360voice Dev Blog

New Badge: Street Team

I don't know who the first person was to suggest this... and I don't know why we didn't do it sooner. If you buy a custom 360voice T-shirt and you send in a photo of you wearing the shirt at mail@360voice.com with your gamertag, you get a fresh new badge:

360voice Street Team!

If you took the time to buy a shirt, we can take the time to reward you for it.

So join the street team. You can get a custom shirt by clicking the shirt icon ( ) on your blog... it will automatically pass in your gamertag and create a custom shirt for you at Zazzle.com.

You don't even have to email us the shirt. I would recommend uploading it to flickr or another favorite photo sharing service. Be sure to tag it with 360voice, and just send us the link!

Ultimately it was ESS3NC3 0F 3V1L who pushed me over the edge though... he sent in a picture and wanted a badge, and I finally said... hey why not.

If you previously took a picture and posted it in the forums, just link me too it and you will get your badge.

New 3VCEs

I would like to announce the addition of three new 360voice Community Experts:

1. Cormyre
2. Davem3 TF
3. Mightymango

These users have been selected for their dedication and consistency in the community as well as recognition by their peers for being important community members.

I personally want to say thank you to each of them for helping out as much as they do already, and I am proud to recognize them as Community Experts.

More API Updates For You Ninja/Samurai

I just threw together another API for you guys to keep the hunger for XML data under control, and like other recent API updates it is for collection data.  I am sure you guys will come up with some interesting tools based on the evolution of collections - I have faith!

360voice.collection.history
Description: Get a history of the changes for a collection

Arguments:
id (optional)

Sample:
[single collection history]
http://www.360voice.com/api/collections-history.asp?id=1
[all history aka collection master history]
http://www.360voice.com/api/collections-history.asp

Don't worry all you non-warriors of XML, we have a little utility in the works for you too that should help you keep your streaks, and your gamertag data in sync as ChangeAgent just mentioned a few days back.  Look for that soon....ish!

Game Data Syncs on hold

If you have submitted a game data sync request this week or want to submit one, we are putting all sync's on hold. Squidpunch is working on a tool that will allow you to do these data sync's yourself... it should be ready in a few days... so look for more information on that when it is available.

The reality is that we get 40 of these types of requests a day and it is getting too much to keep up with... so this downloadable tool will allow you to do it yourself and will not require any passwords or anything.

So for now, no more manual syncs will be done on our end. Watch this blog for more information as we release the tool.

Badge pages updated to include collection info

Ever wonder what games you need to play to get one of those fancy new collection badges?  Or maybe you still don't have the original collection badge?  Well we just put a new update online which will give you the list of all games that you have to play to qualify for the collection based badge.  This is true for all of the collections except the collection master, because the collection master is the having all the games for all of the collections the list might end up getting long enough it wouldn't look right - so if you are working for the collection master, you will have to look at the other collections individually first. 

With this change also provides 2 new public API to get the list of collections, and the games on those collections- so who knows one of those Ninjas or Samurai will come up with some even more interesting tools to track your progress.  I know a few of them have some ideas in the works, and were asking for the API so keep your eyes peeled. 

You know the drill, click the title if you want to leave a comment, and enjoy!

Site outage complete Feb 18th.

Thanks everyone for your patience. The outage was from 5am to 8am and we got what we needed.

We will most likely schedule one more before the database changes are complete, but this was a good step.

Thanks again.

Site outage: Wednesday, Feb 18th

Hi everyone. Just want to make you aware that we will be doing a database move on Tuesday, Feb 17th Wednesday, Feb 18th. This database is to set up another duplicate database so that we can do some additional reporting on the data without impacting the performance of the site.

I can't say how long the outage will last or when it will exactly start... just be prepared that the site will be down during the day.

Update 2/17/2009

We are going to do the outage tomorrow. Jobs will run normally today.

Jobs Delay/Site Slow Down

We are doing some database maintenance that has delayed blogs and other jobs and causing some slow down on the site.

We are updating some tables, and doing some intensive work today. This isn't related to any issues, but we are doing it to take advantage of some newer data, and to fix issues like the Prince of Persia error some folks are having, with the game appearing as the wrong title. So it's work that needs done, to make things better, its just going to keep things running slow for the next day or two. 

Badges will not run today or tomorrow, so you will keep your badges the same for the next day or so without any updates.

We appreciate your patience in the meantime, feel free to post any questions you may have.

Jobs running slow today...still...

Hey everyone... last night our DB ran out of connections for some mysterious reason so many of the jobs froze. We have most of the data, but we aren't 100% sure so we are turning off streaks today. Free day!

We are syncing up people's game info and will be running challenge updates and blogs ASAP.

Update 2/9/2009

After getting everything cleaned up last night, the jobs are hurting again today due to something that is eating up all the database connections at midnight when the jobs start running. So jobs are slow again.

Streaks are BACK ON for today as we did get all the data... just the splits we use to convert the raw data to our format is what was stuck... so streaks and your data are not impacted.

Collection Badge Fix

We made a fix to collection badges, to resolve an issue with them going away on folks. It was coded outside the badge process to test timing, and badges were being cleared out from the previous day before these were inserted. This should now be fixed, and they should stick around for you, until you no longer meet the conditions for the badge.

We also added the Master Collector Badge, for those that have completed all collections.  So Check out those crazy folks.

Finally some additional thoughts on the future of collections. We may move towards collections that are updated dynamically each day, without any notice.  So you would need to keep up with the games in the collection, through a master list.  We would want to have an API in place before this, so the superstar API ninjas could come up with something better to track them.  So just throwing that out there, for any thoughts you folks may have.