Site-Updates

This week we’re deploying some of the new upgrades to the ForumBuildr tool. Starting tonight after the maintenance period: You will notice that thread titles are now split up into three topics that were submitted by the user. When you add a thread title, you have to start with the topic it belongs to. You can submit a logo the second a build begins, but you can’t submit forum styles until Thursday at noon. Previously, you could submit a forum style right away, which led to many mismatched styles and logos. Voting for logos will also end on Thursday at noon, and then when people build styles they’ll know what logo they’re working with. I think this will lead to better designs overall! ...

Some fun Halloween stuff is going on today! You should poke around the site and see what’s new! It’s also the 1-year anniversary of when we launched the site as a closed Beta, so that’s a pretty big milestone. Recently Scullyangel posted a thread outlining some of the highlights of the last year. Honestly it’s my site so obviously I would say this: but I’m really impressed with how far we’ve come in such a short time. ...

We promised our users ages ago that we’d email them when Episode 2 was launched. This was one of the most often requested features during the Episode 1 Beta, since players had finished the content and wanted to be notified when they could come back to play more. So far, any emails you’d receive from the Forumwarz site were related to your Tubmail, Flamebate threads or forgetting your password. This is actually the first email we’ve ever sent out announcing a new feature. In fact, if you’re reading this blog you are probably an active user and will never see the announcement emails: we are only sending them to accounts that aren’t highly active already. ...

One of the biggest pains for our users has been the store interface. It worked really well for buying one or two items at a time, but it really sucked when buying more than that. Additionally, the undo purchase button was just rife with abuse – people figured out all sorts of tricks to advance in the storyline with “borrowed” items and such. Today I’m happy to release the first update to the store interface in about a year! Right now, you are presented with a more brief tabular view of the items the store has. You have a quantity box beside each item, with + and - buttons to raise and lower the value (although you can just type it in yourself too.) ...

I’ve been doing some work behind the scenes to create an API for INCIT, so that we can make clients on other platforms (right now we’re working on an iPhone version with one of our users.) Thanks to Rails, creating the API is taking very little time. I was curious whether anyone else would be interested in APIs for other aspects of Forumwarz? Nothing comes to mind right now, but if you’re a programmer and want access to our public data somehow, send me a tubmail or email with your idea and I’ll see what I can do. ...

I’ve been saying for months that the part of Forumwarz that I want to upgrade the most is the ForumBuildr v2.0 BETA. Right now it’s the only part of Forumwarz that requires manual intervention. Every Sunday night since we launched (with a couple of exceptions), I have had to stay home and do some work to make sure the stylesheet submitted jives with the existing site stylesheet. I also have to run some scripts to assign buildr scores and assign the difficulty of the forum. ...

When our site went down for half a day to move to the new server (a time I’ll call “Black Wednesday”), Evil Trout started up an already abandoned Twitter account so that we’d have a reliable source of information during this dark, dark time. Although I initially mocked him for it, I now realize just how effective this microblogging service can be, especially when things are moving as rapidly as they are now. ...

Episode 2 is now only two weeks away, and we’ve still got some surprises! Previously, I’ve alluded to an unannounced gameplay feature that will be released at the same time as Episode 2, and I’m finally ready to announce it! One thing lacking from Forumwarz is item drops when you beat enemies. Sure, we send you junk the next day, but if you are just 50 flezz short on an item you want, it sucks to have to wait, especially if you have forum visits remaining. Also, there is relatively little to collect in our game, since there are a limited amount of stores and items you can buy from them. ...

Today I’m happy to announce that we’ve launched our official merchandise store! We have partnered with Zazzle.com to bring you a variety of Forumwarz themed products, including t-shirts, buttons and posters. One of the best things about Zazzle is that each product can be customized in many different ways, so you can play with all sorts of settings to make the items into exactly what you want. This is our first stab at merchandise, so we’d love to hear your feedback. Do you like the products we have? What kind of products would you like to see in the future? Let us know! ...

We’ve added a new panel (Profile > Addiction Level under on your home page) where you can view some stats about your Forumwarz usage, including an estimated amount of hours you’ve spent on the site. The estimate is very weak because we don’t track your usage habits that closely. It just pulls up the stats we do know, then multiplies each one by an average amount of time it takes to do each of those tasks. Many things (like your time spent in Internet Delay Chat) aren’t tracked at all. So for most hardcore users you can view it as a “minimum” amount of hours you’ve spent on the site. ...