We are fully aware that Starlist is full of entries that are no longer valid. Some people moved and others dropped out of the game. (Most of the complaints actually boil down to "not enough active players live near me" and that's obviously not something ADB can fix.)

There are, we're sure, people who get a list and try to contact people and get no actual new players. Maybe they tried the wrong way or maybe the people who are there don't want to play the same game, but the fact that Starlist did nothing for one person doesn't mean it doesn't do a lot of good for other people. (Probably every third person who gets a list thanks us for finding them a new group.)

The problem is, there is no practical way to "clean" the list of invalid entries. People who move don't necessarily tell us, and people who stop being interested in the games don't usually tell us. (About once a year, somebody does.)

Contacting everyone would be very time consuming and expensive, and even people who are still there and still active might not respond for any number of reasons. (We do ask people we send the list to to advise us of obsolete entries. Maybe one person a year actually does.)

We cannot delete people more than a few years old because some 1991 entries are still valid and there is no way to tell which ones are and are not. (Just personally, I'd start trying to contact people with more recent entries before looking at anyone from the 1990s.) Of course, some entries from last year are no longer valid. People move. It happens.

We cannot delete names we don't recognize because we can't recognize every active customer and many active customers buy from stores and have no contact with ADB so we don't know who they are. We can't add to the list people who buy from us because they did not ASK to be put on a list given to the publc. (Leanna is adding a special button to the shopping cart for this. More quality names is a good thing.)

Jean is asking people who want to help to request Starlist and check it. (This makes my blood run cold as I don't have time to deal with a lot of requests on one day, but I'll deal with them when i can.)

As I said, we do ask everyone who gets a list to let us know of any "dud" entries on the list, but we need specific information to delete someone. The fact that you called and left a message and got no reply doesn't mean much; the person has to ask us to remove him. If you mail them a post card and they don't answer doesn't mean they're not there but if the post card comes back "no such person" then we can delete them.

Starlist is free, and you don't have to spend money checking it.
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0. If someone is too far away to game with, just ignore their entry. Valid or not, someone too far away does you no good. We have, however, no way to know how far you're willing to drive or how far away a given zip code is, so we tend to send you a big chunk of list to improve your odds.
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1. Look for people with email addresses and send them a note. If you get one of those "can't deliver email" replies then forward it to us and we'll remove their email address (but not their entry, people change email address far more often than physical addresses).
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2. Look for phone numbers and call them if you're willing to pay for the call or get free long distance with your plan. If they say they want off the list, email us and tell them that. If whoever answers the phone says there is no such person there, let us know.
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3. Then look at the other addresses. Check them in local phone books or on-line entries. (A lot of people who move don't go very far, and you may surprise yourself by finding one.) However, just because someone doesn't show up on such a list doesn't mean they aren't there, or aren't findable. But let us know what you find out. You can certainly drop them a post card if you want, but we're not asking you to spend that money.

The #1 thing to remember, however, is when you identify a dud entry and have us remove it, we cannot clone a player and install him in a house on your block to replace the bad entry!

The old company SPI actually invented this list back about 1975. I sent in my dollar for the list (ADB doesn't charge for it) and I got the 20 names in zip code order nearest me. The closest one was 120 miles away and the first and last name on the list were 440 miles away. Turns out I did meet the closest guy in college, and he was a real jerk. Was that SPI's fault?

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, August 08, 2013 - 12:49 am: Edit

Today I proposed and Jean approved a plan to split each of the five starlist files. Each file is a word document, most of which is a TABLE with two fields, one with the complete entry and one with only the zip code so I can sort the table into zip order.

I created a second table in the first file 00000-29999 and moved all entries from the 1990s and (many from 2000-2004) to that second table. That was two-thirds of the total database.

A guess might be that 75% of the 2005-2013 names are still good and that only 10% of the 1991-1999 names are good. Good meaning they are still there AND still play. Those numbers are pure gut feeling.

Done this way, I can still find even old records with one search (say I need to talk to the original author for some reason) but a starlist gamer-user gets only the 1/3 of the list with the higher probability names. Anybody who wants the older ARCHIVE list for their area can just ask when they get the list through the form.

Simone of course just built a new form that works better and doesn't dump you onto a dead page when you're done.

Jean thinks Starlist is a cool service and publicized it. In 24hours I got more requests than in the previous two months.

I do them all myself and all by hand. Everyone I have ever delegated the task to screwed it up, in one case spectacularly so. I don't know why the protocol of what to send whom is so complicated and confusing but so far no one has EVER got it right. I officially quit trying to teach others to do it and now react violently to any suggestion of turning it over to anyone else, flatly refusing to waste time explaining why. Anyone bringing it up at dinner can expect a chef's salad to be overturned on their head.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, February 20, 2014 - 12:07 pm: Edit

We're continuing to improve Starlist.

