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Officers' Quarters: Shaming gquitters
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. How do you react when players quit your guild? This week's email comes from a member of an EverQuest guild who is dismayed by her officer's aggressive response. Hi Scott, Thanks so much for writing this great column. It has provided me with beneficial insight and advice on many occasions. I don't actually play WoW (I play EverQuest), but the things you write about transcend that. I am currently a member of a struggling guild, which only has a few officers trying to run the show (the guild leader is pretty much absent, and the guild has been that way for years). The newest officer is in charge of recruitment. He does a good job of inviting people, but after experiencing our lack of timeliness and progression on raids, many of them seek greener pastures. The recruitment officer then posts something rather nasty and unprofessional on their application (which is visible to the public).
Dictionary apps try to shame supposed pirates, plan backfires
A series of Dictionary apps recently took an, um, "innovative" path to fighting software piracy, though it didn't quite work out as expected. Enfour is the developer of quite a few dictionary-style apps on the store, and it recently implemented an anti-piracy system that hijacked the pirate's Twitter account, and posted an anti-piracy message with the #softwarepirateconfession hashtag. That's a cute way to deal with piracy, you might think, except that the measure erroneously attacked quite a few non-pirates, not to mention invaded a user's public identity via Twitter. Oh, and auto-Tweeted on behalf of a certain Mr. Teller. A representative from the company says on Twitter that the attacks on people who hadn't pirated the apps were the result of a bug, which has since been fixed. But the company is still unapologetic about trying to out pirates -- it says that only 25 percent of its apps in the wild are legitimate copies. It's also not elaborating on this "bug," although to call a purposely built shaming mechanism into your app a "bug" is a bit inaccurate. Developers have tried to stop piracy in interesting ways before. Croteam, the makers of Serious Sam, recently added a huge, immortal monster to the games of any users they'd determined to be software pirates. But invading a user's Twitter feed (especially when there's a chance of accidentally calling out innocent people) isn't the right way to do it. The reviews and comments on the American Heritage Fourth Edition app are a good example of what happens when you make a mistake this big.
