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CSM8 Campaign Season - Mass Evemailing
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Poetic Stanziel
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#1 - 2013-03-06 08:46:35 UTC  |  Edited by: Poetic Stanziel
from http://poeticstanziel.blogspot.ca/2013/03/csm-campaign-season-mass-evemailing.html

I'm planning on writing an app to assist with mass evemailing during the CSM campaign season. We all remember Trebor doing this last year. It could be argued that his mass evemailing was the single thing he did that got him his seat. Without having done that, he likely would have been sitting on the sidelines this term, relegated to pestering people via the CSM alumni channel.

What will this app do? Well, it won't break the EULA. It will mostly assist in gather a huge number of EVE character names. You pop in URLs of a website, such as from EVE-Kill or EVEWho, and it will crawl through pages, pulling out character names (along with their corporations/alliances), and then store them in a database. There will be no link to the EVE API. All data gathering will be conducted via third-party websites.

In terms of the evemails themselves, it will still be a manual process. The application will assist in creating the list of names for each evemail. (How character names are allowed per evemail? 10? 15?). There will be a textbox for body of your evemail. Basically, it will pull from your list, n characters at a time. You use EVE Gate's evemail system. You copy-paste twice. Once for the names. Once for the body. Click send in EVE Gate. Then you click next in the program and it will load the next n names to be processed. (It will mark who has already received an evemail, so nobody gets sent anything twice.)

I'll probably add some rudimentary filtering, so that you can target evemails to different recipients. If you want to send a different evemail to Goonswarm than you do Test Alliance, you'll be able to do that.

Is anybody interested in the application? I plan to have it finished by the end of March (hopefully earlier). I realize that the more people doing this, the less effective any particular CSM-related evemail is going to be. But that's okay. It helps to get the word out on the CSM elections, and maybe educate a bunch more people on their importance. CCP is not going to do jackshit on increasing voter turnout, so it comes down to us, the players. Perhaps that is how it should be.

(And even if a bunch of you use this, and 20000 people all receive twenty evemails on the day the election starts, then that blunts and diminishes Trebor's own evemail initiative, which is a good thing. Cuz, you know, **** that guy and his terrible ideas and his career in spaceship politics. *grin*)

I'll likely make the application and the source code available via Google Code or some such. I don't want anybody thinking that I'm using the program for any nefarious purposes, like stealing your pornography or your sandwich recipes.
GallowsCalibrator
Imperial Academy
Amarr Empire
#2 - 2013-03-06 10:26:56 UTC
Hmmm, something seems wrong, and yet right, about drowning out mass shouting by even more mass shouting.

Poetic Stanziel wrote:
like stealing your pornography or your sandwich recipes.


My sandwich recipes ARE pornographic
Malcanis
Vanishing Point.
The Initiative.
#3 - 2013-03-06 11:03:53 UTC
I'm not interested in mass emailing.

"Just remember later that I warned against any change to jump ranges or fatigue. You earned whats coming."

Grath Telkin, 11.10.2016
Poetic Stanziel
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#4 - 2013-03-06 11:07:35 UTC
Malcanis wrote:
I'm not interested in mass emailing.
You just picked up the "eight people who blocked Trebor last year" vote.
Fon Revedhort
Monks of War
#5 - 2013-03-07 21:50:18 UTC  |  Edited by: Fon Revedhort
Mass-mailing is something only marasmus-affected tards can think of using, pardon for my wording. No idea why CCP was that tolerate on it. As a voter I'd be really pissed off to get mailed 40 or 50 times in case more candidates succumb to idea of adopting these crappy tricks - no doubt I'd just block them all and that's it.

"Being supporters of free speech and free and open [CSM] elections... we removed Fon Revedhort from eligibility". CCP, April 2013.
Poetic Stanziel
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#6 - 2013-03-07 21:51:27 UTC
Fon Revedhort wrote:
Mass-mailing is something only marasmus-affected tards can think of using, pardon for my wording. No idea why CCP was that tolerate on it. As a voter I'd be really pissed off to get mailed 40 or 50 times in case more candidates succumb to these crappy tricks - no doubt I'd just block them all and that's it.
CSM candidates cannot phone you to ask for your support, so evemail is the next best thing.
Dyvim Slorm
Coven of the Morrigan
#7 - 2013-03-07 22:26:05 UTC
Oh great, ingame spam now. What a wonderful idea
Fon Revedhort
Monks of War
#8 - 2013-03-07 22:43:30 UTC
Poetic Stanziel wrote:
Fon Revedhort wrote:
Mass-mailing is something only marasmus-affected tards can think of using, pardon for my wording. No idea why CCP was that tolerate on it. As a voter I'd be really pissed off to get mailed 40 or 50 times in case more candidates succumb to these crappy tricks - no doubt I'd just block them all and that's it.
CSM candidates cannot phone you to ask for your support, so evemail is the next best thing.

