Participation troubles

I noticed a considerable drop in participation recently (5 games.) At first I thought it was gencon, or that site posting bug, but I think there may be a problem with emails. Anyone stopped receiving them? Or unable to post still? (3 games warmed up in past few days)

Email is definitely a concern I'm working on. I noticed hits are down in general but am trying to not over think it. We're hitting the end of summer and am assuming more people than general are on vacation. We're getting new users to offset though (hope it's not just the contest, heh).

A player mentioned they stopped receiving them (I don't use email reminders). A few players have disappeared without a trace for over a week. (Hey, wouldn't a GP reminder app be awesome?)

A lot of the games that I'm in have been very slow as of late, even before Gen-Con. Working on getting a few people who I think would stay dedicated to their games to come along and join.

I've noticed the drop as well. Some of the more active people I play with (I am in 13 games, and still waiting on several applications) are still around but others seem to have disappeared. Real life, I guess. I don't use he email notifications either. I prefer to go straight to GP and see what's up :-)

13 games. Wow. I don't feel bad now!

It's August - school holidays - so I imagine a lot of people are off on vacation. I'm away for 2 weeks of August for example.

I'm happy to see an influx of new people (and some of them are already actively posting). I hope that because of this the games will regain momentum.

I recently convinced a GM friend of mine to bring his game to GP, so he and his players all signed up and now they have a nice little superhero game going. I'm hoping they'll start joining and starting other games as well. :-)

I'm still receiving emails for new posts in games I'm subscribed to

As in... emails you should be getting, or false emails?

Yes, the emails to notify me of new posts. It is as it should be.

I've been starting up some games. I noticed many existing ones are starting to become dormant (3 months or more). I'm doing my best to bring people in because I need more RPGs in my life, even if I have to run them myself.

Emails have not been an issue for me, though I did have to subscribe to the forums to get them, and I'm unsure if most people know that right away. Does it automatically subscribe you to them if you join the game?

The email problems from Gamersplane to it's users, isn't completely on Keleth. Almost any major service (Gmail, Yahoo, Office365) allows emails through if you follow their recommended practices on allowing emails through, this seems to fix it 100% of the time I have helped anyone with it. Basically things like adding the email address to your contact list, etc. I am an IT guy and deal with this kind of crap all the time, so getting people to do these things on their own time is one of the biggest problems faced by people trying to deliver products. People assume problems are always someone else, even when simple steps by them can alleviate the problem.

From my research for Keleth, he has done about all he can for email unless he wants to start dropping thousands more dollars at it.

Now as far as the topic goes, when I actually start running a couple of games on here, I will plan for losing players, as it is the internet and they don't have to face the music for walking away from the proverbial table as it were.

I still feel like I can do more about emails; I'm just really getting overloaded with feature development, bug fixing, and RL. I gotta figure out someway to balance it all better.

I feel for you man. I would offer to help but all I can do these days is HTML/CSS and Powershell. :) Doing this as a team of one is probably more than you bargained for!

I wouldn't say more than I bargained for; I never expected help on it. But I never realized how little I know about servers.

Well, I/We appreciate your hard work man. Anyone trying to better our community is worthy in my book. I don't know what you are hosting on, but if you ever need server help, PM me. If I don't know it, I know someone who does. Work for a Development company, and have worked a high end web hosts in the past. It's all Windows based knowledge, but like I said, I can find answers.

A VPN with Digital Ocean runs the site, email with Dreamhost though I keep intending to switch to Rackspace.