Recon Mission

I have not been out recruiting publicly today, and may not begin for a couple of days. Instead, I am attempting a huge, new, spreadsheeting of all our current members.

The coins are difficult - IWON lies about the coins when I view someone else's profile, and lies very inconsistently. Remy and I had some considerable difficulty determining how many coins each of us had, when looking back and forth - my copy of my profile would say one total, with a ranking, and her copy of that very profile, simultaneously refreshed, would state a very different total, and a different ranking. Same in reverse - I saw different coins and rank on her profile, than did she. (I am currently experiencing the same problem with Irankin - his profile jumps from adjacent, to 20 or 30 behind me, on consecutive refreshes of my profile page.) What I decided to do, was to accept the IWON coin ranking, and time-stamp that into the spreadsheet, to allow at least gross observation of change. It will take a full week to complete the initial spreadsheet. Then I have something that allows me to see if my profile scans have been right about the numbers of non-playing members, the numbers of super-collectors who have joined the team during the past week or so, and the effects of future recruiting on coins, as opposed to simply member numbers.

I see a lot of uses for the spreadsheet, once compiled; but if someone has an additional idea, the sooner I "hear" that idea as a comment, the better. I envision rechecking the spreadsheet against the member roster at least once a month, to add new members, if I don't see them as introductory messages in the message queue. I can, of course, count them by gender, sort them by gender, sort them by coin rank, or back to player name.

This all grew out of the dissatisfaction I felt about relying on scanning and sampling the roster profiles, as a means of finding out whether we are headed in the right direction, or toward oblivion as a team. (I plan to remain until only the ghost of Tiger and the ghost of Conley are still playing for the team - or maybe longer, if Tiger gives up first.)

**** I have added a field for IWON seniority. That will help decide whether this player is "lost" or merely very new.

**** More update: It may take me longer than a week to complete the sheet, for the first pass - no WONDER google calls their tool a "crawler". Part just over-estimation of the durability of my bottom in that chair, and part, the constant discoveries that require an adjustment of my routine for data collection and preservation. For one example, there are far more "Private" profiles than I had thought. After mulling, I decided to take the ranking for those from the mini pop-up that provides for calling the profile, so I have now back-pedalled and filled in most of those. Still cannot get to the IWON seniority, though, so . . .
The upshot is, that I will likely resume recruiting before I finish, for I do not think we can fully expect to beat our competition without resuming soon.