What are you talking about? They can easily earn my support by showing some decent PvP, so that I get sure they know their stuff well.

"Being supporters of free speech and free and open [CSM] elections... we removed Fon Revedhort from eligibility". CCP, April 2013.
rodyas
Tie Fighters Inc
#9 - 2013-03-08 00:02:54 UTC
Fon Revedhort wrote:
Mass-mailing is something only marasmus-affected tards can think of using, pardon for my wording. No idea why CCP was that tolerate on it. As a voter I'd be really pissed off to get mailed 40 or 50 times in case more candidates succumb to idea of adopting these crappy tricks - no doubt I'd just block them all and that's it.


EVE is a sandbox.

Signature removed for inappropriate language - CCP Eterne
Poetic Stanziel
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#10 - 2013-03-13 01:00:01 UTC
from http://poeticstanziel.blogspot.ca/2013/03/that-evemailer-application-is-blowing.html

So that mass evemailing application may be blowing up into something more.

Before I sit down to start any coding, I like to ruminate on an idea first. Check out the tools that will be required, in this case investigating all the various APIs available to snag character data. Once I figure out what's available, start figuring the breadth of the data available and think about what else I might use that data for. Grabbing massive amounts of character data for an evemail application is fine and dandy, but it's of limited use.

The original intention was to just grab character, corporation and alliance info. As it turns out, though, the data available on PvP characters is extensive. The possibilities for data analysis broad.

So I'm thinking I'm going to write two apps. One that will run constantly in the background, polling the various APIs, updating the database, basically gathering player character information. I'll use three of the available APIs. EVE Online. EVE-Kill. And EVEWho. Which will be fun. One returns data in XML, the other two in JSON. But that's why inheritance and polymorphism were invented, after all. For these exact sorts of situations.

It won't be a quick application, since I'm going to err on the side of caution, and ensure that I'm not overpolling any one API. The API I want to hit the least, the EVE Online API, is probably going to be hit the most at times. The Alliance List call, for instance, which returns every single alliance in the game, as well as every single member corporation, only returns the corporations by ID. Which means repolling the API to get the corporation names. Something I was hoping to avoid. Of course, as I'm polling the other APIs from EVE-Kill and EVEWho, I can fill out some of those missing corporation names in a haphazard, random manner.

I'll be relying on the EVE-Kill and EVEWho data to start filling in all the non-alliance corporations, especially all the many NPC corps.

The second app, will be the mass evemailer. Which will use the existing character database. It won't do any data collection on its own. It's use will be to simply the copy-paste process of sending mass evemails and to supply a large collection of available characters.

The database I'll use will be SQLite. It has the smallest footprint and is easiest to distribute. No need for the end-user to install anything extra. It distributes with a single DLL. And there's number of free clients for anyone that wants to query the data on their own.

I may keep the character scraper for myself, see if I can monetize the data. ISK for subscriptions to the data. Perhaps distributed on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. That depends on how many characters I can end up collecting. If I end up with a database of 100+K characters, with associated activity, then perhaps that data will be of interest to people for their own projects. Though that idea doesn't quite sit right with me, considering I'm getting the data for free myself. The other, better option, is to supply the program for free to anyone who wants it, and then sell the database as a subscription to anyone who is too lazy to run the program themselves. On the other other hand, if the application becomes widely used, then that means that the three APIs are getting hit more often, which costs those people money in bandwidth. Stuff to think about, at any rate. The application isn't written yet, so will cross that bridge when I come to it.

Now that I've figured out basically what I want to do initially, and where I want to expand the applications uses in the future, I can begin the coding. Tomorrow I start designing the database schema (which will be simple, since it's mostly determined by the data available), and get to work designing the classes, one for each of the three APIs.

I think it might be fun little project.