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

No Mini, the email account you have to use for the sign up is the one the BBC used to send you the email. This is the one that's on their system...which doesn't bode well for those who aren't getting emails sent in the first place.

People should make a careful note of the e-mail address their account is registered to. It looks like they're gonna need it.

Perhaps this explains why so many people haven't opened them. They've all got lost in the post...

I've asked the h2g2 future Comms team and h2g2 future Tech team to translate from the klingon and explain what it means we have to do to make sure we land in the new place.

Um.

They may be some time...

B

This is utterly ridiculous. It's going to cause all kind of havoc I can see.

And I only use twitter very occasionally and Facebook about once every six months.

It's getting like you have to be part of the mono culture. If you are an *individual* and choose to still use email which is the inheritance of traditional mail, you are disabled in some way.

I'm sick of it.

It's more and more that normal civilised modes of communication are not taken seriously. Next it'll be that if I don't use Facebook I'll lose out in all sorts of ways...I can see that.

It's all getting so incestuous.

Isn't enough that we are bought and sold? And we've been through this horrible period of uncertainty?

things just started to get clearer and now they send out emails written in gobbledegook and no-one knows what the hell they are meant to do or the implications. Aunty should be ashamed the way this whole process has been handled from start to end...actually ever since we were told we'd passed the MOT and the future looked rosy, never mind we were sold a pub in Barfesque.

pup

We bought a pub?

Most excellent, dudes!

in answer to a fear mentioned in another thread… i dont think we are going to "lose the accounts of pheloxi, zen devil, tb falsename," bels or any of the others who have passed away or have been gone a long time... and by accounts i mean their personal spaces, their entries, their postings... the only thing that will be lost, finally, in the end, are the DETAILS which we have lately been talking about... password, email address and login name of accounts ... all that is going to be deleted is the ability to access those accounts from the inside as the owner of each account...

and that will be after a period of time
which
i am sure
since its us who are now going to be in charge
will be a nice long time
rather than
a nasty abusively short time

also... if the new powers that be can finagle keeping it simple...
then if you are one of those folks who want their stuff to stay here at the bbc
but not go over to the noohootoo...

then i think all you will have to do is make sure you reregister over in noohootoo
and then whilst there, delete alla your stuff immediately...

and if you want it not to stay on bbc (which will be an archived thingie i bet)
then you should delete alla the stuff before the move...
and i bet we will have at least 24 hours notice before the move


and you know what i would like to see?
i would like to see this:

that they send these emails they are sending us
from
an already recognized address
such as the one they used to verify our account when we first signed up
or the one they use to inform us of a hidden or removed post

then there would be no spam
then we all would just get the emails


really.

why does it always have to be so hard?

Just doing some maths here...

Wasn't it said that around 170,000 emails were sent out? So if it's just a little less than 10% that have opened their email, does that mean that we can expect about 17,000 people to fish up on the new site?

I'd be happy with that.


Geggs

heh heh good one, Geggs

I understand what it says, but...crikey, they didn't half about it in a spaghetti-junction-kind-of-way!

Can you translate it for us Heather? My eyes crossed and my synapses started melting about a third of the way through.

"Wasn't it said that around 170,000 emails were sent out? "

WHAT?? That many and they expect them all to be read? Who are these jokers...

Right - couple of points here...


The beeb were originally going to give the new owners an open list of all hootoo users with their passwords, ID, e-mail etc.

Then they decide this:

----------------------


Our analysis tells us that less than ten percent of those contacted have so far opened the email, perhaps because they do not trust that it came from the BBC. This suggests that many of our users will not be able to make an informed decision and we have therefore decided to modify our approach.

--------------------

They're worried that if someone doesn't read the original mail then they haven't actually been given the option to 'opt-out' and this might create problems later...

So, instead of handing the e-mail addresses of every body that's ever registered with hootoo, they're stuffing the e-mail addresses into a secure database that the new owners will have limited access to... They won't be able to read the addresses.

- We send the new owners an e-mail from our active account
- They type it into the database
- The database spits out our login and password - only then will they have an email address associated with a login.

They'll not be able to mail everyone who's ever registered with the bbc, only those who've actually re-registered with the new hootoo.


(My guess is the system will be a bit more automated than that, but that's the rough gist of it).

-------------------


Having said that - my guess is their analysis is totally screwed up!

The only way they could actually see who had opened a mail is if they'd asked for confirmation (they didn't!) or they used an old spammers trick (they did!)

If you note at the top of the mail, there's the phrase 'bbc logo' - that's actually an image, and if you look at the address of the image, it's horrendously complicated - basically this means that when you open the mail your computer looks for an image in a specific location on a bbc server - each individual mail has a different image address, which is linked to your e-mail address... Thus they know which e-mail address has opened the message...

Where that idea fails completely is that it doesn't take into account anyone who opens a mail _without_ displaying images (which - given that most hootooers are reasonably technically savvy, will be the vast majority of us.)

"Where that idea fails completely is that it doesn't take into account anyone who opens a mail _without_ displaying images (which - given that most hootooers are reasonably technically savvy, will be the vast majority of us.)"

Ah. There you go then. If you look at the email I pasted above it says 'bbc logo' because that's what is displayed on the email. So my bad, I have not 'opened' the emails. I knew there was a reason I don't display remote content. I'd kind of forgotten why I didn't...

On a plus note, my other email to my other address came through. But I still don't know what 'registered for new h2g2' means.

well, i for one, whiskey, am a lot more technically savvy than i was before i read your post!!
thanks!

It's because they don't think of us as human beings any more.

When I write a letter or email to someone, I'm thinking to make things as clear as possible for that person. Not self indulgently cramming a lot of information into it to purely satisfy myself...and in the end forgetting the most important point of all, it needs to make sense.



It shows total lack of consideration. Nonsensical bureaucracy makes me feel ill.

I*ve had the same email account for over 15 years and it*s been the one the Beeb has had for 9 years (in August). I registered in Barflesque with the same email as well. I*ve visited the new site and unsuccesfully tried to sign on. Is that why I didn*t get the emails? (Please forgive my apparent thickness.)

Do I have to ask for my donation back?

The fact that it's July and some people might be on holiday may also partly explain why some of the email recipients haven't opened their inbox in the 4 days since they sent out the previous mail.

"I*ve visited the new site and unsuccesfully tried to sign on."

what site is that clzoomer?
is the new site available?