Help Wanted - A Chimera Database

Hi all,

Chimera has grown significantly in the last few years and I found (last year in particular) that the systems that worked fine for a 60 person convention fail horribly in the face of the 120+ person monstrosity we have now reached. Presently, when someone fills out a form on the Chimera website, I receive an email to the Chimera inbox and I manually put all the data into an Excel spreadsheet. I would really like it if a wonderful technically capable someone (or someones) would be able to build me a system that did the following things:

  • People fill in a nice form on the Chimera site and all the information they put in gets sent into a database that exports to Excel.
  • I’d like it to have fields for me to edit, particulary in marking if each registrant has paid or not paid.
  • Ideally, this database would allow me to view lists of people who have paid, haven’t paid, requested accommodation, did not request accommodation, requested food, did not request food, have paid for food, have not paid for food etc.
  • Keep a record of the games people requested to be in (first and second choices for each round)
  • Separate from that and uneditable by the user, somewhere where I can enter in what games each person is confirmed for

If someone is very fancy, it would be great if it was a database a bit like the nzLARPS membership database where people had individual log ins and could view what they had requested and what games they were confirmed for.

I do not need the database to allocate people to games. That’s a manual process and with good reason.

Please keep in mind that this is a wish list, and while I’m pretty good at using databases, I have no concept of how difficult they are to build. At the end of the day, I’d settle for something that recorded what people plugged into a form and exported it to Excel so I don’t have to manually retype each of the 120+ registrations and game selections.

Thanks in advance,
Anna

[quote=“Anna K”] Presently, when someone fills out a form on the Chimera website, I receive an email to the Chimera inbox and I manually put all the data into an Excel spreadsheet.
[/quote]

You have to do what?! :open_mouth:

I can build an application that can import the data from the email. It will have a GUI that allows you:

  • edit their game selection, contact details, payment status etc
  • you can create bulk emails to participants who meet certain criteria (haven’t paid, have selected catering etc)
  • export reports (participant lists etc) to Excel

And hard to automate :wink: But I could build some smarts that keeps track of a participant’s hit rate relevant to first/second preference and their player/crew ration etc, if that would be useful.

It will be a Windows application that runs locally and has a local database. I do not program php (the technology in which the nz larps site is developed), so I can’t add features to the site; hence it has to be a local application if I develop it.

Exposing the game selection via the Chimera site would require someone (not me) to modify that site to accept a file upload that contains all current game assignments.

I haven’t seen the email format, so can’t determine how difficult it would be to parse the text (humans are very good at sorting free text, computers less so), so we may need to update the email format. Do you use Outlook to collect your email (NB: not Outlook Express) - if so, I could probably wrangle it to automatically save the email contents to a directory on your PC so all new emails can be imported automatically by the application when they arrive, meaning you will have even less work to do. :slight_smile:

[quote=“Adrexia”][quote=“Anna K”] Presently, when someone fills out a form on the Chimera website, I receive an email to the Chimera inbox and I manually put all the data into an Excel spreadsheet.
[/quote]

You have to do what?! :open_mouth:[/quote]

We did KapCon like that until 3 or 4 years ago. Now we get Drupal to export to spreadsheet (which then has the appropriate rows manually copy-pasted to a local version).

I could do this, but I have a bunch of other commitments and I think Scott wants me to do those other things first. :laughing:

[quote=“IdiotSavant”][quote=“Adrexia”][quote=“Anna K”] Presently, when someone fills out a form on the Chimera website, I receive an email to the Chimera inbox and I manually put all the data into an Excel spreadsheet.
[/quote]

You have to do what?! :open_mouth:[/quote]

We did KapCon like that until 3 or 4 years ago. Now we get Drupal to export to spreadsheet (which then has the appropriate rows manually copy-pasted to a local version).[/quote]

At the very least, writing the data to a csv file that can be opened by excel would take almost no time at all. Databases are better though.

I’ve been playing with Google forms and spreadsheets.

Google forms allow the user to enter their information. And you can actually edit the rows of information in the spreadsheet online. Even as people enter their data. You add columns to the right of the form columns.

And you can actually manually enter lines of data as well, and the forms automatically go to the next line when entering data into spreadsheet.

It’s actually pretty slick. Plus you can add mail merge code that let you send mail merges to people in the list. The mail merge code is a bit specific, but there’s a bunch there that can be used as a basis for our own stuff. But If you can mail merge from Word already, that gives you good data control.

So you can download the spreadsheet if you need to do mail merges from Outlook or Word. Or indeed when you have to go onsite for Chimera.

I suspect that this would be a pretty good solution at least right now. I do think that ideally a solution should hook into the NZlarps website. But that may take time to set up.

Let me know if you want me to set something up to test with. You will need a gmail account and I can set up a test, and give you access.

Hi Norm

Can I just say THANK YOU!!! I had no idea these forms existed and I am now totally using this for Teonn and it will make my life SOOO much easier.

Nikki

Google is your fwend

The Game signup system I have running has options for 10 questions, can track who has paid, exports to excel and has pretty much every other feature you are looking for.

I’m currently building an application to handle Anna’s requirements, but I would be interested in comparing features with the your system once I’ve finished. There’s more than 10 questions required to signup for Chimera, can your system be easily extended to handle more ? Dropdown lists you be useful as well, can it handle these ?

I’m currently building an application to handle Anna’s requirements, but I would be interested in comparing features with the your system once I’ve finished. There’s more than 10 questions required to signup for Chimera, can your system be easily extended to handle more ? Dropdown lists you be useful as well, can it handle these ?[/quote]

You have full admin access on it, have a play :slight_smile: Everything is configurable from the front end with your access so try creating a game and see what it can do.