h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's people like Gnomon's daughter I'm worried about. I was chatting with emo_kid before she was unceremoniously dumped from the site. Will she be able to get back (assuming she wants to) when she turns sixteen?

I haven't tried this yet. I'm waiting till I have something to say on another BBC board, or until I'm forced to to access h2g2. I'm sure it'll work fine, though.

TRiG.

My sister still isn't able to get back into her account, and she's been sixteen since August

Trust Mal to get post 42.

Um, no you wouldn't you'd just need to write a short VBA programme to take each e-mail address and insert it into a VBA produced e-mail which would have a standard subject and message body and send it out through Outlook or Lotus notes.

SQL query into Excel, say. VBA script to take each address and use that string as the address part of the e-mail.

Loop until you hit the bottom of the list of e-mail addresses.

There must be someone in the BBC who can programme VBA. It shouldn't be difficult.

I've got a question. I diddled around with my User Name and password in response to the previous announcements about this in November or so. Am I done, or do I have to do it again. More to the point - how can I tell?

Ben
(worrying about Z having an anti-climax)

It won't let me register my name, even truncated

Mrs Zen, I don't think you have to do it again. I'm presuming you did what I did a couple of months ago. What is now my member name for login on h2g2, is what I used as my username in the new BBCiD thing. But then you have something called 'Name' which they say is optional, on the new thing, which you can use for your actual username on BBC boards, but if you don't fill it in, it will use your user/login name as your user name, rather than your name. I filled the name in because my user/login name is not a name I use for posting, so I didn't want it using that as my posting name. But of course it wouldn't let me use my posting name, I use here. But I'll be able to sort that out via preferences, specifically for h2g2. Anyway that is by the by, and is my own personal climax story

I'm presuming...and this maybe presumptious on my part...that when the new system comes in, rather than the h2g2 log in page coming up, the new iD thing will come up. So now you've already signed up, it'll just automatically go over when the time comes. But like I say I maybe being presumptious. It's probably good to get it from the actual horses' mouths tomorrow to be certain.

I cna't see any ned to register again if one did it a few months ago.

It's simply because h2g2 has a wierd set-up!!!

I logged in using last months set up just to double check - worked for me and now I've saved the log-in info in to my mozilla browser

>It's simply because h2g2 has a wierd set-up!!!<

I think you're right. And some of us take its weirdness for normality. And so when we encounter normality it can seem weird.

Effers...normality...matter...antimatter...

It's not painless for me. Tried "upgrading" already when the first announcement was made, and I might have done something wrong then because it wasn't working at the time and it's still not working now. Might have gotten uppercase and lovercase letters mixed or something.
Now whatever I do I either get the message that the name has already been taken (by me that would be) or that "There has been a problem, please check your legacy_username.fieldname and legacy_user_id.fieldname."
Well, I'd be happy to check those fieldnames, but I really don't know how.

ive seen on a few posts, what do i do, how do i know its worked.
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best way it test it now.
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http://www.bbc,co,uk/dna/mbiplayer
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register this with your original user and password as you do, and you will be acsepted or the user will fail for some reason.
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if after you register, you dont want to waist the email, simple, just go to setting, and delete the account.
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ive done it, to see it i could get on from the digi, after registering, but not a chance, so i went to the cyber a few days back, logged on the mbiplayer, and deleted. now the email will be again for the h2g2.
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some of said, "i,ll wait till the change" if it doesnt acsept the user, at least you have time to sort why. "never put off, what you can do today", waiting can be smooth or a nightmare.
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J.H.D.

Has anyone posted a link to this announcement on Facebook? (I would, but I'm not on Facebook...) I posted a link on the h2g2reseachers account at LiveJournal, and in my own LJ, and I know of at least one person that appreciated it

Assuming you're using LAMP (which you're not), it would be something like this.

<?php

$db = new Data; // Assuming you're using some form of abstraction layer.
$sql = 'SELECT DISTINCT(Email) FROM User';
$rows = $db->query($sql);

$to = '';
foreach ($rows as $row) {
if ($to) $to .= ', '
$to .= '<' . $row['Email'] . '>';
}

$e = new Email; // Again, assuming you have a simple abstraction layer.
$e->from = '[email protected]';
$e->to = '[email protected]';
$e->bcc = $to;
$e->subject = 'Changes to h2g2 Registration system';
$e->message = 'http://lipsum.com';
$e->send();

?>

Since you aren't using LAMP, what 3Dots said probably makes more sense.

And I'm not sure whether the PHP mail() function would work with a massive Bcc header.

Don't mind me: I'm just being geeky for the sake of it.

TRiG.

LAMP = Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP.

You're using Windows, Microsoft-IIS/6.0, ??, and some form of C, I believe, though the HTTP header claims you're powered by ASP.NET.

I posted the link to this to the h2g2 facebook group a few hours ago, Amy. Good thinking there if I may say so myself.

TRiG:

$e->from = '[email protected]';
$e->to = '[email protected]';
$e->bcc = $to;
$e->subject = 'Changes to h2g2 Registration system';
$e->message = 'http://lipsum.com';




This bit of the code is fairly close. You could send out individual emails by having the to part eqaul to a string taken from the SQl which you might be able to create as a 1 dimensional array.

I have some code somewhere I just can;t find it but the link below shows how it's done.

The 'sendto' is the string that is the e-mail address which you would get from the list created by the SQL. Stick the code below into a loop and that should do it.


http://www.tek-tips.com/faqs.cfm?fid=3564

Sub SendEmail()

ESubject = "This is a test email"
SendTo = "[email protected]"
CCTo = "[email protected]"
Ebody = "Testing VBA's ability to send an email."
NewFileName = "C:\My Documents\TestFile.xls"

Set App = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")
Set Itm = App.CreateItem(0)
With Itm
.Subject = ESubject
.To = SendTo
.CC = CCTo
.Body = Ebody
'.Attachments.Add (NewFileName) ' Must be complete path
'.Display ' This property is used when you want
' the user to see email and manually send. Then
' comment out rest of code except “End With” statement
' and "End Sub" statement.
.send
End With
Set App = Nothing
Set Itm = Nothing
End Sub

Bel--great minds, eh?

I posted it to my own FB profile. If people don't see it there, they are not worthy.

Ottox, I briefly wondered about posting it to my profile, but then all my fb friends are active hootooers and know it anyway.

Amy: