Just a brief reminder that we're in the midst of our Virtual Directeur Sportif Open Season, ending Friday, February 26, so head on over to the Podium Cafe VDS Website to register your team. And while you're there, please observe Rule #1:
Use your Podium Cafe username to play, one team per player.
This has long been our sole prerequisite to playing: you must be a registered Podium Cafe member! Right now, of the roughly 200 teams, a dozen of you have signed up at the Podium Cafe, made a team at the VDS website, and then deleted your Podium Cafe membership. This is not OK, and I will have to consider removing these teams if the problem is not fixed.
Here's why: we operate this site like any site -- for whoever wants to read it, free of charge and with no means or interest in finding out who you are, out of respect for your privacy and out of the realization that more than enough people DO want to identify themselves and be active members. The VDS is a side project which we highly value. We buy prizes using donated funds and mail them to the winners, usually people whom none of the editors have ever met or know anything about besides a mailing address. The atmosphere around here is such that we have no qualms about doing this, and I can't imagine that changing, ever.
So when we ask you to become a registered member in order to play, all we are saying is that to take advantage of the fruits of the game is that you make the barest gesture of registering with the site. I don't get paid based on registered members; we don't sell email addresses; we don't even verify them in a way that would prevent you from using a dormant or nonexistent account. [If you win and we can't send you your prize because your email doesn't work, that's your problem!] [Update! Tedvdw reminds me that you need a working email at podiumcafevds.com so you can retrieve your password. Still...] All registering does for me is giving me a sign that you're present, and it gives us a minimal way to enforce the one-team-per-customer rule -- a critical fairness issue.
So please, if you had any discrepancy in your VDS and PdC logins, look into it. If you deleted your PdC login after making a team, please recreate your PdC ID. Thanks, and good luck!