gamerDNA.com | The Blog

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Sean Duhame, Creative Director at gamerDNA and known as Alphadoque in the gamerDNA community.

We’ve done a lot of work at gamerDNA since its launch almost a year ago. We’ve added a ton of product features, over 60, some massive… and some not so massive. We added these features alongside an already fully developed Web site, gamerDNA’s former incarnation GuildCafe.com.  The site simply… grew!

We’ve also learned a lot in this past year. Much of that learning has come from the feedback of our members and visitors, not only by direct contact but also by site usage data we check to measure how much you really care about a feature or particular part of the site. We talk a lot about this feedback in the halls, lunch room, board table, desks and chat clients at gamerDNA. All this feedback, wide and varied, lead us to ask ourselves one simple question. The teams answers to this one question were simply all over the place. It was a sober moment… but most moments worth-while are. Oh… the question? We’ll get there

If there’s one thing I can say about this crew is that when a question is posed there’s no length to which we won’t go to answer it. For example, I’ll never forget Trapper and Antares drawing graphs on the white board to support their ideas concerning ethical utilitarianism (yes, I am serious). So when we couldn’t get to the bottom of "the question" many long discussions ensued. Let me just say this, there’s a lot of passion at this company!

For guidance we turned to what we’ve learned about gamerDNA.com since its launch again relying on our members and visitors to show us the light. When we juxtaposed that knowledge against the site (as it was only a few days ago) we realized gamerDNA.com just wasn’t playing to its strengths. It wasn’t telling its story. It was over-complicated and tried to be too many things and needed to be simplified. There’s still a bit of that going on but we feel we’ve moved in a direction, first with the site navigation and the (logged-out) home page, that helps solve those problems.

John Maeda’s "Laws of Simplicity" state, "The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction." Reduction is a difficult  process when it comes to the things you love but we’ve done our best to be pragmatic and give meaning to the reduction we’ve chosen. There’s no greater example of this reduction than our new site navigation. We realize it’s an enormous change for our members and visitors. We appreciate that change can be a less than fun process but it’s our belief that these choices will make for a much more valuable, fun and usable experience.

SITE NAVIGATION BREAK-DOWN

"NOW" (currently missing)

I wanted to first share our "NOW" location so I can give you the entire picture. It hasn’t launched yet (slated for delivery Tuesday, May 5th) but please feel free to take a look at the screenshot to get an idea of what it will offer. This page supports a few things we learned from our members - that real-time feeds around games, game content and conversation as well as the ability to have a broad view into the activity of the community is very desirable amongst our members. We’ve put a lot of focus on the real-time nature of this page as well as the conversational aspect of the system. We’re very excited to launch this and we’ll be looking into how well it’s received by our members and visitors.

GAMES & PLAYERS

I’ve bundled these together because simply put, there is no gamerDNA without the two. It’s why we’re here and we’re pretty sure it’s why you’re here too.

The Games and Players navigation have consistent use patterns. Top level links will bring you to powerful directories for each. Future vision for Games and Players are a landing page for each that bubble up high-level, interesting, timely content.

Within the drop-down menu we track your last 5 visited locations for each, both Games and Players, and add them to the menu. We did this because we learned that members often go back to the same game and member pages within lengthy blocks of time. There are numerous use-cases that support this choice. We really believe you’ll find this pretty useful.

As Web users we find the type-ahead function to be unbelievably useful. Quick, easy, helpful. If you have a game or player in mind, typing in the first few letters for either will deliver you the closest matches in less than a second. Again, we found a lot of use cases that this feature supported. We all find we’re using it a lot already.

What a simple question. Like I said, we all came up with different answers. We’re now doing our best to rally around one. Development continues but we want to deliver improvements as they come because in the face of a little confusion we feel you deserve the enhancements as they’re completed. Changes our coming fast and we’re pretty sure you’ll be happy with what’s to come.

Lastly, some of our members have wondered quite a bit as to why our forums section was moved outside of our main site navigation and into the footer. Let it be said, we adore our members who use the gamerDNA.com forums. This was a very difficult decision, one we spoke of at length. Please read Community manager Sam Houston’s post  for more on this choice.

Respectfully,

Sean Duhame

Creative Director, gamerDNA

Hi everyone!

This was a pretty massive build this week for a few reasons. We ended up pushing it to Wednesday to give us a little more time to tweak it out. I will break down the major new features. For screen shots, look after the jump.

1. A new Game Activity list that takes the latest action from all your friends, and rolls it up into an easy to consume list. Each game played for each friend will only appear once per day. You can add comments and add your own game play activity right from your member-home page.
2. A mini-game activity calendar is on your member homepage. Use it to quickly add game play to days that you played. Try and make the calendar as green as possible to show how active of a gamer you are.
3. A game activity calendar is now prominently displayed on every person’s profile page to help you learn how much a person plays, easily browse what they play and find conversations. Look at the icons in the calendar… if it is a controller, it is game play… if it is a quote, it is a blog entry… if you see a "+" in a speech bubble, there are comments there.
4. You will now receive emails when other people comment on any activity, blog or image that you have commented on. To stop receiving email updates, unsubscribe from the item or tweak your settings in the preferences section.

