Welcome back to gamerDNA.com!

We first want to thank everyone for their patience over the last few days that the site has been down, we really appreciate it! This was a big update for us, so we needed the time to make sure everything worked, fix various bugs that came up, etc.

That all said, you can check out the brand new gamerDNA.com right now!  There is a TON of stuff in this update, with the most obvious being the new color scheme and design, new Member Homepages, and new Profiles.  There are many new features within these pages, other changes and updates that are big and small…so expect a flow of blog posts explaining it all in the coming days and weeks.

In the mean time, we encourage you to check out the new gamerDNA.com and let us know what you think!  Use our Feedback page to let us know about any bugs, your thoughts, your praise, etc – We want to hear from you!

Thanks!

Sam Houston and the rest of the GamerDNA Team

Hello!

Next week we will be taking GamerDNA.com down for an extended period of time while we update the site.  This downtime will start at 8pm EST on Monday August 24th, last through all of Tuesday, and will come back up in the morning on Wednesday August 26th.

To see what time it is at the GamerDNA offices right now, please check out the Boston page at TimeAndDate.com.

We need this long period of time to make sure that the update has gone through correctly and that all of the features on gamerDNA work the way they should.  We really appreciate everyone’s patience and we apologize for the inconvenience that this may cause, but this is downtime is something that must happen in order to make sure everything goes as smoothly as possible.

Important things to remember:

• Facebook updates from gamerDNA will not go out during this downtime
• Twitter updates from gamerDNA will not go out during this downtime
• Tumblr updates from gamerDNA will not go out during this downtime
• ALL gameplay that gamerDNA is tracking for you via Xbox Live, Steam or Xfire will still happen during this downtime.

The best way to keep up to date on what is going on is through our Twitter account, at http://www.Twitter.com/GamerDNA.  We will be updating Twitter on how things are going, and we may even include some videos and pictures of all the mayhem in the office

Thank you for your patience everyone! We can’t wait for you to see all the new things on gamerDNA!

-Sam Houston

gamerDNA Community Manager

Editor’s Note: This blog post is written by Adam Krebs, gamerDNA’s Summer Intern who helped out with all of our data input goodness.  We salute Adam as he sails off to college and we wish him luck!

As GamerDNA’s summer data intern, I had the all-important job of keeping the game data up-to-date and the traits on topic while the guys on the product team built the cool new features of the site. I had a lot of fun and learned a great deal, and got to help out with this website we all know and love. My first day happened to coincide with the opening day of E3 and the launch of TweetMyGaming. In fact, one of my first assignments was to live-add the games to GamerDNA and TMG as they were announced. It was especially cool to watch the tweets fly by showing how excited people were about Metroid: Other M just moments after it was demoed on stage.

The guys here have been absolutely relentless about improving the product, and I was consistently impressed at the extent of their knowledge of website design and user experience. I always looked forward to the opportunity to sit in on the design meetings, where each team member provided input into the progress of the latest features. What does that x in the corner do? Why are there two arrows highlighted? How do we communicate enough information without being overwhelming? These conversations gave me a real insight, as a GamerDNA user and aspiring web designer, into how much effort it takes to make a great product that people find useful.

It wasn’t all seriousness, and working at a video game website definitely does have its perks. Whether playing Battlefield 1943 at lunch, or a particularly memorable debate about the Monty Hall problem, the guys approached it with the same level of fun and intensity that I saw them put into the production of the GamerDNA website. Almost every desk has video games or action figures of some sort, and even I managed to amass a collection of Star Wars and Starcraft-related paraphernalia (and an awesome Zombie Hulk, which I got for my birthday). One of my favorite days was going out with the guys to IHOP for lunch, and immediately raiding the comic book store afterwards.

This has been an amazing learning experience and an incredibly fun summer and I thank everyone at GamerDNA for the experience. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to go back to civilian life after working at one of the coolest summer jobs ever. But hey, there’s always next year!