In theory, requests show up randomly either from the shopping cart or from the Starlist request form. They all land in my email in-box.

In theory, every day (unless I'm really busy or it's a short day for some reason) I do the oldest request, which might be up to 4 or 5 days old. If Jean does one of her publicity things, I may get so many I do two or three a day so avoid them stacking up. Some days like today there are none on file.

I send a copy of outbound lists to Jean, who sends them a follow up welcome message.

In theory, I then do a cross-check of a state in that file, unless I'm too busy. I take that state and sort it by last name, looking for duplicate entries and deleting the old one. I almost always notice somebody who is in the list backwards, with last name and first name reversed. I fix those, and if I ran another sort (which I never have time to do) I might find another duplicate.

The best way to improve the list (i.e., improve your odds of getting a new opponent from it) is to recruit new current entries. Jean does a media blitz once a month (almost always when I'm really busy as she doesn't ask first), and Leanna added a note to the shopping cart with a check-off box to have your data entered in Starlist.

If you don't want your address "out there" you can do a limited entry with just your zip code, name, and email, but we will NOT send you a list in reply because it's not fair to send you data on other people when you won't give that data on yourself. Maybe that results in someone contacting you.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, March 21, 2014 - 01:47 pm: Edit

Today I finally did the last phase of the "Improved Starlist Plan" from late last year. I sent everyone in Iowa who had an entry from 2000-2004 an email asking them to update their information. That was six people; three emails bounced and one guy replied to say he no longer played. One guy sent some kind of security thing I have to fill out to email him, but his security system won't talk to my Mac and says that since my PC is not the original source it won't talk to that either.

Anyway, five "dud" addresses have been eliminated.

The campaign to improve Starlist is two-pronged.
1. Recruit new good entries by way of the shopping cart, Jean's marketing, Captain's Log, and the newsletters.
2. Delete bad entries by cross-checking one state per day (takes almost two months to do them all) and by emailing the oldest entries (will take three or four months to email them ones from 2000-2005, after which we'll start doing 2006 and then 2007).

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, March 24, 2014 - 03:29 pm: Edit

The campaign to improve Starlist is continuing to make progress.

I have so far cross-checked 26 of the 50 states to eliminate duplicates and obsolete entries. Of course, there is no real way to check beyond that and if someone moved out of state then his obsolete and current data are both somewhere in the list.

We have had a couple of people do local contact checks on the lists they got.

I have so far sent out 16 emails to people with entries from 2000-2004 with mixed results, 1 actual deletion, 8 deleted email addresses, and 1 renewal, the rest no answer meaning that the email address is still there but the contactee is either not checking it or busy or didn't bother to answer.

Jean ran an add for starlist the other day and got 10 new entries. That's not a lot in the greater scheme of things but the more new entries, the more the chance you will find someone near you.

Remember, guys, we cannot....
Force people near you to sign up (unless we use the orbital mind-control lasers)
Delete obsolete entries (unless somebody reports them as obsolete).
Contact everyone on the entire list in one day and ask them to confirm their info and interest (just too many to manually send individual confirmations).
Spend more than 5 minutes a day on this free service.
Send the list to someone to check for us due to privacy issues and a lack of faith that such a volunteer would finish the project once he found out how much work it is. If individuals who get the list would advise us of the results, it would do the same thing, and probably in less time.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, March 27, 2014 - 03:46 pm: Edit

Starlist procedural update

I stoped trying to retype entries into the all-caps format the post office wants since we never use this as mailing list anyway. Saves me about half of the time I have previously needed.

I started listing US military addresses with the country involved in the foreign section.

States cross-checked so far: 37 In the process, I found one guy who was in the list four times. I atchived the eariest address (which might be his parents) just in case we're desperate to find him someday. These are marked EARLY ADDRESS for such purposes.

Somebody did what we asked (imagine that) and started trying to contact people in his area. He found a new player (that's kinda the point) but he also found four disconnected telephones (we deleted the phone number and archived the address; over 95% of people who changed phone numbers did so as part of changing their address, but not 100%).

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, March 30, 2014 - 06:22 pm: Edit

STARLIST UPDATE

In an ocean of too many things to do, I think I have created a spot of dry land.

Starlist has reached a critical phase in the upgrade plan. The list has been totally "divided" into two sections, with entries from 1999 back (2004 and back if no email address) sent to an archive.

