Sign-ups are looking good and I think we may be getting close to a full house.
This in itself brings about a few questions:
1. If we have a fully booked LAN and people drop out at the 11th hour or don't show up then I think we should 'ask' them to pay the £15 lan fees.
2. It was suggested that priority should be given for active Alpha members to sign up before friends and inactive Alpha's. I thought this was a good idea and OB concurred (yay Mats). The problem is then how do we determine who is active or not?
I think that when the list goes to Alpha and therefore public, we'll add an addendum to it saying that *active* alpha's take priority and have two weeks to sign up before non-active Alpha's and friends can sign up. We can keep a running list of those others who want in. IMO, any Alpha who hasn't posted at least 3 times in the last 3 months is not active.
3. Finally, 44 is the maximum the room can handle, and that is going to be, umm, cosy to say the least. Shall I increase the sign ups to 46 or 48 working on the premise that we're gonna get some dropouts? Down side is that it's going to be messy if we don't get the no-shows and also makes the seating plan a sod.
4. I'm really going to push that we EXPECT people to attend the Steak Night or at least eat in the restaurant on the Friday. To make it more of an event I'll also bring along the whiteboard and we'll draw the teams and announce the comps during the course of dinner. I know we can't really enforce it but if we can 'encourage' people then so much the better.
Any thoughts?
PEN
good points, if people drop out then there is no reason that they should be willing to donate
Are you sure you're not 'over-organising'? If you start 'expecting' this and 'asking' that you'll start alienating folk. Getting people to pay if they can't make it smacks of being fined for not closing your dustbin lid! Let people enjoy the LAN as they see fit. This is a LAN party not the Labour party. Chill.
As far as hotel bookings (I presume that's what you mean by bookings) there used to be a perfectly good system. Charlies got first crack of the whip for a week then it was open to the rest of the community. Tzimple.
No offence is intended but you did ask for thoughts. :)
No, that's fine Ron. That why I posted.
I'm only raising issues that have been brought up from discussions at the previous LAN and the BBQ.
The paying the LAN fees thing came about at the LAN before last when we had 20% of people not showing up. There were discussions about getting people to pay a deposit etc.
It's really this LAN that it becomes moot as we're pretty much at a full house. The idea is that we don't want to be full so that others can't come only to find we have several spare seats because some of the people who signed up don't turn up. That's just not fair or reasonable. Also, until the mythical subscription model comes online the LAN is the only source of income we've got. I'm more concerned about people missing out and this LAN it could become an issue as previously we normally don't get oversubscribed.
The Steak Night is more random - Of course we not advocating that we try to force people to come, we just want people to want to come. It's not compulsory which is why we're trying to make it more of an event so that people are more inclined to come.
Over-organising... hmm possibly :whistle: . Most of the points do to come from a unique fact though - that this LAN has the potential to be oversubscribed (which hasn't happened for the last few LANs). And that has a direct impact on the above in relation to sign-ups, drop-outs and booking hierarchy.
Cheers
PEN