-Adam Krebs

Thanks for doing a great job Adam!

-GamerDNA

Earlier this month we asked our community to submit questions for us to answer about GamerDNA.com.  We received quite a few questions, and all of the answers are contained in the video below!

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We apologize both for the length (48 mins!) of the video and the blurriness.  Since this is our new video we had some learning to do about what the best way is to do this!  Future videos should be much better quality.

Thank you all for your questions, we really appreciate it!  We plan to do this more in the future, and we continue to take your questions, feedback, ideas and praise on our Feedback page:  http://www.GamerDNA.com/feedback

Thanks!

Sam Houston

GamerDNA Community Manager

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:

Member Profile Changes/Enhancements

• Built out a new Game activity list to replace the watch list. This list shows the activity of all your friends and the conversations that are occurring. If your list looks sparse, add some friends! Invite some to the site! Build out your game activity! We will continue to expand this out with filtering and customization options.
  
• Built out a calendar on the profile page to showcase your game activity. The calendar is green on the days that you played via a network or you manually entered game activity or an experience. Make sure to add your activity every day to keep the calendar green!
  
• The calendar on the user profile lists out your game activity. it has icons to differentiate between game activity and game posts, as well as ones with comments. Clicking the date pops open a preview of the items on that day.
• There are three places where the new activities are listed. On your profile sub section called Game Activity, on your personal game page, and on the public game page. All three places use a similar layout with paging.
  
• There is a form in your DNA section for adding a new game post and assigning some games… your mood… think of this as your blog post. The cool part is that you can now add multiple games to a post in situations where it covers lots of titles.
  
• There is a game activity creation page in your DNA section where you can add new game activity (if you aren’t using the modal). You can select a mood, but also milestones if anything special happens. Any activity can have milestones for: Advanced, Discovered, Achieved, Marathoned, Dominated, Acquired, Dominated, Completed. Make them mean what you want them to mean.
  
• At the top of your member home page is a dock that presents you with easy access to creating a new game activity entry or game post. You can also pick from your games to jump start the process.
• Added a game activity list page to the DNA section. You can filter and sort them to manage them easier.
• When you enter a comment on any item (activity, image, etc), you are automatically subscribed to that item and will receive all comments on that item until you unsubscribe.
  
• Added a new email preferences section to the DNA section. You can control your global email there as well as emailing for comments and bi-weekly friend updates.
• In any game that you play that is detected on a network, you will now get a game play verified event. This will appear at the bottom of your activity along with any other details like minutes played or gamerscore earned.
  
• Cleaned up the numbering on the friends list on the profile page.

Group Hosting Changes/Enhancements

• Guilds can now display and sort their rosters by the Guild Ranks that they assign.
• Changed the guild stories to reflect the new activity model.
• Fixed an issue where the game type-ahead stopped working in some cases in the guild directory pages.

General Site Changes/Enhancements

• The game database now has every iPhone game in the app store. If you have an iPhone and you play iPhone games, add them to your profile!
• All games have a list of the most recent activities and posts. Only activities and posts that have contributions will show on the entries. Check out your favorite games and see what people are saying.
• All game activities and posts have a new comment system. When you add a comment to an activity, you are auto-subscribed to all updates about that activity made by other members. You can unsubscribe to any activity by following the link in the email and clicking the unsubscribe button on the item.
• There was a bug where openID was forgetting that you had trusted a site. This now works as it should.
• Corrected a bug in the persistent trust of OpenID that was causing the user to get asked for trust even when the trust was being assumed based on the source of the registration.
• The old gamerDNA panel has been completely removed from all sections.
• Created a modal that allows the user to enter game activity from the game activity page directly without leaving and updates the list in real time.
• Updated game information for all games that we are running promotions with.
• Built out an email system for tracking clicks on any emails sent by the system.
• Change over all of the links for the old experiences model to use a 301 redirect to the new model.
• Changed the link to the Helix API to link directly to the documentation and not the forum.
• Added a link to the company blog in the forums section.
• Fixed the z-index issues with the game auto-complete.
• Corrected some of the links in the member feed to point to the correct locations.
• Fixed an issue where the counts of profile items in your list and in the header weren’t matching correctly. They should now match up after correcting the logic.
• If you enter a trait with a trailing or leading space, that is now stripped off.
• Changed the profile header and signatures to reflect the count of the new activities.
• Had to flip around the challenge pop up since the columns changed locations.
• Added a back link to the activity entries.
• Fixed an issue with box art disappearing.
• Tweaked discovery to work with iPhone games which do not have an assigned style.
• Fixed a bug in how we refresh warhammer characters when the user changes their data.
• Fixed up the pull of last.fm information to the user profile page so that it retrieves it more consistently.

