November 10th Release Notes

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!

Tags: development, Release Notes

November 3rd Release Notes

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.
 

Tags: development, Release Notes

October 27th Release Notes

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.

Tags: group hosting, group themes, guild hosting, player experiences, Release Notes

October 22nd Release Notes

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

Tags: development, Release Notes

gamerDNA Build Night – Tonight!

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!

October 14th Release Notes

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!

Warhammer Online Guild Roster API

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!

Tags: API, Warhammer Online

Slashdotted!

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!

Tags: gamerDNA, slashdot, slashdotted, WAR, Warhammer Online