Starting tomorrow at 12PM, you will be able to submit Icons in ForumBuildr for each topic. You know, the little icons to the left of any post in the game. Each icon must 60x15 in size, and represent the three topics chosen for the current build. This week they will be “Porn Shops”, “Websites” and “Directions.” I’m really excited to see what kinds of icons you guys come up with. If some are really good, maybe we can integrate them into Flamebate proper. ...

Tonight I launched a new Style builder for ForumBuildr. Previously, you had to type in your own HTML Cascading Stylesheet, and each element had to inherit from a particular element. Now, you can use a forum and choose options and colors using a rich interface. The options are a bit limited right now (although the color picker allows for a lot!). Going forward, I plan to add many more options to the style builder. The important part was getting the technology out there and letting us play with it. If you have any requests for things you’d like present in drop downs let me know! ...

We’ve changed your E-Peen(tm) count to be an E-Peen(tm) length. It’s a much more interesting way of tallying your E-Peen(tm), since not every E-Peen(tm) is created equal. In general, E-Peen(tm) that are harder to obtain increase your E-Peen(tm) length by more than those that are easy to get. Your E-Peen(tm) length is a value in inches less than 13" – the first 6" is really easy to earn, the next 7" are much more difficult to pick up. ...

In case you missed it on Twitter, today we’re running a Presidential Election on Flamebate. Make sure you read the platforms of the candidates carefully before you cast your vote, because your choice could affect you negatively!

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. ...

Season 3 is in its second week, so we thought we’d get things rolling with a bang! Welcome to DOMINATION: RUSSIAN ROULETTE. The Domination round that starts tonight will end at a random time next Wednesday! Have fun and play nice! B2015

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. ...