All existing experiences in the system are currently being converted over to the new system. This will take a few days… also Twitter updates will be impacted during the conversion. We hope to have those back on soon.

We hope these changes make it easier to see what your friends are up to and also engage in conversation with them about gaming. More fun things to come in this area as well. We are also publishing a member newsletter shortly which will go into these changes in more depth. Look for that soon.

All changes:

Read More

Hi everyone. Sorry for the delay in the notes. With the database craziness and everything yesterday I didn’t have a chance to really iron these out. So here we go… all the changes from Monday.

This was mainly an infrastructure week. We moved a lot around on the back end, both in our main environment that you all use and in our development environment. But we did get some pretty cool new features and tweaks in. Check them out.

Read More

This latest release was a pretty big one for us. It introduced another major system that will lay the foundation for gamerDNA as we move into 2009. I have mentioned it in the past, but this new system allows us to start getting at the "WHY" behind what you like as a gamer. All games are not created equal. Just because you and I play the same games and like the same games, does not mean that we like them for the same reasons… and when it comes to your gaming identity, this is an important nuance that we as gamers want to recognize.

Read on for the full release notes. We will be producing some more blog posts and materials through the week that call out many of these new features and give you specific help in using them.

Read More

This week we worked on some new features at gamerDNA, most of which we will deploy NEXT week. We want to run them on the live site for a week to tweak them before we unleash them on everyone… so everything else is more of a bug fix.

I will say that the new features next week are about breaking down why you like the games you like. Just because you and I play the same game, does not mean that we like it for the same reason. As you build your gamerDNA, this nuance is important so you can accurately convey your gaming identity. We also hope it adds a fun dimension to your game list and provides all new ways to explore games played and enjoyed by people like you.

So look for that next week… this week, here is the full list:

Group Hosting Enhancements/Changes

• Added a new "HELP" link on the group management tab to help members with functionality. The docs are hosted on the company blog.
• New AION theme for group hosting!
• Added new documentation for lots of various parts of group hosting. Go check it out.
• Images in the group forum have a max width supplied so they do not break the layout.
• Made some tweaks to the filmstrip gadget for groups to be clearer when images are approved or not.
• In the Home page configuration of group hosting, when you configure an order for the homepage gadgets, they will now display in the correct order.
• Fixed an issue where guild applications were still pending, even when the user has applied.
• Fixed some IE7 cross-browser issues with the group recruitment configuration page.
• Trying to create a group event will now prompt you to enter a game, if you attempted to create a game event without one.
• When you remove yourself from a group, you are now redirected to the homepage after confirming, instead of refreshing the same page.
• When we display the games that your group plays, we now show the platform.
• Renamed the tabs on the group management interface so we could fit more of them.

Profile Enhancements/Changes

• All quiz behavior trait widgets are now shareable to various social networks sites. Click the "get & share" link in the widget for a list of networks.
• [next week] Built out a new homepage for gamerDNA that focuses on discovery.
• [next week] Built a new page for adding games to the system.
• [next week] Built a new page for helping you explain WHY you like the games that you do.
• [next week] Created a discovery page that runs off why you like the games you do.

General Enhancements/Changes

• Build a query that inserts traits and pre-populates the system.
• Tweak some settings that will allow caching of javascript and css to work properly.
• The most anticipated section on the games landing page shows the games by individual game/platform combinations.
• Adding some new caching configurations to make things go faster.
• The quiz results all use caching now, which is a big performance boost.
• Added new content to the results of the RTS quiz that better explains the buckets.
• Full caching put in on the Message of the Day component.
• Visual tweaks to the DNA panel pages with the new game type-ahead.
• Converted the games landing page to use lots of caching to increase speed.
• Fixed some CSS issues for the game typeahead on the games landing page.
• There were some strange redirect issues with the DNA panel pages. This has been repaired to behave correctly.
• Fixed a performance issue with the first step of group hosting due to the new game data.
• Fix the game type-ahead so that it handles ":" properly and provides better match results.
• Added some data to the individual game pages for platform in the game title, other platforms, and release dates.
• when adding a game using the type-ahead you will get a cancel link when you are entering platform in case you made a mistake.
• Cleaned up some CSS issues on the guild recruitment pages. Most of it was IE7 issues.
• Cleaned up some spacing in the gamerDNA panel around the game type-ahead.
• When clicking the Add Game button from a specific game page, it now jumps your directly into adding the game.
• Fixed an issue where the home button on the nav bar was not clickable in some instances.
• Fixed an issue that was preventing preloading of backgrounds in Css that was contributing to performance issues.
• Fixed issues where the nav bar was still wrapping due to some lengths of user names.
• When you are picking a game using the type-ahead and the game is selected, the platform now displays to enforce your selection.
• There were some errors being created by spam bots trying to submit the give-respect form. They have been blocked.