A cross-check has been run for EVERY State. This means putting the state into alphabetical order and scanning for duplications. It cannot catch somebody with entries in two states. Also, part of the scan is to correct people who are not in LAST COMMA FIRST format, which means there are some duplicatons as there wasn't time to run a second scan after some FIRST COMMA LAST entries were reversed. Maybe I'll do more scans later. For now, I'm back to the old process of just doing a state whenever somebody sends an entry for that state, if a cross-sort wasn't done in the last three months.

Jean's advertising and Leanna's cart notice continue to bring in new entries.

The pilot test of "send an email to everybody on the list before 2005 and ask for updates" has been completed, and the process will be handed over to Simone, who can do a lot more than five per day. It will take about 3 months to finish that and a year to do the whole list by the old five- per-day system; Simone can speed that up.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Wednesday, April 09, 2014 - 05:57 pm: Edit

UPDATE 9 APRIL 2014

Things are moving forward. There are (today) some 1,472 "active" entries, or more to the point, entries on the active list. How many of them are actually still at that address or still play the game, we have no way to tell.

All of the reports and updates and mentions of the Starlist Improvement Project have resulted in more people contacting us than would normally happen, PLUS the ones from Jean's churning of the internet and Leanna's shopping cart. We're adding about one new valid entry per day, plus two or three per week who are replying to Simone's email and updating decade-old entries. (One update today is still at the same house as he was 12 years ago. Another of today's updates said everything but the email address as wrong so he will go fill out the form to update his info.

Every day, I send Simone 20 entries from 2000-2004. I'm working my way thorugh the zip codes, and am well into Ohio (45363). She sends out 20-30 per day (she got behind doing some higher priority stuff but is catching up). Of those 20 or 30, about 6-10 bounce back as email not valid (these are moved to the archive portion) and one or two send current updates.

I guess if you add it up that means every day we lose about seven old entries, gain an average of one and a half new ones, and get one or two updates. If you assume (and these numbers have no validity) that of the 1472 active entries about 1000 are valid and 472 are not, the net change per day of removing 7 bad ones and adding 3 good ones means that we go from 67.93% good to 68.37% good, a net gain of a little under half a percent. Not much one one day, but over a period of months, the list will get better and better.

It pains me to move someone from the active to the archive portion but if his email address is no good and his data is 10 years old, the odds of him still being there are fairly small. Not zero, but fairly small.

In a couple of weeks, we will have emailed everybody more than 10 years old and will start on the ones 8 or 9 years old. By the end of the year if not the early Fall, everyone on the list will have gotten an email from us.

The next step (mailing everyone a postcard) probably won't happen due to time and expense, but we might try doing a pilot project, sending 25 postcards to entries that are 5 years old and 25 more to people who are 14 years old and just see what happens. That might convince us to do more of that.

Did have one guy say "Data is still good but there is no one around here to play." I found him three people within 20 miles.

One day, three people with 2000-2004 entries all u updated on the same day and they all lived in Connecticut (not a big place) but more to the point they all lived in a relatively small area in the middle of the state with nearly consecutive zip codes.

I have also found some staffers that I email every day who have entries that are 12 years old (and still valid).

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - 03:36 pm: Edit

STARLIST UPDATE PROJECT REPORT 15 APRIL

This was a typical day. I sent Simone 20 entries from 2000-2004. She sent out 30, since she had 60 on file. (She sends 30 because I send her 20 every day 7 days a week; so if she does 30 on each of five days a week it works out.)

I have three new requests (one caused by Jean, one from the shopping cart, and one that just wandered in) on file, but as that's the most time-consuming part I'm not supposed to do more than one of those per day. In theory I could delegate that part to Simone but considering that the four people I previously delegated the task to failed to do it right, and considering the time it takes to keep two sets of data identical, it's not really a net gain to delegate that. Even as the most time-consuming part of the process, it's only 5 minutes a day.

As is typical, she forwarded to me two guys who wanted to update their info and get current lists of nearby opponents, 1 person who wanted off the list, and 17 people whose emails bounced. The bounces were moved to the archive portion of the list. Statistically, a third of them still live there and some of those still play, but with no way to know which is which, and entries 10 years old, they were "low probability of success" entries and moved to archives (which are sent only if requested and nobody has that I remember).

Since Simone sends 30 per day, the 20 "answers" of various types today mean 10 of those old entries got the email delivered. Some of those went to old accounts that nobody checks, but some of them went to the person involved who (for whatever reason) blew them off instead of answering. So, those remain on the list because if somebody local contacts them they might actually reply.

