I think a checkbox option that allows BOTB to send an email that notifies you when a OHB goes down would be really helpful for people like me who either keep missing them, or don't have enough time to participate in them seriously without having to resort to terrible shitposting.

you can follow follow https://twitter.com/battleofthebits and get email / mobile / sms (edit: / desktop) notifications that way. probably twitter doesn't let you do that on a per-account basis though, so if you already have a twitter you'd have to make a second account for that purpose.

i agree that email notifications would be swag. i know a lot of people stress about missing ohbs they'd have wanted to join.

edit 2: for battle notifications only there's https://twitter.com/botb_battles

You can tell twitter to give you push notifications on individual accounts. Every BotB twitter account post blasts my phone. It's the quickest way for admins to get at me. Like Jangler said, there is second account that announces OHBs only.

Oh sweet! Didn't know you guys had a twitter for this exact purpose. Still feel like email would be a more reliable way of being notified, but that's just my preference. Thanks for sharing that.

You know, there's also the IRC channel. If you set up the OHB spamlist correctly you can get notified everytime an OHB starts. And if you set up audio notifications for name mentions. You can know by a little jingle when an ohb is starting!

Yeah, seconding Minerscale, IRC is by far the best method to get notified, especially given the fact that because of the very nature of OHCs you should be able to interact with rest of competing folk in realtime

IRC and twitter hilights are the way to get notified for me.. I've got word-hilights for stuff like 'ohc' and 'ohb' on #botb, and so even the mention pings me

Email was opted out because with the current hosting solution we are limited to 200 emails per day. Odds are we would go over that limit if we sent out alerts via this method and then n00bs would not get their registration emails for the rest of the day.

not that i think we should necessarily do this, but a way around the 200 email limit would be to only send one email per battle to an email list (e.g. a google group), and then people can subscribe to that for email notifications. so google would do the heavy lifting, so to speak.

thats GENIUS!!!

What about the google chrome notifications that I've started to see websites asking to send me nowadayz? Idk how they work, but it seems kinda RSSish... idk...

I just perused specs around push notifications. I personally am not a fan of browser or desktop notification, but I understand the want. Implementation doesn't look insanely hard, but it requires both https (a thing many have clamored for) and constant pinging of the server.

Chrome notifications would be something I would definitely use. I'm all for this!