See you next week with all-new and improved stuff!

This week’s build was pretty massive. We expanded our game data to include over 40,000 titles plus all sorts of game information that you will begin to see trickle into the product over the next few weeks. We had to go through some pretty old code and change how we relate everything to games… so if you see something weird, let us know! Here is the full list of changes:

Member Profile Changes

• Adding games using the gamerDNA panel now uses a type-ahead.
• Changed the game selection when adding a new character to use the type-ahead.
• Changed game selection to a type-ahead when adding or editing an image.
• Changed the game selection to a type-ahead when adding an experience.
• When using the game type-ahead in certain places, such as your gamerDNA panel, you can add games that we don’t currently have in our database.  Type in the game name, and select the "Create ???" option.  Then a select box will appear that invites you to choose a game platform. Choose a platform, and bam! Your new game is created!
• Fixed a bug that was causing logout requests from the profile pages to throw a 404 error.
• The LFG (Looking for Group) functionality for individual users has been removed from the site. It was never utilized, and the feature never lived up to expectations. We will revisit this in a much lighter-weight method in the future and focus on guild recruiting in new ways shortly.
• Fixed the DNA Panel profile like to point to the correct new profile location.
• Fixed the badges page layout to show the badges at full size in your member profile.
• Changed the social media feed link for adding a game to go to the user game page instead of the user profile homepage.

General Site Changes

• In the news section, you now choose the game filter, by typing in the game name of the game you want to check out news for, and then choosing the game from the dropdown that appears.  If no news exists for your game, you can submit the news you find interesting!
• The games landing page has been updated to reflect some of the new awesome games data.  Of note, anticipated games, and new releases are highlighted.  Expect to see more in future builds!
• When filtering groups by game while in the group directory, choosing a game is now done via a type-ahead.  Enter the game name you want, then choose it from the list that appears.
• All manually entered games have been merged with the new games… if you see duplicates, let us know and we can correct them.
• gamerDNA is busting at the seams with a massive influx of game data.  This data has been integrated with current games, and we have added thousands of new games.  We also have added platform, and genre classifications to the data model, and in the coming weeks you will see this data manifest itself more on the site.
• Added caching to the first page of the quiz to speed up the user experience and reduce load.
• Caching has been added to the quiz API that displays results to reduce load.
• Now preloading the background image for various menus to make appearance/hiding smoother.
• Now preloading large background images on the front page of the site, for smoother transitions.
• Caching the summary of the company blog where we show it, to improve page loading speed.
• Switched the individual game pages to use box art where we have it.
• Documentation added about the Curse WarDB content that can be added to the group forums.
• Fixed a small CSS bug in the forums that was the result of another hotfix.
• Fixed issues where the type-ahead for games was bleeding through some of the backgrounds on the pages.
• Fixed an issue with launching the DNA Panel from the navigation.
• Removed some duplicates from game type-ahead
• Fixed an issue where caching was preventing the avatar and other quicklinks items from displaying. they should now appear correctly despite the cache.
• Fixed the company blog summaries to pull more consistently across the site.
• Cleaned up how the login pop-up box renders for some browsers to clean up the design.
• Cleaned up some CSS design on the registration page.
• Added better caching to quiz, trait, and guild signature badges to reduce server load.
• Fixed a broken image on the homepage.
• Fixed an issue where some Javascript libraries were not loading correctly.
• Added some missing Javascript files to the header as required by some site features.
• Added back some missing content from the quiz landing page. It no longer causes performance issues.
• Made more changes to the global nav header to prevent wrapping for really long names.
• Fixed the case of gamerDNA on the dev blog call to action.

Group Hosting Changes

• New guild theme, Gears of War! Get it while it is hot!
  When creating a new group, the game selection now uses a type ahead to properly pick the game and platform.
• When managing your guild(or clan)’s games, you now choose the games you play by entering them in a type ahead.  Enter the game name, then select the game from the list that appears.
• Cleaned up the invite form a little more to differentiate between the two options of inviting people via email or using a join link.
• Fixed a bug that was causing the Shaiya theme to appear blank.
• When creating new guilds, the custom pages were being set to UNDEFINED preventing them from being edited.
• The games tab of the group management now uses the new type ahead for picking from all games.
• Fixed an issue on the guild image pix strip that was preventing scrolling.
• Changed the text on the group creation confirmation page and corrected a typo.
• Fixed issues where certain games were not working for recruiting.
• Cleaned up some styling that was conflicting with the button colors for certain guild themes.
• Fixed an issue where you could nuke your entire guild site by resubmitting a request from a browser that was closed right after a POST comment.
• If you have been invited to a guild, but you have not accepted the membership, you can now go to the Group’s page > Settings and there is a link at the top that lets you know you were invited but not a member and a link to remove yourself or respond to the invite.
• The group HTML editor no longer allows script blocks/tags in the editor. It converts them all to comments for security reasons.
• Fixed an issue where the guild story gadget was not displaying content when the shortname was in use instead of the guildID.
• Fixed an issue where removing Bartle score from the group signature images also removed the recruiting text.
• Added a caching message to the group signature configurator for leader and members. It can take up to 10 minutes for everywhere your signature is used to properly refresh any changes.
• Fixed image scrolling on group pages.