The 30 I sent Simone today mean I have sent her everybody from 2000-2004 who was in zip codes 00000-61822. That isn't quite half the country as there are 30% more people in 50000-99999 than in 00000-49999. I have no idea why that is. Wtihout doing a lot of work I don't want to do I have no idea how long it will take me to send Simone everybody from 2000-2004.

Anybody from 1991-1999 was moved to archive months ago when the list was divided.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, April 24, 2014 - 05:51 pm: Edit

Today I did something I never thought I would do, but something that needed to be done.

I took the "archive" part of each of the four Starlist files (Zip codes 0-2, 3-4, 5-7, 8-9) and merged them into one big archive file. That made the "active" files smaller and easier to work on. I had noticed that with half of each file "archives" it was hard to scroll down to a given number. Without the archives, it's much easier.

I also combined all of the "archives not posted the lost souls" into one list and alphabetized it, then moved everybody from A-Christiansen down to a separate list. New people being moved to the archive will go the separate bottom list. (Unless they're low enough in the alphabet to be merged into the not-yet-posted list without sending it back to "A" every day. Each group of 10 that I post will move to the main archive file. That way, the "lost souls" postings will be one huge alphabetical list.

Until the alphabet starts over sometime in about a month.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, April 28, 2014 - 07:04 pm: Edit

Another update.
Today I sent Simone the last 60 of the "People between 2000 and 2004 who had email addresses." As noted, these broke down into these groups:

1. People who renewed their listing. These were treated as new requests and sent the current area.

2. People whose email bounced. These were moved to ARCHIVE.

3. People who fall into other categories, such as those who asked to be deleted or who said they would renew. These were moved to the "Deep Archive" list.

4. People with "no answer, no bounce" who were left on the list but marked "April 2014: email sent; no answer, no bounce."

I also did some random test samples of more recent entries with a success rate of 8 out of 10 for 2005-2009 and 9 out of ten for 2010-2013. I'm going to assume that 2014 is 10 out of 10. There are a lot of 2013s and 2014s due to the efforts of Leanna and Jean. We have had well over a hundred new entries and updates this year.

Back when somebody complained that "Starlist is not worth the bother" there were 5200 names on it. Based on tests, about 40% had working emails. Maybe 50% were still where they were but had a new email address.

The current "active" roster is about 1200. Based on tests, maybe 85% of those are still good emails and over 90% good physical addresses.

So, if there is someone near you who plays the games you want to play, your chances of a new opponent are extremely high. Of course, they were extremely high before we did all this extra work, but the workload to contact people who might or might not be there was somewhat higher. Of course, if you happen to live somewhere that nobody plays games, there isn't much I can do for you but you can run demos and recruit local players.

We decided to "push pause" on emailing older entries until I get a couple of products done. Even though I am only spending about 10-15 minutes per day on re-contacts that's an hour to an hour and a half a week that could go into a new product. I can lay out four or five pages in that hour, so call it 4-8 pages per week. Say I take three months off of the recontact project, that's 72 pages or a big chunk of a major product.

But Starlist is a heck of a lot better now than it was nine months ago.

By Glenn Hoepfner (Ikabar) on Friday, June 27, 2014 - 04:02 pm: Edit

Curious about Starlist: Old Entries.

Are all of these different names from the previous list of archiving names?

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, June 27, 2014 - 04:17 pm: Edit

Glenn: We have been compiling Starlist since 1991 from people who asked to be on it and convention attendee lists (which allowed people to opt into it).

Over the last several months, I have (under pressure from Jean and Leanna to improve the quality of the list) moved anyone prior to 2000 and anyone prior to 2004 without an email address to the "archive" file which is separate.

We have sent an email to every entry from 2000-2005 which had an email list and moved to the archive anyone whose email bounced. Many people updated, a few asked to be deleted, and a lot just didn't answer at all meaning the email went to an old account they don't check very often but which is still active.

We have posted on the BBS the people we have moved so that perhaps they (or a friend) will notice and send in an updated listing via the online form for Starlist. So if you see your name there, you are no longer "on starlist" and your contact info is no longer being sent to people in your area who ask for active players. You might want to send in an updated entry. (Note that we delete phone numbers and street addresses from the BBS post to protect privacy for anyone who still lives there.)

Basically, until a year ago, if you asked for everyone in your area you got everyone from 1991-2013 which obviously included a lot of people who have moved or quit playing since they were on the list. If you ask for a listing now, you will get
---only people from 2005-2014
---some people from 2001-2004 with email addresses that do not bounce
---a bunch of new entries from the last 12 months when Leanna and Jean have tried very hard to get more people to sign up.