doesn't seem to have been sent.
- I'm being harassed.
Basically its a way for members to be able to contact one another about con-related matters.
Over the last couple of years of having online registration, a number of people have expressed that it would be neat to be able to easily contact other attendees and ask questions - simple things like seeing if other individual members want to make a team before the con, whether a player can move out of a session that a writer wants to cancel, and so on.
An email is sent to the recipient.
They might not want to have their email address available to all and sundry. Members can also place limits on who can contact them - a non-public member can only be directly contacted by gms and conorgs for a Con that they have signed up for, for instance. If they don't want your message, they won't appear in the drop down of users.
You also might not want to give out your email to a bunch of other folks - as long as "Display Email Address" in your biographical details is set to No, your message will appear to come from a system address.
Players in a con can anonymously message a team. When they do this, they cannot see who is in the team, but will only be messaging the team name in that session. This feature is intended to help people organise theirselves into teams a bit more easily (see conventions). You do not have to reply - if you are receiving multiple messages, please let us know.
Go to "new message" on the message menu. You'll see a screen with fields for who the message is to, a subject, the message itself and a message status.
If you want to send the message straight away, change the status to "Send". Otherwise the message will be kept as pending and you can come back and edit it further (add more people, delete it, etc).
Unless you're a writer or a conorg, you're limited to 10 recipients at a time - enough to contact all the individual players in a game, or a similar number of other AON members.
Yep, but you count as one of the ten. You don't need to message yourself just to keep a record of the message - your sent messages are available via the "show all sent" menu option.
Yep, you can list and view messages you have received or sent by going to the "show all sent" or "show all rcvd" menu options respectively. Also, when you click on 'messages', you will see a list of any messages that you haven't marked as read.
If you have selected "Yes" to the "Display Email" option in your biographical details, the email will be sent with your email as the reply-to address. Otherwise, they will have to contact you via the message options in AON - the easiest of which is to use the 'reply' link in the bottom right corner of the message.
Primarily the system has been set up with writers and conorgs in mind - often we have to notify groups of con attendees about changes, and this makes it considerably easier. Making it available to all the AON members was sort of a bonus.
First check that the status is ready. If you are sure that your message has a "ready" status, make sure that it has a title and some content. Then wait 5 minutes - the list of messages ready is checked every 5 minutes, and then they are sent out and the message status is updated.
Let us know - all the messages are logged, and we will follow it up.