As we like to say around here… this is only the beginning. The first step was getting all of the game data in… now we have to add the special sauce! Look for that in a couple weeks.
 

We are right in the middle of a huge update to our games data… we thought it would be ready to rock this week… but there were still a few things we want to tweak before we unleash it upon the gamerDNA world. So instead of a full build, we rolled on some hotfixes for various bugs and small enhancements.

Group Hosting Changes/Enhnacements

• Added the ability to add multiple people to a group invite before sending so you do not have to do them one at a time.
• Made some fixes to guild sigs including the centering of the avatar, the size of the slogan, text alignment, the addition of the member name, and some font fixes throughout.
• Added a new guild theme called SniperVision! Designed to cater to FPS fans, Sniper Vision features two distinct styles to choose from which are available under the advanced option settings as "Rusted Metal" or "Night Vision" versions. Also this theme allows the replacement of every image it uses so you can supply your own graphics to completely customize this theme.
• The hosted group urls are: http://yourgroup.gamerdna.com… many users were passing out these links as http://www.yourgroup.gamerdna.com… this use to not work, but it now will.
• A new stories gadget has been added to the guild sites. The top 10 latest stories for your guild will now appear in the gadget on the homepage. For an example see http://gamerdna-war.gamerdna.com
• Fixed a bug where all members of a group where showing as unclaimed.
• Corrected duplicate ranks that were showing up in the guild members tab.
• Fixed an issue where group pages (custom ones) were missing their titles and there was no method for changing them.
• Fixed an issue where choosing your existing theme would break your theme with a blank background and missing css styles. Now if you click "Choose" on your existing theme, it will remain.
• Fixed an issue with CSS design problems in the frostmorne guild themes.
• Cleaned up the layout of the guild Image Gallery and the pix strip with the approve buttons… still needs a bit more work though to integrate into the themes.
• Changed the default group emblem image to be a new version that blends in better.

General Site Changes/Enhancements

• Made some search enhancements to better handle no results with some possible options based on "sounds like"
• When you perform a search, whatever you select in the drop down will be saved on the results page… it won’t reset the search box anymore.
• Corrected some layout issues on the game pages.
• Fixed an error that was causing profile pages to crash in some instances.
• Fixed the broken links in the search results for groups.
• Added some performance improvements so the login box loads faster in the header.
• All generated sig images will not make a request for 10 minutes after initial query. This will save round trips to the server for performance.

Member Profile Changes/Enhancements

• Created a new layout for the badges page of member profile to accomodate the wide badges and a smaller ad format.
• There use to be a link on the guild list for a game. This link is no longer valid because some guilds are associated to multiple games… The guild link is in the profile, but not attached to the game directly.
• Xfire occasionally incorrectly reports very small game time, if the total is under 0:15, it will post a generalization, not the exact time.
• All COD4 multiplayer Xfire game titles are merged into COD4. They will no longer appear as duplicates.

These next three builds are going to be pretty crazy… we are all over here cranking towards some pretty cool changes. Stay tuned.

Here are the notes from Monday’s build. As always they are a little delayed because we had to clean up a few things (and continue to clean up a few things). Funny enough, during the build day we were published on WoW Insider which made it double fun dealing with new features and new amounts of traffic! Never a dull moment over here!

Profile Changes/Enhancements

• All games played over Steam now appear in your profile if you have the AKA added.
• FriendFeed is now supported for publishing your gamer activity automatically!
• If a game is marked as ANTICIPATING in your game list and we see you play it off a network, we reset the status so that it appears in your QUEUE for you to mark if you liked it or not.
• If you have your Sony Playstation Network AKA added, the PSN card will now appear on your profile at the bottom of the right column.
• Fixed an issue where the social media feed was truncating when it saw a & or =.
• If a user tried to click "upload" without adding an image to the field it will properly validate and no longer throw an error.
• If a social media feed had only one item, it will properly use a singular or a plural.
• Repaired some missing text from image upload activity sent to the social media feeds.

