News: (5/29/2005) - Finally noticed and fixed the problem with this here main page. Somebody should have mentioned it to me...

News: (3/1/2004) - The GE poll results are in.

News: (2/25/2004) - I thought I was very clear in the original notice about the format of a vote, but perhaps not. Most of you seem to have gotten the idea, so this message is addressed to the one fourth or one fifth of respondants who seem to be confused.

A vote consists of a string of numbers. These numbers must be between 1 and 7 inclusive, and no number may be repeated. If you specify fewer than 7 numbers the vote is invalid and will not be counted; if you specify more than 7 numbers, or incorrect numbers, the vote is invalid and will not be counted. The series of numbers must be bare and on the same line. Numbers ordered vertically are not valid and will not be counted. The numbers must have no spaces, commas or other punctuation between them. Additionally, votes must be sent to poll@zealot-trivia.net, not to any one of my personal addresses.

If you're wondering why I'm being so picky, and perhaps asking, "Why can't I just represent my vote in a logical way which any human could understand? Why must I do it your way? What are you, some kind of control freak?" My reasons are simple and (I believe) understandable. I am going to put all of the votes in to a text file, and then I'm going to run a script I wrote and give it that text file as the input. The script knows how to figure out what option won. The script only knows one format for votes. Now, I could reformat the votes of all voters from the various formats in which they arrive to the format appropriate to the script, but that is tedious. I'd do it anyway if it were necessary, but it really isn't. Not when I can just ask people to format their votes in the correct way to begin with. It's very little extra work, if any at all, to ask you the voter to submit your vote in the required format. Very little burden is placed on any one of you. By contrast, being forced to reformat a bunch of votes does place an extra burden on me. I thought I'd head off this problem by stating a requirement with regards to what a vote should look like, and gave an example. I thought that was enough, but appearantly I was mistaken.

The original reason for wanting votes sent to a special address was so that I could also script the extraction of votes. I had a regular expression pattern all set (/([1-7]{7})/g) to slurp in all matches and generate the input file for the vote calculator script. The other reason was to ease the collection of votes. If you sent a vote to any other place, I cannot guarantee that I didn't overlook it. Most probably I did not, but it could have hapened. I've decided to toss out the slurping script idea for various reasons, but votes should still be sent to the poll address.

If you sent in a vote in a format you now realize is improper, you may be asking yourself "Should I send it again? Has my vote been counted, or discarded?" The answer is: If you recieved a reply from me saying the vote was somehow improper, it was discarded. If not, then I counted it. If you sent the message to the wrong address, don't worry: I'm certain I got it.

And yes, I have now spent even more time end effort on making sure people vote in the prescribed fashion than I was ever likely to have spent reformating votes. Just another one of life's little quirks!

News: (2/19/2004) - GE Poll.

It has come to my attention that at least some people are disatisfied with the current state of the Galactic Event (GE). The current system has two special games each day which count towards the GE. The total amount scored by each team during these games is used to calcualte a bonus for the winning team or a penalty for the losing team. I am asking every Zealot player, even if you don't really care, to please vote on what should happen to the GE. There are several options:

1. Leave the GE as it is with two 15-question games at 10PM Eastern and 11PM Eastern
2. Have one GE game of 15 questions at 10PM Eastern
3. Have one GE game of 15 questions at 11PM Eastern
4. Have one GE game of 15 questions at 10:30PM Eastern
5. Have one GE 'game' of 5 questions at the beginning of each hour of the day
6. Have one 15 question game beginning on the hour at a random hour
7. Eliminate the GE

Voting will proceed as follows: There are seven options, and you will rank them in order of preference with your most preferred option first and least preferred last. My selection might be:

1237456

Indicating the order of my choices by number. Votes will be tabulated in an instant runoff manner, because I feel this will give a more accurate picture of the wishes of the majority. (Anyone who wants to argue about why I should have chosen approval or condorcet is free to mail me and we can bat it around for a while.)

Please submit your vote via en email to poll@zealot-trivia.net. The contents of the email may be whatever you like, any comments are welcome, so long as a string of numbers such as the example above appears somewhere. Voting ends at the end of February, so if I get an email with a date stamp that says March, then I'll ignore it. Feel free to promulgate this information via newsletters, chain letters, or rooftop shouting (if you are so inclined).

