This morning I found out that Futuremark, a Finnish company famous for their software benchmarking products, have requested a trademark for the word Pwnage. Seriously. The word Pwnage. A word that pulls 2 million results on Google, and the same one that we happen to make heavy use of in Forumwarz. (In the introduction for our game, we come up with our own mythology of the term, calling it the recently discovered fifth force of physics: “A force so strong that, when harnessed properly, can destroy a web forum from the inside out.”) ...

We just launched YouBoob, the latest community built forum in the world of Forumwarz. Some contributions shocked me by getting hundreds of votes each, and I think the end product is quite lolsworthy. Also, check out the awesome logo from Xoey: Xoey did a great job mixing the mythology of Forumwarz into the parody of an existing site :) Our new Build has been selected. We’re doing: Fathers Against Pornography ...

If you’re interested in the technology behind Forumwarz and live in Toronto, you might want to come out to the next TSOT Ruby on Rails Project night, where we’re giving a short presentation about the challenges involved in building a site like Forumwarz. Of course we’ll also be around to answer any questions, and afterwards there is pub outing which we will be attending. Here are the details: TSOT Ruby on Rails Project Night Tuesday March 11, 2008 Doors and Snacks 5:30pm Presentations at 6:00pm ...

Just a small update today: I went insane this morning fixing server lag and I think we’re running smoothly. We’re dealing with a consistent 50 requests / second right now, insane! There’s now a notice when you view the profile of a player who’s been banned. for example, this asshole. More fun stuff coming soon!

We’ve upgraded to a much faster server. Even with a RAM upgrade our old one just wasn’t cutting it under the load of thousands of active users. There might be some weird behavior while the DNS records update. Please let us know if you experience anything strange!

Today we have some small Forumwarz Domination changes: As the game gets more competitive there are now more teams for medal holders. Secondly, in the event of a large tie (over 5 people), no medals will be awarded for a category. This is to prevent large noob groups of non-players from stealing all those precious medals! We’ve also elected a new Moderator for flamebate: n00b65. He should help us get rid of some of the crap in there :) ...

First off, I have to give a big thanks and a hearty props-knuckle to blogger Nick Douglas of Gawker, who extended Forumwarz’s 15 minutes to at least 17-and-three-quarters with his enthusiastic and decidedly unironic review of our game! Glad you enjoyed it, Nick, and many happy returns. The gameplay is actually simple and well thought-out. The copy is clever. And because users can create new levels, the jokes don’t run out. If Kingdom of Loathing wasn’t witty enough for you, and you’d rather be caught watching porn than playing World of Warcraft, give it a little try. ...

Today we passed two fairly cool milestones. First, I’m really happy to announce that this morning we received our 10,000th user account! I think that’s pretty impressive considering it hasn’t even been three weeks since our official opening. On top of that, our 70,000th forum was pwned. Maybe we should add a McDonald’s style billboard to the main page saying as much :) The site was acting slowly again today (that ram we bought on Thursday sure didn’t last long!), and I made some patches to address some bottlenecks that have come up. We’ve also ordered a new server, but it will likely take a few days to get set up, so I appologize for the slowness in the meantime! ...

Yesterday I took a couple of hours to chat with Andy Baio of Waxy.org about Forumwarz, and he’s just published the interview. It’s quite long and goes into huge amount of depth about Forumwarz, its development process, our team and everything else under the sun. It was the first time I’ve done an interview with someone who had actually completed the game, and I think it really shows through in the quality of the discussion. ...

A week ago, someone added an article to wikipedia about our game, and we were delighted because it was fairly detailed. We were sad to see though, that by morning it was deleted. Someone started a thread on our flamebate forums asking about it, and we bounced around various ideas for making a new article that wouldn’t be rejected. Then, this morning, out of left field, I was delighted to find out that the article had been brought back! Apparently one of our users is an admin on wikipedia, and brought it back and made the necessary changes to prevent it from being deleted again. It helps to have users in high places! ...