General Changes/Enhancements

• Made some edits to the registration confirmation to better explain some new features.
• Updated the initial private message users receive when joining to showcase new features.
• Added a new Tools drop down to position the Developer API and the Warhammer sig generator. Anything new we put together can live here for more visibility.
• Made performance improvements to everywhere that we display experiences, speeding up counts for things like paging.
• The Alliance co-branded registration is complete. It will allow sites in the alliance to link into our registration system using OpenID.
• We moved one step closer to having over 40,000 games in the system for use in your profile and in groups.
• Groups link was taking users to the wrong page. Routing fixed.
• Fixed the quiz results to only return 5 games instead of the dozens it was returning in error. This was due to an API change that altered the count default.
• Solved a bug where registration would let you submit even if the validation did not pass. The Registration did not complete, it would simply refresh… but it was unclear what was happening. This is now much clearer.
• Corrected an issue that was causing errors in some cases when trying to log in from the member sub domain pages.
• Added Sorcerer class to Warhammer game information.
• Fixed a scenario where the global nav header was appearing on the wrong side of the page for some users.
• Added a min-width to the nav bar to prevent it from collapsing when the browser is re-sized to be too small.

Group Hosting Changes/Enhancements

• New customizable signatures launched for use with your guild/clan/group!
• Permission system extended to the image gallery for guilds to give guild leaders control over image posting.
• Curse WARDB support for Warhammer Item markup added to all forum pages in the site (public and group).
• Cleaned up some CSS bugs in the group layouts.
• Changed the functionality for managing the time that you play and ensuring that it appears correctly in the guild directory. Also fixed the time zone popup.
• Fixed a long standing issue in the Age of Ownage themes where it was not using rounded corners correctly.
• Made some more tweaks to the guild editor so that it is showing in IE7. We added a show/hide button so that if it doesn’t load, users can at least manually load it.
• Fixed up the roster to work better with IE7.

Our next big goal is to work on more performance issues… do some clean up on the group invite process… and complete the roll out of our new game database which impacts many places in the site

As you guys may know, every Monday the intrepid team here at gamerDNA puts on their coding hats and sprints to close out bugs, tweak functionality, and add new features to the site in the form of our weekly builds.  Well, this week we’ll be switching things up a bit and hosting our first  Build Night so that while the development team reaches the finish line and puts the site down, the gamerDNA community is invited to join Team gamerDNA in a frag festival that only long hours of coding can fuel!

We’ll be using the gamerDNA IRC channel as a staging area, and the party officially starts at 4:00 PM EDT and runs until whenever the build goes up!

While you’re at it, why not check out the gamerDNA Steam Community?

The server information is in the graphic below - we’ll see you there!

Due to the holiday, our build was on a Tuesday this time… we like to shake it up on you all! Here is the master list.

Profile Enhancements/Changes

• Infinite scrolling has been added to the DNA panel for experiences so that if you have a lot of experiences, the performance is faster because it does not try to load them all before displaying.
• The Quiz Traits gadget from the quiz results has been added to the member profile page.
• The icons in the games list of the DNA Panel are now clickable.
• When you take a quiz, the results will now show in the social media feed.
• The social media feed will now be smarter about displaying game names in situations where you have played multiple games.
• Games played on the Steam network will now be automatically added to your game list.
• The Explore section of member home for Last 24 hours now runs on a sliding 24 hour scale so that the title of the section is accurate.
• Cleaned up the display of the play time percentages on the profile page.
• Corrected an issue where Twitter timeouts and authentication issues were preventing the twitter gadget from displaying on the profile page and causing errors.
• Removed quotation marks from around comments on experiences.
• If gameplay on Xfire is above 5 hours, it will state that the person played for "several hours" instead of listing it out due to the inaccuracy of the Xfire reporting during larger time periods.

General Enhancements/Changes

• The Warhammer Guild Roster API has been documented and released.
• Fixed a performance issue with the game landing page.
• Redirects have been added for all old PlayerVox content to properly redirect to the dev blog.
• Made performance improvements to the global site header… continuing to make improvements that will reduce # of requests to render a page.
• The bottom of every company/dev blog post now links back to GamerDNA.
• The Bartle test has all new richer and deeper buckets associated with them. Go check out your results and see how you are profiled.
• Company blog URL converted from company.gamerdna.com to blog.gamerdna.com.
• Built out some custom error handling to provide better notification. We still have some work to do in the guild sections, but we are making progress with softer fails.
• Restructured the member profile CSS to be more IE7 compliant.
• Corrected a bug that was causing the games on the game landing page to not fully display.
• Fixed an issue where the game links on the group directory were not linking to the correct sub list of groups.
• Fixed the quiz trait gadget to display a default trait if the member does not have one.
• If you already have a game in your profile, you will no longer be able to accidentally add it through the "Other" selection.
• All links in the social media feeds no longer use http://www.gamerdna.com and instead use http://gamerdna.com
• Fixed an issue with the edit button on the favorite page in IE7 that was causing a redirect to the homepage.
• Removed places where we had duplicate words in the social media feeds.
• The tab for quizzes on the panel has been removed. All that was there was a notice to go to the nav section of the site, so this isn’t a major change.
• Added validation so that if the person off the homepage tries to create a group when they already have one, they will get a proper notification.
• Cleaned up some formatting issues on the open ID authenticate form.
• Cleaned up the game list formatting on the explore page.
• Fixed an issue where the Warhammer Online signatures were missing guilds for some servers. This involved adding proper timeouts and using the cache when realmWar is not available.
• Fixed a bug on the HOME nav item where the GAMES link was turning white.
• Fixed an issue where possessive logic (his, her, etc) was not working in some cases in the social media feeds.
• Forum posts now work correctly in the social media system, and the link for them will take you to the thread.
• Added prevention of duplicate posts to social media for both creating and updating experiences. It will only do one within an hour.
• Fixed some missing icons in the user activity feed.
• Cleaned up some of the links for experiences and attitudes.
• Shortened the social media text around number of achievements, time play and gamerscore.
• A social media update about commenting on an experience was removed as no history is generated for that. It was assumed in error that this was the case.
• Searching for characters will now give you a link you can click to go to a profile!
• Added "Sarnak" to races for EQ2 at user request.

