dS Seekrit Santa - info update!

[sprat.livejournal.com]

Just a few notes:

I. If you have already signed up for this year's challenge, you should have received a reply from me acknowledging your sign-up email. I did find one sign-up in my spam filter already, so please let me know if you haven't yet heard from me.

II. If you are going to sign up, but haven't sent me anything yet, I'm changing the sign-up process a tiny bit, to make things a little easier and less vulnerable to human error. I still want to know the same information from you, but I now have a handy form I can email out, the contents of which get plugged directly into the database where they need to be. So when you sign up for dSSS, please follow these steps:

1. Send me an email with Seekrit Santa 2007 as the subject line. Don't put your registration info in the body of the message -- just say something like "Hey, I want to play!"
2. I'll send you the form you can fill out with your registration details.
3. You won't be able to type anything in the form until you hit "reply" to my message -- the form in the reply box is the one you'll fill in.
4. Send the form back to me.
5. I'll add you to the database, and send an acknowledgment email back to you.

Ta da! It should be pretty easy...but yeah, I know, the universe isn't often that generous. So if you do have problems getting the form to work, NO WORRIES -- just send me a regular email as described in the original rules, making sure "Seekrit Santa 2007" is again your subject line, and I'll copy and paste you in instead.

III. For anybody who participated in last year's challenge, one of the writers has had several spammy messages come in through the comments on her story. One of these was an ad for some website; all the others were posted with something like "test" in the name or comment fields. I think I've managed to block the IP addresses of the spammer in question, and have also added some screening thingies that should prevent any URLs from being posted in a comment. But in order to put these safeguards in place, I have had to a) set up the archive to collect your IP address when you're commenting and also b) CC all comments to myself. Your IP addresses aren't put up anyplace public -- they just get added to the bottom of the comment email. But I thought I should let you all know.

If anybody receives any spam comments in the future, please email me so I can add those IPs to the block list.

That's it! You guys have been awesome, so far! And your requests are making me ITCH to get this thing underway -- I can't wait to read what you all come up with. \o/\o/\o/