I hope everyone enjoys the new changes. We are always interested in your feedback!

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.

Member Profile Changes/Enhancements

• Created new World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King signature images that run off your character and item history. As things happen to your character and new items are obtained, that information will appear in your signature. Up to 10 random events will display on each view each day.
• Built a new character add/view page that offers up a signature.
• Some of the styles on the personal game pages were reverting to old versions. This has been fixed.
• If a game is in your list with no traits, it will now say ADD TRAITS instead of 0 TRAITS
• Fixed situations where the last login date was incorrect.
• If you add a game, one of the "What’s Next" options is to view your personal game page.
• Changed the game list in the header to sort correctly and changed it to "Recent games" since it could have games that were recently added and not played.

General Site Changes/Enhancements

• We put in a new login/logout process that is smoother and uses less redirects.
• Created a page that displays when you need to login to a protected area of the site.
• Added a new Helix API for requesting Guild Profile information. Check out the documentation!
• Added a new Helix API for requesting a guild roster. Check out the documentation!
• Corrected some CSS issues with the display of avatars on other parts of the site.
• Fixed some errors where certain people weren’t seeing a game page due to older games they have added.
• Repaired a javascript error that was occurring on logout for IE7 users.
• Corrected some javascript and CSS issues that were appearing in IE7 on the homepage.
• Made enhancements to Xbox 360/Steam/Xfire game detection that better match up the games played on the network with our internal game names.
• The trait system has been optimized to better weight multiple trait matches with higher relevance.
• After you trait a game that is new (meaning you added it), you will no longer get broken discovery entries.
• Cleaned up some orphaned characters for warhammer sigs.
• Changed some instructional wording on the game trait page.
• Fixed an issue that was preventing the giving of respect.
• Fixed some css width issues on the registration confirmation when coming from a referral.
• Fixed an issue where buttons were jumping around in IE7 when taking a quiz.
• Wrote some better logic to handle the truncating the titles of the blog on the homepage.
• Cleaned up the game activity system by removing duplicate records and merging tier 3 and tier 4 titles.
• If traits aren’t matching, it will let you know why the match is there (style/genre) and hide the non-relevant links.
• On the discovery page, the game titles and box art for the suggested titles are now clickable.
• Fixed an issue that was causing partially complete achievements to appear in the member profile API.

Group Hosting Changes/Enhancements

• Added Brigade as a group title option.
• If you try to post to a form you no longer have access to, the error message will be much more friendly.
• Fixed an issue where the story gadget was causing strange errors on certain group homepages.
• Resolved an issue where new guild sigs were throwing errors when choosing the base image.
• Repaired some problems with the Aion group theme default coloring. If you are seeing an issue and you are using this theme, you will have to reselect the theme in your group management.
• Added a divider to the guild forum posts to better differentiate the start of the signature in the posts.
• Fixed a display issue with the theme slider on the group creation page.
• Fixed a broken link on the group creation confirmation page.
• Removed LFG terminology out of the guild hosting creation pages.
• Corrected the list of most popular games on the group directory to use the correct/new game names.

