Thanks to everyone who tried it out and gave us feedback.
]]>I was pleased to get plenty of on-the-spot feedback, which all boiled down to: dude, where's your developer API? My next steps with Planbeast development are now more clear-cut than ever, which isn't a bad thing at all. Let's you and I see what happens.
]]>I also fixed a bug that was biting people answering invitations to some private events, only to be greeted by an ugly error message. There was some yucky cookie-based confusion in the works, but it's all cleaned out now. Thanks to CyberKnight for alerting me to it.
]]>The site's active population has dwindled a lot since its big spike in February, which isn't terribly surprising; March was a busy and travelful month for me, and it's been weeks since I've been able to do much in the way of promotion or feature-addition. I plan on putting together a talk about Planbeast for the Boston Indies meetup next month, which has the nice side-effect of forcing my attention back onto this project for a while. We'll see what happens!
]]>You can also read this first issue on planbeast.com, in beautiful full-color HTML. Enjoy!
]]>Repeating events carry their users and their attached comments over from one iteration to the next. So, for example, all the discussion that happens in a weekly event's comments section remains in place, allowing for ongoing conversation among its players. Furthermore, when you join a repeating event as a guest, you'll continue to stay there for further repetitions until you leave.
To set an existing event as repeating, go to the page of an event that you're hosting, click edit this event's settings, and then select the desired frequency from this This event repeats pull-down menu. Naturally, this menu also appears as you set up a brand new event. Please give it a try, and let me know what you think!
One of my main motivations in building Planbeast was my desire help promote all the multiplayer games that just don't have the critical mass of players to support a culture of online play. Getting to this point by themselves is especially hard for Indie Games, whose developers shoulder the entire burden of promotion.
Do you have any other Indie favorites that we should add?
]]>Event history: When Planbeast events slide into the past, they stay in our database, but unless you happened to have their URL bookmarked they become basically nonexistent to their participants. This is an especial bummer if there was conversation attached to those events' comments sections.
Now, every user who was a host or guest of an event at the time of its passing can easily continue to find those events. Your history page shows a neat little list of all the events in your past, as well as the most recent comment posted to each one. You can click through to re-access the original event page and all discussion attached to it.
You can find your history page linked from the front page, as well as your account page.
Buddy-list sharing: One of the known weaknesses of Planbeast is the difficulty in seeing who-all is here, so when three people in one day asked for a basic friends-of-friends feature, I jumped on it.
If you check the "Allow other users to see your buddy list" checkbox found on your buddy-list-management page, then a link appears on your profile page that will allow other users to see your list. Likewise, you can view the buddy list of anyone else who has turned on this feature for themselves.
So that nobody is unpleasantly surprised, I've set that feature to off for all existing users; you'll have to go turn it on for yourself, if you want to share your list with other users.
]]>I have finally discovered the culprit: Planbeast's source for getting new game data, 360voice.com, at some point last year changed the numeric IDs of their game database, as part of the process of merging their data with their new parent company, GamerDNA. Since Planbeast's database uses 360voice's game IDs in order to figure out which games are new and which it already knows about, this led to Planbeast getting confused, and effectively ignoring a lot of new titles.
I certainly don't blame GamerDNA for consolidating their own DB, and recognize the responsibility is wholly mine. This is simply the sort of thing that can happen when you leave a project with external dependencies alone for several months, as I did with Planbeast. There's little for me to do about it other than clean up the mess, and I sincerely appreciate all the help y'all are giving me with pointing out games that ought to be in our database. I add them as fast as I can, when you do, so please keep them coming!
]]>The Geezers have so far been invaluable not just in making some nice suggestions about the site, but calling out its flaws as well. For one thing, our registration system wasn't allowing recognizing addresses with two-letter TLDs (such as .uk or .ca) as valid. Just as alarming, the magic elves who populate our database with new titles had somehow managed to overlook both Modern Warfare 2 and Borderlands, two of the most popular Xbox Live games right now. I patched these errors as fast as I could, and extend my gratitude to those who report them to me. Please keep the bug reports coming!
New members, especially those who frequent web forums, should check out Planbeast Cards. Paste these little code snippets into your forum signatures will let everyone else on the web know what online games you like, and when you're next scheduled to play an online XBL game. (Yes, I should make that page more obvious to this site's users somehow...)
One one user's request, I have also created a game entry for Halo 2, even though it's technically not an Xbox 360 game. Microsoft has announced that it's pulling the plug on XBL support for original Xbox title (including Halo 2) in April, and Planbeast can help you get your last licks in before the servers go dark.
Happy planning!
]]>Take Schizoid's page, for example. If you dig that game enough to want to know when someone else creates a public event, check the checkbox labeled "Email me when anyone creates a public Schizoid event", which you can find underneath the "Stay notified of upcoming events" header (if you're logged in, that is). Every game page has a checkbox like that.
In some ways this feature is redundant with the RSS feeds already attached to each and every game, but I'm operating under the hypothesis that signing up for emailed announcements is, for many people, a friendlier (read: less nerdy) way to stay informed about things like this.
]]>We'll also use it make short posts on other stuff of interest around the Planbeast-o-sphere. See you there...!
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