Alerts

[Tbone]

Our text alerts are no longer functional. The website we were using instituted a couple of new parameters geared towards forcing you to pay for the service. Essentially if it goes unused for two or so weeks, they delete your group. Rather than recreate it and make everyone sign up for it again, I'm currently looking for an alternative.

In the meantime, I'm posting alerts to Steam. It doesn't go to your phone, but it will pop up on your computer if you have Steam running, so I recommend using Steam more often if you haven't really been connected to it.

If anyone can find a free alternative to the site we were using (TextMarks), let me know and we'll set up another alert list. It was pretty effective for interviews and such, so it'd be nice to have something similar.

[Eroz]

I might be able to work something out on our own, we don't need a lot (100 at most of messages sent at once, so a simple email to text might work well. I just tested it with my ATT phone and it send it on time, I'll see if Verizon does later.

eg. <10>@txt.att.net will send a text to that phone, I know the other service providers do it as well, we can just get the numbers and do it ourselves.

[Tbone]

What I liked about our last service was that there was just one master subscription list, and anyone in that list could send out an alert without even having to give out their number to other people. I could probably create a contact list and save it as some sort of distribution list, but only I would be able to send out alerts and I would need to know everyone's phone number. Also, people wouldn't be able to remove themselves from the list and if I wanted anyone else to be able to send alerts, I'd have to share everyone's numbers with them as well.

[Eroz]

All we would really have to do is build a little backend. I bet over the weekend me or Lithium could do it.

You would have a page with:
Textbox[Enter your message here]
Button[Send message]


Subscribe textbox[enter your 10 digit phone number] dropdown[Choose your cell phone service]

Button[Unsubscribe]

Heck with enough time I bet we can even write it into the PokeNuke site itself. No one would have access to the numbers themselves, other then the page/service. It would still be hackable, but no less then any service would we be using anyway, and no one would really care about attacking us when they can attack the service with more numbers. Maybe Lithium has some idea on how we can make it secure.

[Lithium]

Yeah, Eroz,

I had this idea in the past. Most every cellphone carrier has a backend email address that acts as email text messages. Typically all you have to do is send a regular text to your email address (instead of a phone number) and in the received email the sender will be your 'text email address.' For verizon I have mine setup like myusername@vtext.com.

We could probably build something for this someday.

[Tbone]

Hmm, ok. It's worth looking into. The text alerts were pretty effective at getting people to events and letting them know about time-sensitive stuff.