Decipher mailing lists
Decipher mailing lists were the e-mail discussion lists run by Decipher for players of the Star Wars Customizable Card Game and its other games. From 1996 the company ran Majordomo lists at games.decipher.com, including swccg-discussion for rules and strategy talk and swccg-marketplace for trading. Decipher sponsored the lists officially but did not moderate them, and the Star Wars CCG "Netrep" answered rules questions on swccg-discussion.[1] Around 2002 the lists moved to a GNU Mailman server at lists.decipher.com.[2]
History
In 1997 Decipher's Star Wars CCG "Dialog" page listed the "Listserv", the emailback document service and the faxback service as sources of information. It placed them alongside the bulletin boards and the Star Wars Palace chat. A web form sent subscribe and unsubscribe commands to majordomo@decipher.com. Every list also had a digest version.[3] On the matching Star Trek page, Decipher explained that a digest arrived "in bundles of 50 messages each".[4] In 1999 the Young Jedi lists were added, and the subscription form moved to the Message Boards section.[5]
swccg-discussion was very busy. Between January 1997 and December 1998 it carried about 67,000 messages, with more than 4,000 a month at its peak in mid-1998.[6] Frequent posters included Justin Pakes and Mark Tuttle.
Decipher's Mailman server, lists.decipher.com, hosted discussion and marketplace lists for each game: Star Wars, Star Trek, Young Jedi, Jedi Knights and The Lord of the Rings TCG. Only list members could read the archives.[2] From 2002 Decipher also ran short-term "insider" or "news blast" lists for new expansions and events. In September 2004 it set up the dAgent and dAgent-intl lists for its volunteer program, run by Kyle Heuer and Kim Logie.[7]
Lists
| List | Game | Purpose | Software | Active |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| decipher-announce | All | Company announcements | Majordomo | 1996–2001 |
| swccg-discussion (+ digest) | Star Wars CCG | Rules, strategy and play discussion; unmoderated | Majordomo, then Mailman | 1996–c. 2004 |
| swccg-marketplace (+ digest) | Star Wars CCG | Trading and sales | Majordomo, then Mailman | 1996–c. 2004 |
| stccg-discussion / stccg-marketplace | Star Trek CCG | Discussion / trading | Majordomo, then Mailman | 1996–c. 2004 |
| yjccg-discussion / yjccg-marketplace | Young Jedi CCG | Discussion / trading | Majordomo, then Mailman | 1999–c. 2002 |
| jktcg-discussion | Jedi Knights TCG | Discussion | Mailman | c. 2001–2002 |
| lotrtcg-discussion | The Lord of the Rings TCG | "The Lord of the Rings TCG Discussion List" | Mailman | 2002–c. 2004 |
| twotowerstcginfo, lotrbohd-info, st2einfo, stenergize-info, vegas | LOTR TCG / Star Trek CCG | Expansion and event news lists ("Become an Insider") | Web form / Mailman | 2002–2003 |
| dagent / dagent-intl | All (WARS, LOTR, Star Trek) | dAgent volunteer program (private membership, public archive) | Mailman 2.1.2 | 2004–2005 |
Archives
Decipher's own archives of the game lists were private and do not survive. The most important surviving record is an eGroups (later Yahoo! Groups) mirror of swccg-discussion, which was subscribed to the Decipher list as a "remote list". It held messages 1 to 67,554, from 7 January 1997 to 5 December 1998.[8] The Internet Archive saved several hundred individual message pages from the mirror. The first is a rules post by Justin Pakes titled "R units". The 428 recovered messages are indexed on Decipher swccg-discussion list archive.[9]
The public Pipermail archive of the dAgent list survives in full: 2,092 messages from September 2004 to January 2005, mostly about WARS and The Lord of the Rings TCG.[10]
See also
References
- ↑ swccg-discussion group info, eGroups (1999). Preserved copy: Internet Archive
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Swccg-discussion Info Page, Decipher (2002). Preserved copy: Internet Archive
- ↑ Star Wars Customizable Card Game : Dialog, Decipher (1997). Preserved copy: Internet Archive
- ↑ Star Trek Customizable Card Game : Dialog, Decipher (1997). Preserved copy: Internet Archive
- ↑ Message Boards : Mailing Lists, Decipher (1999). Preserved copy: Internet Archive
- ↑ swccg-discussion, Yahoo! Groups (2001). Preserved copy: Internet Archive
- ↑ Dagent Info Page, Decipher (2004). Preserved copy: Internet Archive
- ↑ swccg-discussion messages, eGroups (1999). Preserved copy: Internet Archive
- ↑ swccg-discussion message #1, eGroups (1997). Preserved copy: Internet Archive
- ↑ The Dagent Archives, Decipher (2004). Preserved copy: Internet Archive