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!

• Little Racers


• ZP2K9


• Creed Arena

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...!

Got ideas for other kinds of feeds we should support? Let us know...

You can get one for yourself by logging into planbeast.com, clicking "Account", and then following the link to the card page under the "Other Stuff" header. Or, if you're already logged in, just go here.

What do you think?

Tip of the hat to MyGamerCard.net, whose approach to turning Xbox Live Gamercards into sharable images I used for inspiration, here.

Planbeast cards. That's my working title for it, anyway. This will be, essentially, a little blob of HTML you can paste into blogs or forum signatures and the like, resulting in a nifty dynamic image that will let people across the web know which online games you've got coming up, by way of Planbeast.

We have a working design, but I made it myself, and so it's pretty ugly. Rather than foist them upon y'all as-is, I'm talking to Rob, the fellow responsible for the beautiful punched-out look that this site's miniviews sport. I hope to get some solid advice from him, and then turn this feature on next week.

Facebook integration. Through Facebook's new Connect API, websites can rig themselves up to allow users to log in and even create new accounts using their Facebook credentials. This can lead to a lot of cool stuff, such as having Planbeast stamp a notification on your Facebook wall whenever you create or join a game event, letting your friends know about your online plans.

We'd been talking about doing something with Facebook from way back when we were first plotting out Planbeast, so I was happy to discover the Connect API earlier this month; it really looks like the best way for us to hook into it. This is a more involved project, but I hope to see it happen before summer.

In other news, I totally just picked up Left 4 Dead, mostly due to peterb's review of it, which spoke directly to my totally-not-into-the-whole-zombie-meme self. (As well as my desire to go blow 50 bucks at Amazon, I guess.) Anyway, so long as I'm pretty much the only person making public events on this thing, I've made a few of those. Want to come shoot zombies with me?

Also fixed a bug where users' XBL online-status in event miniviews were getting pulled from the wrong cache, which often resulted in these miniviews claiming that online users were offline.

If I cannot also resist making an egregious plug for my day job, well, so be it.

There's not a lot we can do about this, so long as we are relying on (rather unstable) third-party information sources which, in all cases, are just other people's hobby-projects. I'll be frank here - what we'd really like is access to Microsoft's Xbox.com Community Developer Program, or something like it. The XCDP's own page (link to Google Cache) says that they're not open to further membership, but I've heard conflicting information about this from other sources If you happen to know anything about this one way or the other, feel free drop me a line, or comment here...