If someone gets booted because of duplicate accounts, will that remove them from the rmail system?


The reason I ask is in the past I have manually looked up missing players in the Chamber of Lost Souls but if I can do it all at once with an rmail check that would be a time saver for me.

Banned accounts can not send or receive rMails, except to and from the Moderators.

But when I type in a banned username into rmail, it says it checks out...

Can I send it to them and they just don't receive it?

The account still exists, so it shows up as being okay (because if it's just a temp ban they will still be able to read any rMails after their access is restored).  They simply can't receive non-Moderator messages.

For clarification,

It sounds like a banned account will still show up when you "update and check" to find an rmail recipient.

It sounds like you can compose and send rmail to a user if they are banned - they just won't get it.

Do you get some notice that the message was not deliverable?

On a similar vein, do GMs get notified when players are banned or otherwise no longer capable of participating due to moderator action or are they left in limbo wondering why a player hasn't been active?  Unless they happen to check Lost Souls or some other thread that may provide insight.

The message is not "not deliverable", it is simply not readable unless the account is reinstated.

GMs can always check the Chamber of Lost Souls - that's part of the reason it exists.  We do not have the time to notify the GMs of all the games that a banned user may have on his sticky list (and in some cases this can run to hundreds).

Is there much difference?  I do not know the inner workings of your site but it is likely there is never any "delivering" of the message, just notifying people that there is a message, providing a link to it, and setting the permissions on it.  Likely one single data set that is marked as "readable" by the sender and all eligible recipients.  One recipient "deletes" the message and the data is not deleted, their link to it and their permission to read it is removed.

The inner workings aside, the question is does the sender know if a message is being sent in vain?  It seams like with a little coding when a message is sent to a person who is banned and unable to read it some alert could be given to the sender to let them know the recipient of their message will not be able to read it.  This way they know immediately that there is a problem instead of waiting a few days for a response, maybe sending another message, waiting some more and then maybe going to check lost souls.

I'm not in the habit of checking every update to lost souls just in case.
This message was last edited by the user at 20:14, Fri 05 Feb 2016.

You don't have to check every update.  If you are concerned about a player who has not responded in a game, you can go to CoLS, open a thread and display All, then use your browser to search for their user name.

For some threads there is a summary post on the first page, so you can skip the All step.

And you only have to do this when you are concerned about a player.  Not every time there is an update.

Note also that the vast majority of bans are for duplicate accounts - the user's original account remains active afterwards (or is reactivated after a temporary suspension), so they are quite capable of contacting you themselves to tell you that their extra account was locked, and to request readmission to the game with their proper one.

This is true. I just thought I had stumbled upon a quick and easy way to identify if a group of names are 'bad' without having to search for each and every one.

I wanted to go from 5 seconds of work to 2 seconds of work but alas... those 3 extra seconds will have to remain!


WOE IS ME! LIFE IS PAIN! :P