360voice Dev Blog

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.

New Games Page Fun

If you head over to your games settings page (login required) you will see that we added some new functionality to the page.  Previously you could only mark what games you wanted to play, and the games that you owned - but we have expanded that to include games you have rented and games you have traded in as well.

Also you might notice that you can now finally cast your own vote on all the games you have played, it's a simple voting scheme; simply thumbs up or thumbs down instead of a big huge scentific formula to create some random number which indicates your level of enjoyment.  What it really boils down to is you like it or you don't.

Finally the page is now sortable, so you are able to sort your game list in a number of different ways so you can find the ones you haven't rated easier, or perhaps you want to rate only your more recently played games - etc.

Once we get some data flowing with these new data elements we will be bubbling them up to the games page for the acutal game - so you can some of these stats in an overall way - such as how many people rented or traded in Avatar: TLA: TBE instead of actually buying it, and some data related to how many thumbs (up or down) a game recieves. 

Finally I would like to claim victory over Fatty Chubs, as this was mentioned on the forums  as a challenge of who would finish first, "Fatty's "Badges 2.0" vs Squids "Games Rating System".  To be fair rating your games is a bit less involved than badges 2.0, but I will take a win anyway i can get them!

As always click the title if you wish to leave a comment - cheers!

New API service: Job Status

With our merger with GamerDNA there is a need to share data back and forth across the two databases. In order to do this effectively we needed some sort of service that could be queried to say if the nightly jobs were finished and it was safe to pull data. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that this would be an important capability for all of our community developers as well! So here it is, a service you can use to check on job status:

360voice.jobs
Description: Allows you to check the progress of the daily 360voice system updates. Use this to track the system if you need specific data at specific times each day. Querying this service will allow you to schedule dependent jobs.

Arguments:
date (optional) (format: YYYMMDD)

Sample:
http://www.360voice.com/api/jobs.php
http://www.360voice.com/api/jobs.php?date=20080529

This service and more, are covered in the API docs. Go check em' out and build something awesome!

As you might notice, the service is written in PHP instead of ASP... that is because Fatty Chubs wrote it... So this is the first PHP based service we have... it doesn't really mean anything... just interesting to notice!

I can't keep my hands out of the code

Things have been pretty busy lately as I complete the process of moving my family to Boston. That doesn't prevent me from jumping into the code and breaking things every now and again... If you didn't know, 360voice has no real dev environment. We like to live out there on the edge... everything is coded directly in production against production systems... it keeps us spry... on edge... if you haven't tried running a software product with NOT development or staging I suggest you try it... it makes you question the need for complexity.

Although I have been known to roll back some of Squidpunch's code from time to time... I know we have a mantra around here that when something breaks, blame Steve (Fatty Chubs)... but lately it should be changed to blame Trapper (ChangeAgent). :)

I did jump in and add a few things lately that I never called out.

1. Added gamerscore to the Top 20 Most Played list on the game pages.
   This is fascinating because I sort of assumed that people who played 313 DAYS of Oblivion would have all 1250 points... not so! Craziness! So click around a few of the popular games. You might be surprised at what you see. A special thanks to Himself0890 for the suggestion!
2. Rearranged the challenge trash talk to match the blogs.
   This was something I have been meaning to do. When I redid the comment layout for the blogs I never did the trash talk, so now it should be much easier to read. I have seen in the forums that you might have to refresh your style sheets (CTRL-F5) otherwise it might look funky.

So that is it for now. Look for a few bigger new features this week! And for all those wondering, we will be recording another podcast here soon as well.

We are giving you the keys - drive safe!

For those of with keen eyes you might have all ready noticed this, but we have added a new gadget on the right hand side of your settings page (*login required) titled API Authorization Key.  This is your own personal key which you can share with a 360voice API powered site to prove ownership of your blog. 

This was developed for those API Ninjas and API Samurais looking for a way to validate you actually owned the gamertag you were submitting to their tools.  That is not to say that everyone is going to lock down their tools so you can't check out your friends information on growing list of community tools out there, but recently TX Eegras built a gateway tool that you can use to check if a gamer has badges you have selected as requirements to join your challenge.  Without checking ownership, you could just enter my gamertag (shameless plug to raise my ranking!) to recieve the code to join a challenge which was supposed to be locked down to the Community Experts for example. 

So as the API warriors conquer new ground with their tools, we are doing our best to help them on this journey.  You might have guessed, if you wish to start validating the new API Authorization Keys right away on your community tool, just head on over to the API Documentation for more details on the new API 360voice.gamertag.authenticate

New Badges: Motto Love, and API Ninja

We are throwing up two small badges tonight. They are:

1. 360voice Motto Love
   We were looking at gamertag mottos in the database and noticed 45 people had 360voice in their motto already! So we decided to make a badge to recognize anyone that wanted to do that. All you have to do is have the word "360voice" in your gamertag motto, and you will get this badge during the next processing. Simple enough! To change your motto, click here. (Live login required) It takes at least 24 hours for the change to update and award the badge.
2. API Ninja
   As we continue to expand the API for the site, some people are just cranking out the code. We want to recognize those people that are pushing the envelope and keeping us on our toes, so we created a higher level of the API Samurai badge called API Ninja... There is no criteria to receive this. You simply have to differentiate yourself above the 60 people currently with the API badge... how do you do that? Just get involved... challenge us... help us make the API better. Do that and you will get your just reward.

Nothing huge, but we like to jump in when we can to reward and recognize.

Update 10:01pm CT

Also forgot some small genre updates from Fatty Chubs:

1. Puzzle - Added Tiqal
2. Social - Added Lost Cities
3. Party - Added Wits and Wagers
4. Shmup - Added Triggerheart Exelica

Arcade madness!

360voice celebrates GTA IV weekend!