Group Hosting Enhancements/Changes

• We made a bunch of changes to the guild roster in the group sites. There are default options the guild leader can specify for what displays. there are two views. One for gamerDNA members, and one for Character specific guilds… Also some sorting options that were requested.
• We added a new "MEDIA" option to the guild editor. You can upload Flash, Quicktime, Shockwave, Windows Media, or Real Media content. This can be used to show video or play music on other servers. You have to provide a full URL to the file. (http://www.domain.com/myfile.mp3)
• Added a button to add your own stories to the group stories page. This pops open the panel making it easier to find. You have to be sure to select the guild you want to link the story to when you save the story/experience.
• Added a button to upload your own images to the group image gallery. This pops open the panel making it easier to find. You have to be sure to select the guild you want to link the image to when you save it.
• Repaired a problem where games added to groups were not being correctly inserted into the database and causing recruiting errors.
• Cleaned up the formatting and behavior of the recruiting form to hide and show depending on the proper actions.
• When you add a new post to a group forum, it will now jump you to that post instead of the first post of the thread.
• The preview directory link in the guild management screens now point to the correct location.
• Fixed an issue where editing the Roster would cause the list of members to disappear.
• Warhammer had a duplicate name in the database that was preventing recruiting applications from working properly. The names have been merged.

A ton of stuff in here… more on the way each week! As always, feel free to send your comments!

We are launching a new method for our API today targeting Warhammer Online guilds. Ask yourself these questions:

1. Are you playing Warhammer Online?
2. Are you a guild leader or a member of a guild?
3. Are you a developer that knows how to weild XML?

If the answer to those questions is yes, or you know someone that applies, check out the new Warhammer Guild Roster web service! You supply:

name - The name of the Guild
server - Server the Guild is on
apikey - User’s GamerDNA Apikey (learn how you find yours)

The request will look like this:

http://helix.gamerdna.com/warhammer_guild.php?name=<guild name>&server=<guild server>&apikey=<yourkey>

We will provide back information about the guild (name, side, server, rank, etc) and a full roster list, all in XML. Check out the full documentation of this API method for more information.

What can you do with it?

This is something I whipped up in a few minutes for the House of GamerDNA using the service. I am sure any of you can do better Let’s see it!

Don’t forget to check out our Warhammer Online Character Data API that we launched a few weeks ago!

As gamers, there are two things that we consistently do: Play games, and talk about games. As GamerDNA pushes forward it was an important step for us to connect the places you play games with some places where you talk about games… namely Twitter and Tumblr. Here is how it works:

There is a new Share page off a tab on your member home page. In addition to all of your graphical/dynamic forum signatures, there are options to configure Twitter and Tumblr… two popular micro-blogging services.

Right now we started with only two sites, but we will be building this out as we go. Feel free to contact us and let us know your network of choice. Facebook is in the works… but we are interested in your thoughts of broader support.

Clicking the "Configure" button on either service allows you to authenticate the account and configure what you want to share over those networks. Don’t worry… Your password is stored using secure encryption, and will only use your account information to publish stories.

There are two types of activity: GamerDNA.com activity, and Gameplay networks.

GamerDNA site activity is summarized into posts that are made at most once per hour to your social network account.

Gameplay network activity (Xbox Live, XFire, and soon Steam) is gathered up and pulished every morning between 8am and noon encompassing the previous days activity.

In both cases, the short summary may link back to your profile or to the exact activity depending on how much activity you participated in. Examples of what will appear:

"added Call of Duty 4 to their profile and created a gaming experience titled: ‘I can haz games?’"