That’s it for now! If you notice any craziness from the database cut over, be sure to let us know.

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.

Member Profile Changes/Enhancements

• Launched a new member profile header with new information and navigation as well as one-click updates for your motto and avatar. Hover over your motto to change it. Hover over your avatar to upload it.
• Members now have member-specific game pages, in addition to the system-wide game page.  The page highlights the items that a member has added to the system about the game, including why they liked the game, images, stories, etc. Think of it as all the content you have created around a game.
• On your games page of member-home, there are links to trait your games… which is essentially tagging WHY you like them.
• Validation added to prevent entering of commas, long text, and accidental caching of previous entered traits.
• If you say you are anticipating a certain game title, you by pass the game traits and receive a confirmation page.
• Members can now periodically check out offers from merchants that gamerDNA thinks they might like by clicking on the offers tab on the member home.  First up:  Custom wow guild T shirts!
• If you are logged in, you now always land on your member homepage (Watchlist)

General Site Changes/Enhancements

• European support added to the warhammer signatures and to the HELIX Warhammer Character API.
• We are starting to move away from the DNA panel… the first pages to do this are adding a game, traiting a game, and the confirmation/discovery page.
• All places where you added a game through the DNA panel now directs you to the Add game form.
• When adding games as a non-logged in user, you can now bridge that into a registered user and take all of your games with you.
• All games returned through the discovery show the platform correctly.
• Added a button to get back to the discovery page from a game page that you have added to your profile.
• A new member profile API has been created for members to utilize!  Check out the documentation!
• Some meta data enhancements have been made to the game pages.  Check them out!
• Game meta data has been added to the personal game pages. This information includes publisher, release date, and developer.
• Fixed the game shadows to display correctly in IE7
• Fixed a small stories display problem on the games pages.
• Repaired the line wrap on traits when they are displaying on the game discovery page.
• Fixed some class conflicts in CSS on the member profile.
• Created a tool for scheduling community nights. The Gears of War 2 community night will be first to use it.
• Fixed an issue where the footer was overlapping the homepage at lower resolutions.
• Adding games was moved to a new form… so one of the bugs around creating new titles was fixed in the process.
• Cleaned up the discovery UX when checking out the matched traits and all available traits.
• Fixed the wrapping of traits in the popularity box when the bar charts were too short.
• Repaired a large performance issue when a quiz was completed.
• Cleaned up some formatting in the games header where the buttons should be positioned.
• Added some missing icons to the interface when adding new traits.
• The default for no box art has been changed to a new more hi-res image.
• Repaired some issues with the openID cobrand page when incorrectly sized images were used. The page will now hold shape in these cases.
• Merged a few games to make things less confusing. We will be continuously monitoring and merging games where it makes sense. Any games you want merged, let us know!
• Fixed an issue where icons were over-sized.
• Corrected grammar in the game widgets.
• Fixed the search results to show the game platform and the box art for games.
• When you add a game and say that you like/dislike/anticipating it, history entries are generated.

Group Hosting Changes/Enhancements

• New guild theme! Pyromaniac features smoldering background images and singed borders in a deep red theme. However every color and image used in this theme can be replaced so designers can create their own versions and completely change the look.
• Repaired an old issue where a user was having conflicts with some markup- libraries.
• Cleaned up how the group image gallery works. If images are not approved they drop off the list.
• On the members tab of the guild section, you can now see a history of all the applications for your guild.
• Fixed a strange issue where guild signatures were not displaying in the guild forums when you weren’t logged in. It should not display correctly.
• When a member applies to a group, the join date of that applicant is now properly set.
• date/times on posts in guild forums were showing an hour off. A correction has been put in. We have to remember to change the GMT offset when daylight savings moves around.
• Fixed an issue where the signatures tab was blank due to permission/naming issues.

That’s all! I’ll be back next week with another new list! Cheers!

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.