EDIT: Please Disregard This Plan
I will leave it here as a point of historical interest, but I have a better and more automated method of doing the below process which has less room for mistakes and will hopefully get us online faster. See
this thread for details.
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I'm going to be typically longwinded and repeat the general plan I've proposed on the LS. It may take a long time to read this, and it may seem a bit complicated, but it could take a while to get everyone together and this seems to me to have the least potential for confusion, wasted time, or misspent gil. It will take a lot of patience on the parts of some people, and/or a willingness to delete their characters and start over after only a few weeks.
First, some background. There are probably going to be a fair number of servers. There are already 29 current or planned servers for Japan as far as I know, and there could at least that many ultimately added to accomodate the US release. Servers are completely separate worlds, and people on different servers have no way of communicating with each other in FFXI. Linkshells can not span servers, so we will need to all be on the same server in order to be in the same linkshell.
It is normally random (or at least not controllable) which server a new character is added to. Some have suggested that you can end up on a server of your choosing if you continually delete and recreate your character until you get on the correct server, but if that exploit was indeed ever possible, Square may have done something to prevent it. It may be worth a try, but we shouldn't depend on it.
The only exceptions to the rule that you're once and forever on the same server after you create your character are the World Pass and the World Shifter. We can ignore the World Shifter for now, as that only appears on overcrowded servers, to allow people the option to move their characters to another random server. This will probably not happen on any of our servers for some time, so we should not rely on World Shifters.
That means our main method of getting people together will be using World Passes. A World Pass is purchased. using gil, by someone who wants friends to join him on a server. The World Pass can be purchased from locations at the seat of government for your country on that server. I know they sell them in the office of Heaven's Tower, and they probably sell them somewhere in the President's Office of Bastok and the Chateau d'Oraguille in San d'Oria. When you purchase a world pass, you receive a code which can be given to and entered by up to 5 people when creating their characters. Those people's characters will then be created on the server from which the World Pass code came.
Each World Pass is only good for a limited time from the date of issue, and each person must wait a certain amount of time (not sure how long...perhaps a week, maybe two), before purchasing another. I believe there is also a similar waiting period for new users before they can purchase a World Pass. Furthermore, the fuller a server becomes, the more expensive a World Pass becomes. And, to make it perfectly clear, a World Pass can only be used to create a new character. If you start a character on another server, you can't use a World Pass to move it. You will have to delete your character and start over if you want to use the World Pass to go to a specific server.
The upshot of this is that we can get everyone onto the same server to reform the linkshell, but it will require a slow sequence and people will have to wait in line:
1. Everyone signs up on the first day, and reports back here what randomly chosen server they ended up on.
2. Based on which server holds the most of us, someone decides what server we will all go to. I suggest a board admin, since that person can lock the thread, tally up the users, announce the majority server, and add a note to proceed with the "refugee" step below.
3. The people on the chosen server will start making gil to try and afford world passes. The rest of the people who are able to play now (that means no PS2 users yet, until they are ready to sign up) and wish to join the majority should make a "refugee" post, preferably in a newly created forum to keep them straight. Each refugee looks at the refugee threads, and looks for one with 3 or fewer replies (4 or fewer posts total). If there is one, the refugee adds a short post to that thread. If not, he creates a new thread. Everyone should go back after posting to look at the thread and make sure that they are
one of the first 5 posts in that thread. If you've accidentally added a sixth message to that thread, delete the message and start a new thread. This way everyone is conveniently grouped into threads of
no more than 5 people.
4. Once the people on the chosen server are eligible for, and able to afford world passes, they will look at the threads for the first one with
only 4 replies (which means only 5 messages). They will add a reply to the end saying something like "I have bought the world pass for these 5 people." Then, just like the refugees, they will check carefully to make sure another person has not just posted the same thing. If two people have posted claiming the same 5 people, the second person should delete his claim and go to the next group. Only once the person is sure he has claimed those 5 people and that nobody else has beaten him to it, should he buy the World Pass, and then, via private message feature of this bulletin board, send that world passcode to each of the 5.
5. All refugees should check back here at least daily if possible to see if they've been issued a world passcode (remember, if you don't use it soon enough, it expires), and should probably also use the edit feature to change their refugee message to confirm that they've gotten the code and signed up on the new server successfully. The newly invited refugees will then start trying to earn gil and check to see when they are able to afford a world pass to continue the process.
When most of the people are invited (i.e., all but one of the refugee posts have 5 replies/6 messages total), there may be some incomplete sets, and we should watch for that and just go ahead and invite those last few people without waiting for a complete five. We should also watch very closely for the start of the PS2 retail, and prepare to repeat this process for the PS2 users. At some point, someone should also start working to pool gil to buy a linkshell.
Some people may have missed it, but Tigara is gone from beta, and will probably not be back until the PS2 version is available, so we will have to choose a new linkshell leader if we want to have a shell before March. I suggest the first person to have an account on the new server who was a linksack holder on Cactuar should buy and start the shell. If there are several former sackholders on the new server at once, they can work it out between themselves at that time. Nonetheless, I think affording world passes should be the priority before we worry about spending money on a linkshell or else some people will get impatient and not want to wait to play.
So there we have it. What does everyone think? Once we've agreed on a process, perhaps one of the board admins can repost this process somewhere more prominent (and maybe make it sticky) so we know the plan.
I kinda still dont get the whole refugee thing..... 
I'm sure that it will all workout though
I plan one starting a LS on my Server but I wanna make sure it isn't mistaken for Tigara's LS and I do want it to be called Mithrapride. Maybe we could call them like Mithra....1 mithra...2 so on so forth. 
To be honest I didn't read the whole post yet on the proposed rulz but I'll get to it.