"posted a message to the MMORPG Connections forum"

"played Guild Wars and Atlantica Online on their PC yesterday for a total of 1.4 hours"

"added Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning to their profile and added a character to their profile"

"uploaded images titled: ‘My new guy’, ‘That really hurt’, and ‘My new sword’ to their profile"

We see integration with social networks as a way to start conversations. By using summaries to ensure that we aren’t spamming your social graph, we hope to create a valuable way to let your friends know the full range of activities you are engaging in around games. This can include playing something on Xbox or Steam, uploading a new screen shot of your MMO character, or maybe writing an awesome story recounting an epic flag capture.

As always, bring the feedback to our door step. It sustains us!

Oh, and I will also suggest you follow GamerDNA on Twitter… it is a great way to get real-time updates about the site.

Sanya’s most recent article about the launch of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning recently hit the popular news site, Slashdot.com in their posting about the status of the Warhammer Community.

I just want to take this opportunity to welcome the Slashdot community and I invite you all to take a look at gamerDNA, the source of the data that you read in Sanya’s article. Why not join up and be part of the action? We just launched some exciting new features that will allow you to discover games played and enjoyed by people like you - right now.

You can even take part in some of our gamer personality quizzes, which will allow you to see how your gamer personality relates to those from gamers around the world (you might even learn something new about yourself!)

So, once again, welcome! Have a look around, and enjoy the site!

Just moments ago gamerDNA launched our Warhammer Online API service, one of the first services that is a part of our gamerDNA Helix Platform.  The Warhammer Online web service gives community developers access to character data information from Electronic Arts’ RealmWAR website.  This is the same API that gamerDNA used to create our Warhammer Online signature generator that we launched last week.

The character data API gives developers access to every character that has be inputted into the gamerDNA system through our  Warhammer Signature generator page on our website.  A player’s character name and server name, along with your unique gamerDNA API Key, gives you access to the Warhammer Online API web service.

Today we have also opened up a new section of our forums called "Helix Developers/API", which will become a central hub for all discussions about the gamerDNA APIs we currently provide and all APIs we roll out in the future.  Community developers are encouraged to use this forum to collaborate on projects, ask questions, and give feedback on our APIs.

How to get your gamerDNA API Key

gamerDNA Warhammer Online character API web service information and documentation

If you are a community developer and you have built something exciting for the Warhammer Online community, please email us at community@gamerDNA.com for a possible feature on gamerDNA.com

Hi everyone. This week was a pretty big build for us… as it brings us closer to our mission of providing a unique gaming identity across a growing alliance network of sites using OpenID…

It is also pretty cool that your gamerDNA profile is available from xxxx.gamerdna.com!

Here are the full notes from the build:

Profile Enhancements/Changes

• All members (and guilds) can access their pages by going to xxx.gamerdna.com! Share with your friends!
• Contacted the final set of members that need to change names due to conflict with guilds.
• The badges have been changed to use a .PNG extension, so that they are more versatile and behave with their transparency correctly.
• Fixed an issue where the member name was not displaying on sub profile pages.
• Google maps have been removed form the profile due to the new domain name scheme not allowing for a google map license per sub domain.

Guild Enhancements/Changes

• We changed the layout of the guild image page to use larger thumbnails so that they are easily visible and fixed some IE7 browser issues.
• Corrected more issues in the editor that were causing lots of extra spaces and broken links. We continue to fight the battle on this.
• Found an issue where some themes had the wrong default values specified causing background images to not appear. Also repaired some small issues in the theme switcher that would cause blank values to be saved.
• Fixed an issue where the image gallery on the guild page was not obeying the size of the page and breaking the layout.
• If a guild is disbanded, you will no longer be able to access the old pages by guild id number or short name.
• Any older guilds that were never given short names, have been back-filled to have them as required by the new sub domain requirements.

General Site Enhancements/Changes

• New Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning signatures launched at http://www.gamerdna.com/warhammer-signature/
• OpenIDs are now supported for registration. If you want to create an account without a password and use an existing OpenID that you have, you can now do that at gamerdna.com
• OpenID is now supported for login. If you have an existing member account, you can login and associate your openID to that gamerdna account.
• New forgotten password page implemented. It no longer uses a popup.
• Quiz result pages have their content added back in, with a new flag to flip them off for performance reasons.
• We had to remove the DNA Active strand from the homepage for performance reasons. We moved a few elements around until we can implement the new homepage design.
• In some cases, using spaces in your name would break registration validation and cause user confusion. This has been repaired.
• Fixed performance issues around uploading an image.
• Fixed performance issues around selecting an attitude.
• Until we can properly populate games into the list with enough information, the search bar in the upper right is restricted to only finding "Tier 3" games. These are games we have specifically promoted within the system for use with guilds.
• If you try to submit the first answer of a quiz without an answer, it no longer breaks.
• Corrected some typos on the registration page and quizzes.
• We are now truncating the game name on the character DNA panel to prevent strange wrapping issues in the small list space.
• Changed the help text on registration to explain that hyphen are allowed.

