360voice Dev Blog

New 3VCE- SoupyC

360voice is proud to announce that SoupyC has been awarded a 360voice Community Expert (3VCE) badge. 3VCEs are people that have been recognized for their contributions to the 360voice community. He has been a long time member, and an active and knowledgeable user of the forums.

If you are wondering what this 3VCE business is, check out the FAQ.

Top 20 Days Played for games

I made a small change this morning to the Top 20 Days Played on each game page... There are many cases where people are tied on those little leaderboards...  so to break the tie, I am sorting it by gamerscore descending. So if you and a bunch of people have the same number of days played, the rank is by who has the highest gamerscore.

So if you dropped some spots due to the tie breaker, go score some points!

Question: Does anyone use the Directory?

Here is a question for the community:

"Do you use the Directory?"

I am talking about the user directory that is up on the nav bar... the issue is that it is an HTML scraper's dream... those pages just get pounded day in and day out and I have to imagine people aren't really bringing up all the "S" tags just to find their friends... so my thought was to maybe turn that section off (remove it) if it isn't really being used. With the search box you can find any friends you have. I never personally use it... so I was just wondering... we built it because we had the tag search.

I am interested in feedback.

IP Banning today

It seems that the database/site issues are still in play today... it seems we are under some sort of attack both from an HTML scraping standpoint... and a SQL injection attack stand point... I am watching the logs and pretty much banning anything that looks fishy... by fishy I mean hundreds of simultaneous requests to non-API pages... and anything with funky querystrings.

If you get banned... and you are legit... email us at mail@360voice.com... but I doubt that is the case... so if the site seems wonky, this is probably why.

Update 2:11pm ET

Ok, so Steve found some fancy ISAPI filters that I added to the server to hopefully block all the madness... what effects they might have on other sections, I am not quite sure yet... so if you see something broken, let us know in the support forum.

New ads... on various pages.

Today I will be deploying some new ads to some of the pages. The most jarring will be a new 300x250 ad on the homepage and the blog page. I know that we all hate ads... but given that 360voice is now part of a for-profit start-up... we have to play our part to help out the mothership.

The exciting part, is that 360voice is actually quite effective with its advertising. Because our community is so vibrant, we actually make up a pretty good chuck of the ad money that is gathered... so you can all be proud to be apart of a significant cog in the wheel! :)

Seriously though... I am well aware of how advertising is perceived on the web... but you can take comfort in the fact that the advertising that will appear in these blocks will be as targeted as possible... we are working with a company called Intergi that fills all the ad inventory from GamerDNA... and they do a pretty good job... so while it all won't be gaming specific, it should be stuff generally targeted at gamers.

So I hope everyone doesn't revolt... remember that Steve and I are working on these sites full time now... and we have to feed our families... and while the ad money doesn't go to that directly, it does help us in our goal to build a viable company.

(click the title of this post to leave any thoughts/comments)

Database issues

Hey everyone... we were running a database query and it decided to take over THE ENTIRE SERVER.

It actually started melting the silicon on the board... things were moments from catching on fire.

(I might be over-dramatizing this)

Anyhow, we are working on resurrecting it from the dead. Stay tuned.

Update 9:53pm CT

Things have been pretty smooth after a database server reset... don't know what that was... but it was lame! Hopefully all good now. :)

A hodge podge of small changes

Many people have asked to have your stats to compare against the average stats that were added to the games page yesterday, that was simple enough so I squeezed it in this morning.  So you can now easily compare your scores and played days for a single game against the average value of the members here at 360voice.

Have you ever microblogged a game like LEGO® Indiana Jones™, just to find out your blog suffered its own version of the RRoD?  Well I believe I have just hit the encoding beast with the final blow, and you should be able to microblog a special character games without entering blog graveyard.(hopefully).  I understand that this is mostly a fix for us so we don't always fix blogs that go breaky - but it is also a fix for you!  You shouldnt have to avoid microblogging about your expierence just because the game has a funky title.  The encoding issue is dead - amen.......at least i hope so!

On those same lines, I noticed on the permalinks (or page that you leave comments) the special character games were not encoding correctly, it was mixed within the text of the blog so it wasn't as obvious at first, but while I was on my mission to destroy the encoding beast, I took care of this as well.

You know the drill, click the title if you want to leave a comment - and definately post if you see something wrong from the few small changes I just shoved onto the server.

Some Monday Love to the Games Page

Did you know the average achievements unlocked across all 360voice members who played Call of Duty 4 is 19?  Or that 97.31% of members who voted on GTA IV gave it a thumbs up?  Probably not, but now you can! These are just a few of the added features just put online on the games pages.  Head on over to the page for a specific game and you can see some interesting new features

On the top left you will see some new fun stats about the gamers here at 360voice.  In addition to the original stats we gave you, you can now see the average gamerscore and achievement gain for all 360voice members who have played the game.  You can see the average number of days dedicated to the game, and finally you can also how well the game is doing in the thumbs up, thumbs down rating system.

Speaking of game ratings, if you are logged in, and have played the game you are viewing you have all the options you have over on your games lists page - the ability to mark it as something you own, something you rented, something you traded, something you want to play, and of course the ability to give it a thumbs up or down.

But wait, the fun doesn't end there!  You can also scroll down to the bottom of the page and now in addition to the recent players list, you can also now see a list of people who have marked the game as something they own, or who have actually marked the game as something they want to play. So you are more likely to find a match when looking to join forces over xbox live.

As always click the title to leave a comment and let us know what you think about the new features.

Oops

So... Funny Story... I am sitting here with ChangeAgent and Squidpumch at 11:00PM EST....  Playing some GRID and we got an IM from FragmasterWolf asking if the blogs ran today.  A moment of nervous shock hit me, as I asked ChangeAgent where his computer was.  See, the 3 of us have been hanging out all day, rescuing Squidpunch from burning subway trains (no joke), eating grilled foods, playing Rock Band, and generally enjoying the down time and conversation.

So I wasn't thinking that yesterday I set the jobs to run manually to make sure nothing was missed with the outage.  However I never turned it back on, and no one was at the terminal pushing the buttons to make it run.  So the hamster fell off the wheel and no one was there to put it back on.

Sorry guys, catching things up, everyone will have blog entries, just no badge updates or leaderboards for today.

Jobs Delayed Today

The jobs are delayed today, due to a server maintenance issue.  Shouldn't be any data loss or miss blogs, but to be safe streaks are going to be disabled (for what you played or did not play Thursday 6/13/08), you still have to play today.

Will update when I know more, thanks for your patience.

Update 12:27PM PST - Blogs are currently running.  Things are a few hours behind today, so things like Badges will be very late this evening before updating.  Things look okay, so I hope everyone's entry is going to be pretty accurate.  In other news all 360voice folks (ChangeAgent, Fatty Chubs, and Squidpunch) are in the same town right now... trouble.