Why does the FIRST website not have a Contact Team option in their Team and Event Search? It could work much like a Contact Us form on a website and send an email to the 2 main contacts for the team.
Why is it this hard for someone to contact a team? Now that the team contact search function is gone from TIMs it’s even that much harder for me to help someone find a team.
HQ, make this happen.
I always check social media and website on Blue Alliance. It’s far from a perfect system, but usually works.
As for why they don’t have it, there could be some worries about email scraping. I don’t think those fears would be wholly justified, but that could be why.
A blind e-mail system, similar to what Craigslist uses, would do wonder for helping reach out to other teams. Right now you pretty much need to reach out to a senior mentor who can pass along contact info or engage in a frustrating maze of TBA, google, and social media searches.
We have such a form on our team website, and have it protected by Google’s reCaptcha to cut down on spam… but spam still gets sent through it from time to time (as it goes to a Google Group, it’s almost always caught by the Group spam filter, which means I get to moderate it when it happens). As one of the team contacts for my team, I don’t really want to have to deal with that sort of thing in my personal email… and FIRST never asked me if they could expose me to potentially receiving unwanted spam through their systems. When it comes to privacy and things like the GDPR in the EU, FIRST has to play conservative, I think.
I would, however, be a fan of letting teams include a “contact us” email address or URL for FIRST to publish on the team profile. It’s opt-in, it lets you manage it separate from your account with FIRST.
All that said, it’s worth getting to know the RD and/or senior mentor(s) for your area. As authorized users, they’re able to “peak behind the curtain” and get you in touch with the contacts for another team.
Gotta justify that 40k stipend/event for RD’s or however much it is these days by making people go through them to contact teams. /s
Someone trying to find a local team for their kid to join should not have to “get to know their local RD”.
What if they have an exclusive opportunity for them with Mary Kay?
Isn’t it just going to http://www.firstinspire.org and then go to Community -> Find Team, check the program type (FLL,FTC, FRC, etc) and then put in seasons, county, state, zipcode and distance and up pop a list of teams. Most teams would have a link to their website (I understands that not all do). So it’s up to each team to make sure that they have a simple contact us form or email link at least?
If only FIRST already had some contact information for each team and they could just use that to contact the team and didn’t have to rely on teams having functioning websites. Some day well invent this technology, but not this day.
In an ideal world, it would be nice to have an FRC email for each team being created, emails sent to that can then show up in the lead mentor’s/primary contact’s TIMS portal or forwarded to the email address the main contacts list in TIMS.
Something like [email protected]…can be [email protected][email protected] etc
The TIMS contacts get an alert, and the team can reach out to the individual themselves.
I’m surprised a system like this isn’t in place already.
No, they shouldn’t. That advise wasn’t directed towards them. It was directed towards your statement:
As someone that wants to help others find team contact info, you can get to know the people that have access to that info 
. Not a perfect solution, but it is a solution.
That’s funny, I was replying directly to what was said in the OP. I guess I missed the change in conversation over the past 10 posts. Also, I did contribute to your concern about making it better.
It’s funny how people on here can ignore 2/3 of your post, pick out a single line and hammer you for it…
FIRSTAlliances has a blind email/contact form for any team that’s fully signed up for these exact reasons. I definitely wish FIRST would add a proper system for this so that we didn’t need to get teams to manually register for it first, though.
I understand where the confusion was. My original post was more supposed to be directed at the difficulty of someone not connected to a team already but I wasn’t very clear in that regard (considering I completely left that point off of the post).
I’d even be happy with a contact button that emailed the RD for that team’s area. It’s another layer that doesn’t really need to exist but it’d be at least easier for someone to be able to contact someone after using the search feature.
I feel like we would use this feature to publicize things like offseason events if it existed. Not sure if FIRST wants teams marketing to other teams all the time.
We’d opt in if there was an opt in function though. I’d rather get both more spam and more inbound messages than our current state.
This would be awesome!
So, like, I do this anyway because I’ve built up a database of contact information over 6 years of running an offseason event.
Yeah I did too this year, but I imagine FIRST doesn’t want to be seen as the reason team X (or even some external org completely separate from any team) is bugging them to come to their event.
True… but at the same time, the Regional Planning Committees are able to send out email blasts to local teams. You can see everything that gets sent to MN teams here, and it includes signup information for off-season events, other events local teams are hosting, and even events that 3rd parties are hosting.
At least this way, however, you have a single source that is able to moderate the content and frequency of such communications, which is nice to have.
That’s a really good idea. Maybe FIRST can use their existing partnership with Google and/or Microsoft to get this set up.