[penguicon-general] Wrangling LUGs

[lverhulst]

On 5/1/07, Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
> On Tuesday 01 May 2007 4:14 pm, Neal Probert wrote:
> > If we want more LUG folks, I would suggest giving LUG members a
> > discount.  Base that discount on the number of members from that LUG
> > attending.  Perhaps a prize for the winning LUG with the most attending
> > members, best party, longest distance traveled, coolest LUG table.  A
> > lot of these guys are bringing in loads of their own gear, so they
> > should also be rewarded/compensated likewise.
>
> Data point:
>
> For the first Linucon, I wrote an online registration system that
> accepted "coupon codes" that changed the price of registration (either by a
> delta or to an absolute value).  I then spread lots and lots of "$5 off
> current registration price" coupons everywhere I could, and made them
> different coupon codes so I could see who had found us through where.  I gave
> a code to each of our Guests of Honor (giving them an excuse to tell their
> fans about us _and_ give them a discount), I put them on flyers at the
> University of Texas, I gave them to the local LUGs, I put them on flyers we
> gave out at room parties, etc.  I also had some with an expiration date
> (yeah, I know "act now supplies running out" is sales, and I don't do sales,
> but I know the tricks) which I implemented by manually adding and removing
> them from the cgi script with a text editor. :)
>
> A fringe benefit of this is I had various coupon codes that could comp badges
> (I had one and each department head had one), so that whenever somebody
> wanted to give out a free membership for some reason they could do so but it
> was easy to track who had given out what.  Things like the panelist
> registration rate was also a coupon code.  Everything could be done live
> through the online registration system, and every attendee had a badge number
> assigned (and displayed to them) at time of registration.  (I kept meaning to
> write a page that could dump the current registration list, but to be honest
> I just ssh'd into the server and did an ls -l in the directory.)
>
> Altogether it was only a couple hundred lines of code.
>
> Rob

Any interest in open sourcing the code? :-)

--Leane