Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Brandon Martus
Reading this makes me think they could make some kind of contact system which automatically forwards to the TIMS team leader (ie: team47@email.usfirst.org ) and doesn't require an additional gmail account. Of course this would require initial work on FIRSTs part, but it would keep it centralized and auto-updated based on TIMS updates, and wouldn't depend on GMail. |
Agreed, I've been thinking that while reading this thread as well, since it also poses less potential for violating Gmail's terms of use. When I first signed up they had a policy against having more than 1 account but I can't find it now. Even if they don't really enforce it, as a group we should try to respect their wishes (like I said though, I can't find anything forbidding it at this time, but they change policies like that regularly).
The other problem I see with this Gmail setup is that you don't really know who's on the other end. Is it the team admin and/or someone who can "speak" for the team? Nothing against any of you who have created the accounts here, but if I had something important to communicate to a team I don't think I'd trust this method to work. How do you even know that if you contact "2175.FIRST@gmail.com" and it goes through that it really is someone from team 2175, and not someone else trying to cause trouble (just because you wouldn't do this doesn't mean someone else won't).
Expanding on Brandon's idea, I think it'd be neat to have a URL redirector, so that
http://team111.frc.usfirst.org would redirect to 111's web page. That would make it easy to find any team's website (as long as they registered it with FIRST), AND you could use it for the email forwarder (admin@team111.frc.usfirst.org). This way, the service could also "fail gracefully" when the information isn't available. Team 2175 hasn't registered their website? Then
http://team2175.frc.usfirst.org displays a nice "We're sorry, but this team has not registered their website." message. Same thing for email: anything sent to
admin@team2175.frc.usfirst.org would be returned, perhaps with any other relevant information "This team has not registered an admin email address, but they have provided a website available at http://team2175.frc.usfirst.org."