Hooking Up Online - Issues

Any suggestions for how I might use NearbyGamers effectively to find people who want to play online via chat or voice? It sort of goes against the purpose of the site since I'm looking for people in a fairly non-geographic way. But the site's offering me tantalising glimpse of people who might play the games I'm after, I just cant see quite how to make use of it.

Geographic info is still relevant in that I'm better off targetting people close to my own timezone (and who speak my own language). Plus, it would be nice to play online with people who I might bump into at a UK con.

There are issues of ettiquette and site functionality involved. I can't very well mail everyone registered in the UK just because they have tagged a game I'm after; that would surely be spam. And there is nothing that lets people flag that they are interested in online gaming.

Suggestions?

Use the tags. I've set up a bunch of MMORPG tags...

Rather than mope about doomsaying I have given it a go but have reservations...

I have set up a number of tags to let people say how they play or would like to play.

• PlayFaceToFace
• PlayByChat
• PlayByEMail
• PlayByForum
• PlayByMail
• PlayByVoip
• PlayByAnyMethod

However I dont think the search facilities currently up to it. These are not games, they are additional pieces of supporting information. When I search I would want to search for people with (say) DogsInTheVinyard and PlayByVoip; which the search can't do at the moment.

Though the geographic info is no longer as important it would still be helpful to have the results sorted in terms of distance since that helps increase the odds of finding people in similar time zones.

But really I want to be able to say (say) show me people who are intersted in DogsInTheVinyard and would PlayByVoip who can manage thursday evenings. I think that this is not something that can self-evolve through the users, it would need the site developers to enhance the site to handle it.

You're right, it does need extra code. Right now all searches are "OR" searches, they turn up gamers who match any of your tags instead of all.

I've put it on my TODO list. Do you have any other straightforward suggestions to make NG better for remote players? I'll add features as needed if we can design them so they don't confuse or burden folks looking for nearby gamers.

Other suggestions? Yep - when you add the facility to specify searches let the user save search criteria.