[TXT] Match Results via Text Message and E-Mail

[Greg Marra]

The Blue Alliance
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Match Results via Text Message and E-Mail
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You may have recently seen that The Blue Alliance will be posting live match updates to Twitter from now on. The same change to the code base also enables another feature - live match updates via e-mail. And guess what? A phone has an e-mail address at which it can receieve text messages. If you can't make it to the Championship and want to follow along with your team, or want to stay up-to-date on another team, this service will text message you after each match that that team plays in.

It's in beta (there have been no events to test it with yet), so I am not sure how it is going to work out. Sending an e-mail takes a fairly long amount of time once you have to send a few hundred or thousand at once. For this reason, I am going to slowly phase in people as they register. When you sign up, the system will tell you you are verified, but I am going to leave all subscriptions disabled, then turn them on a few at a time during the Championship as I see the system can handle it. I'll do this first-come-first-serve, but if things aren't working out you might not get any text messages at all. Thanks to your help testing though, we ought to be able to roll this out fully-fledged for next year's competitions!

Also, since it's in beta, if receiving text messages cost you money, you may want to be wary. While I have tested everything and it seems to be behaving properly, I wouldn't want something to break and you to get 100 text messages (there are a couple hundred matches played during the Championship...) that you have to pay for.

If you want to sign up for e-mail or text message notifications, go to http://www.thebluealliance.net/tbatv/notifications/ and fill out the form. You may find e-mail formats for various carriers on Wikipedia. The final interface will make this easier, but it's beta, so I haven't written it yet.

If you sign up, just give a shout in this thread so I can keep approximate tabs on interest from Chief Delphi. Please provide any feedback, issues, or suggestions in this thread.

Thanks!