Format or for worse

[j4]

Okay, so I am trying to subscribe lots of people to something (the University's team for the Developer Programme of a big company named after a fruit...) and the member management interface says I can upload a file of names and email addresses: "Please choose the text file containing the member names and email addresses and click on submit. You can have a maximum of 200 members in the file." Fair enough... but it doesn't say anywhere what the format for this text file should be. I tried a .csv file (Firstname,Lastname,firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk) and got told that it was expecting a .txt file, but that's the most informative error message I've managed to trigger. Everything else I've tried, I just get the following: "We are unable to process this Member Invitation file because of a file formatting issue. Please check the file and try again."

I have tried the following line formats for this text file:

1. firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk
2. Firstname Lastname <firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk>
3. Firstname,Lastname,firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk
4. Firstname Lastname,firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk
5. Firstname|Lastname|firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk
6. Firstname Lastname|firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk
7. Firstname\tLastname\tfirstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk
8. Firstname Lastname\tfirstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk
ETA:
9. As for #2 but comma-separated, no line-breaks
10. firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk (Firstname Lastname)
11. "Firstname Lastname" <firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk>
12. "Lastname, Firstname" <firstname.lastname@thisplace.ac.uk>

None of them work, & none of them give any more information about how to make them work. Am I being spectacularly dim here & missing an obvious upload format? I really don't want to have to add 80-odd people by hand.

ETA: It may be even worse than I thought; when you add a member by hand, you have four input fields: Firstname, Lastname, email address, role [member|admin]. So I guess I have to try adding the role in for all the character-delimited formats. Though the instructions do say "member names and email addresses", not roles. Hrm.

Or I could fill in I have now emailed them via the 'support' contact form, but their track record on actually replying to stuff is lousy, & I need these damn things added by the end of the week.

Comments

[j4.livejournal.com]

You mean the dot between firstname and lastname? That certainly is valid, & it's not by any means ox-specific or even particularly unusual as far as I can see (most people I know on gmail have firstname.lastname or f.lastname; friends/family at other universities have f.lastname...). I think your online feedback form must have just been even less helpful than this 'portal'! :-/

[sea-bright.livejournal.com]

I was a bit surprised that it wouldn't accept it as a valid format: I hadn't thought of it as particularly unusual, but it set me wondering if it was less common than I'd realized - although I also know lots of people with dotted gmail addresses, most of them previously had Oxford addresses and seem to have stuck to the same format. Good to know that it's not an issue, though.

[truecatachresis.livejournal.com]

Dots in the first part of a gmail address are ignorable; if you have registered firstname.lastname@gmail.com, you also have firstnamelastname@gmail.com (and possible all other combinations, although I haven't tested this). I'd guess the canonical version as far as gmail is concerned ignores all .

(This was true a couple of years ago, anyway, and may have changed. YMMV.)

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Excellent! I was annoyed that someone had beaten me to registering owenmcknight@gmail and now you've taught me that not only is that me but I can give the address as ow.enmck.night instead (http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10313).

[(Anonymous)]

regarding dots in gmail addresses - a leading dot doesn't work, e.g.

.firstnamelastname@gmail.com

But many others do, perhaps up to the point of a gmail address's character limit, e.g.

f....i...r...s...t...n...amelastname@gmail.com

-dpv