That’s it this week! We have a really ambitious week, hoping to get some pretty serious and awesome enhancements to your member homepage in for Sept 29th. Look for those on Monday!

Updated: 2:07am EST Saturday

Today has been a very exciting day with our announcement of gamerDNA hitting 500,000 quizzes being taken on our site.  Along with that announcement, we’ve been receiving some great write-ups on various gaming press sites.   The most recent write-up that we received was up on Kotaku, which had many great things to say about gamerDNA.  Welcome to gamerDNA Kotaku readers!

Earlier today we had some trouble keeping everything up and running because our servers were getting slammed from Kotaku readers checking out the site.  Right now it looks like everything is running well and the site is holding up, so please feel free to check out all the features on the site that you may not have been able to reach earlier due to site issues.  We’re very excited about our 500,000 quizzes milestone and we’d love for you to check out the quiz system enjoyed by so many people.

In the future you can monitor our gamerDNA Twitter account to keep up on any news and announcements we have from gamerDNA, as well as any site issues that we may encounter in the future.

Read More

Are you a Call of Duty 4 PC clan in need of a server to host your own clan matches, practices, or other events? Well, you’re in luck! We here at gamerDNA are now offering timeslots on our gamerDNA.com Call of Duty 4 server where we will give you (for a specified amount of time) full control over the maps, settings, and gametype on the server so that you can play Call of Duty 4 how you want it!

You should use this if you:

• Have a big clan match that you want to have a speedy server to play on
• Want to use a server to test out the remote console commands
• Want to have a place to practice map layouts privately
• Want to have a server that you can call your own!

Best of all, all of this is totally free - because we love you!

How does it work? Well, first take a look at our Community Calendar and see if anyone has the server reserved (the Call of Duty 4 server requests have “COD4club” prefixing them), then send a  request to reserve the server, and we’ll let you know when we update the calendar! We’ll also hook you up with an rcon password and we’ll even help you out with the basic server commands!

This is me, Trapper, slacking. Posting the build notes from this week totally skipped my mind! Not a ton of changes… some big bug fixes and gearing up for a few major projects.

The big accomplishment this week were some major successes around site performance. You should see things running much better, snappier, with less down time. Leave a comment if things are faster for you! We would like to know!

General Site Changes/Enhancements

• Blogs were taken off the site, as previously proposed. If you were an author of a blog, you can grab the content so you have a copy!
  
• Fixed issues that were causing the nav bar to wrap on non-full screens and lower resolutions.
• All inactive guilds with short names that conflicted with existing active members were renamed.
• Cleaned up some style conflicts between the DNA panel and the guild templates.
• Re-sized the search bar to fit correctly in the nav bar.
• Updated the Warhammer game to have all the correct character classes.
• Replaced the icons for network IDs in the forum so that they respect the black background.
• In the guild directory, the LFG button will now accurately reflect your LFG status.
• Guild directory will now default to the top 50 alpha and the drop down will properly display sub sets. We also improved the directory filter behavior to make it more consistent.
• Fixed the recruitment link in the guild directory
• Fixed a few broken game icons.
• Changed the search term from "User" to "Member" in the search drop down.
• Search results will now NOT display a blank motto if a user does not have one.
• Made some huge improvements on performance by changing some back end configurations. I hope you all notice.

Guild Hosting Changes/Enhancements

• Fixed an issue that was causing guild hosting content to appear, then vanish in IE7.
• Fixed an issue with double posting on preview in he guild forum, and some layout issues.
• All guilds that were created before we introduced sub domains have been given their own shortcut names to be consistent with all data.
• Guild leaders with invalid shortcuts for their guild were contacted to rename them so they are subdomain-valid.
• Fixed a layout issue that was breaking the guild forum preview link.
• The guild editor defaults to a larger font size making it easier to read.

Things to be aware of

• We will be contacting members with now invalid characters in their member names to rename to a format that supports an xxxx.gamerdna.com format. So look for those notices.

That’s it for now folks! Cheers!

That’s right FPS fans, gamerDNA now has its very own Call of Duty 4 server. Just like the TF2 server before it the COD4 server will give a place for gamerDNA members to enjoy a friendly and competitive environment to hone their skills. The server’s ip is 66.199.247.99:28960, and we’ll be needing some people to play on it to get it kickstarted! So what are you waiting for? Join the fight, Soldier!

Once again, our own Zel has allowed me to show not just one but three themes that you guys will soon be able to use on any of your group hosting sites. The first theme, entitled Sniper Vision, should prove to be a favorite amongst groups that want a gritty, yet straightforward layout.

Next up we have Need for Speed, a design that’s built for the growing subset of groups that are dedicated to racing games.

Finally, we have FrostBorn, a theme that is sure to be a hit amongst those who are eagerly waiting for a certain expansion pack to a certain best-selling game.

Once again, thanks to Zel for creating these awesome themes for us all to use. Drop her a shout in her shoutbox telling her how awesome she is!