News: (7/1/2003) - The return of Horrible Truth day! I'm afraid I was unfortunately and uncharacteristically asleep at the promised hour, and as a result did not think of making Horrible Truth Day happen. Since then I have been preoccupied. Never fear! Or, actually, Fear! since Horrible Truth Day will happen anyway (so I decree!) beginning... RIGHT NOW! It's a little before 3PM right now. I'll try really hard to be awake 24 hours hence to turn off the Horrible Truth. I await your screams of agony.

News: (6/25/2003) - Prepare for Horrible Truth day. On Friday the 27th of June I will be turning off auto-capping. Normally the Questions in Zealot appear in all caps, regardless of how they were entered. For this one day only they will appear in their original case, as entered into the database. This will be horrible, because a LOT of people have no problem being lazy with their capitalization. I'm hoping this will shock people into better behavior, or at the very least provide a few laughs.

News: (1/9/2002) - I've changed my email address. Those of you trying to reach collin@crosslink.net will now be bounced, as it no longer exists. I have a new address, kollajin@comcast.net, but to prevent further problems, any email related to Z trivia should be sen to collin@zealot-trivia.net, which will get back to me indirectly, and isn't likely to go changing again.

News: (5/28/2002) - The impossible has happened. I have (finally!) found a message baord system which does not completely suck. All the rest I've seen suck, usually they suck like ezBoards, but sometimes in other ways. In fact, what I've found STILL sucks (even if you don't count the Not Hosted Locally and the Stupid Advertisements) but it's a damn bit better than anything else I've found. If anyone knows of a message board system that behaves more sanely (like an oldschool newsreader, say) then I'd be interested in hearing about it. Until such a mythical future point in time, I now present the official Zealot message boards. You'll have to create an account, but it's not too much of a hassle.

News: (5/1/2002) - Finally, some GOOD news. I'm pleased to say I've implimented YET ANOTHER fix for the annoying "you've been cheating" error that keeps jumping on people. This one I expect to actually work. One problem down... next stop: world domination.

News: (2/22/2002) - I've been asked to say something concerning the playing of multipul games at a time. To play with more than one name at once, or to in any other way play more than one game at a time, is unethical and should not be done by anyone who is interested in seeing Zealot continue to exist. Doing so puts off some players (quite a lot, in fact) and is extremely detrimental to the wellbeing of the community. While it's not, strictly speaking, "cheating", it exploits a loophole in the game which should not exist, it is frowned upon by me, and I'll do what I can in both social and technological ways to prevent the practice from being practiced. If you want to see good things for Zealot, you wont do it. Just like progs, the best way to fight them is NOT to join them, it's to prevent those engaging in such practices from detracting from the enjoyment of the game by everyone else.

News: (2/2/2002) - Well, the game is fixed again. A stupid permissions problem, I'm affraid, compounded by my not checking my mail till late Friday. Also, a similar problem was there with the Questions database, but you should be able to add new Qs again.

News: (12/20/2001) - If anyone has sent me any email within the last 48 hours and not recieved a reply of some kind, they should resend. My mail app is still beta, and it has been hopelessly corrupting mail as it downloads the mail.

News: (12/17/2001) - Angry about the recent rash of negative events? Want to know why they're happening. Well so do I

News: (11/3/2001) - I have a mailing list set up here for site-related announcements. I encourage you to sign up.

News: (11/2/2001) - Wanted: HTML templates. Do you know HTML? Have an eye for design? Then you may be able to help. I'm wanting to put up sections on this site for the Z teams, but I want each section to have a unique look-and-feel. I have a great perl system for doing dynamic templates, which makes maintaining lots of pages easier, but I am short on templates. If you'd like to come up with a template or six for any or all of the teams (or even the main section, I'm open to improvements), please do pop them off to me. There are no special requirements, but please do try to have a definite section for the body of the page, a defined place for the title, and locations where links can be placed. I do like clean code, but if you use a WYSIWYG I'll still take it.

News: (11/2/2001) - Well, Zealot has returned. It's back, and should be the same as ever. However, due to the odd nature of such things, if you notice something sort of wrong (and that thing is not that the MBs are broken) over the next couple days, then I'd like to hear about it.