Next weekend (May 16th-May 18th) we have two GTA IV related events going on. First we are kicking off GTA IV weekend with a Community Game Night on Friday May 16th from 9:00PM-11:00PM EST. If you would like to play, send us a friends request to the gamertag gamerdna. Attending this event will earn you the plays well with other badge and the chance to win some t-shirts.

In addition any registered member of the site that plays GTA IV any time between Friday May 16th and Sunday May 18th, will be eligible for a chance to win an Xbox 360 game of their choosing (max value $64.99).

So keep that Xbox happy, and pop in GTA IV and join us online!

Official Rules:   To be eligible for the game drawing you must be a registered member of the site, must play GTA IV between 01:00AM 05/16/2008 EST and 11:00PM 05/18/2008 EST (while connected to Xbox Live and having all privacy settings disabled) either single or multiplayer. Full details on quantity and qualification for t-shirt drawings, will be giving out during the community game night on Friday May 16th.

Feature Friday: Email Notifications

We have been working on and testing this for a little while now and finally are ready to release it for all of you to use.  We are now allowing you to recieve email notifications on events that may happen on your blog,

You now have the ability to enable email notifications on:

1. whenever someone leaves a comment on your blog (mass comments and comments made by the blog owner are exlcuded)
2. whenever someone adds you to their watch list

Additionally any posts that you have subscribed to on the forums will also be manageable on this page, giving you one central point to modify anything related to email notifications.

Just head on over to your settings page (you must be logged in) and click the link for Email Notifications to manage what you would like to be emailed on, and the ability to modify your forum subscriptions.

Happy Friday!

Getting caught up, Microblogs, Recap RSS

I didn't really announce this change, so I wanted to officially put it out there...

Remember Microblogging? (you have to be logged in) You put in a game... while you are playing it, you go to your computer... the site will know you are playing it and let you make a comment on the game as well as locking in your streak. This also makes it so demos and betas can appear in your blog and you will get credit for playing the... I have slightly extended this:

1. You can now microblog without a game in the drive... this allows you to create a manually entry about anything you want. It also makes the blog a little more versatile.
2. If you put a game in and try and blog, we will properly explain what your current status is... we don't let you blog a game if you are marked as "away" while in the title... but at least now it will tell you what status is appearing so you know.

I also added an RSS feed for weekly recaps only... so if you just want to get those notifications about yourself or a person, you can. Check out your share page to see that.

Auto-Challenges are Back! With a twist!

We are bringing back the very popular Auto-Challenge this week, but with a new twist! Auto-Challenges will now be 5 days long, and run every week from 12:01AM (PST) Wednesday to 11:59PM (PST) Sunday.  Meaning that while activated, you will automatically be placed in a scheduled challenge each week.

Starting tomorrow (April 22nd) new Auto-Challenges will be populated every Tuesday.   So this means if you have gone into your profile and enabled Auto-Challenges, under your Auto-Challenge settings, you will automatically be put into a 5 day challenge, starting the following day at midnight.

Each week, you will be matched up in a 5 person challenge, based on your current gamerscore.  Your challenge will then start at 12:01AM PST on Wednesday.  All challenges are for bragging rights and help you move up the leaderboard and earn badges.  If you are currently in an active or pending challenge, you will not be entered into an Auto-challenge.

Finally this does require a full account, so if you haven't signed up yet, please do so and get competing!

New comment style, microblog tab, Fav list delete

I found myself with some time on Friday so I cranked out a few small things, and worked on a larger thing that I didn't get done.

1. Delete all button added to FAVs List.
   If you browse the site, there is a little link that appears on the nav bar called "Favs". This link is dynamically created, tracking the blogs that you go to the most. This is so that people who do not register have a way to organize the blogs that they visit without having to do anything. The list can get big and the browser cookie that runs it fairly large, so a "Delete All" button was added to allow you to manage it better.
2. Microblog tab added to blog page
   All of the microblog entries that you create can now be found on a separate tab on your blog page.... and a separate RSS feed has been created for those as well.
3. New blog comment style
   We were getting some feedback that the comments were really hard to read on the blog page, so I restyled them to be a little more clear about who is saying what. This style also applies to the comment tab on the blog page.

I am also working on a feature to give you more reasons to go to the game pages on the site. I got the first part done, and need to complete the second part some time this week.... so look for that as well.

Monday Smashed Bugs and Suprise Goodies

Well it is not code night but I put some time into a few bug fixes and a couple small features that were requested recently and I had time to work on.  It is looking as though Fatty Chubs, and ChangeAgent are going to be a bit busy during our normally scheduled code night, so I figured why not give you something a bit early just in case we do in fact delay code night by a few days.

First those pesky bugs, some of which you might not have even noticed!

- On the first day of a challenge (before scores have been gained) the colored rollover effect would cause a javascript error - this was fixed once before but it made its way back onto the page and should be all fixed up now!

- There was an area on the site where when modifying your watchlist it would go to the old form, which would essentially replace your existing watchlist with the old 20 limited gamertags - Wink was the (un)lucky member to find and report this bug to us, thanks!

- Also on your watchlist management screen your gamertag shows so you can compare yourself with others, but it kind of blended in, it was supposed to be colorized differently so you could easily see that it was your gamertag - this has been updated.

Now that those pesky bugs have been squished with a size 15 boot (not mine, sadly i have rather small feet), onto some new features for those of you dying for a new toy on the site.

Blog comments now allow links, and smiles!  That is right folks, if you want to put a smiley face, or a link you want to share in your comments, you can do so.  If you are a regular on the forums, you should be able to start using this functionality right away, because it works identical to the form, and for those of you that are not regulars of the forum - what are you waiting for, you have to have a full membership to leave blog comments anyway, why not come on over and join the fun.

Just a quick refresher though, links that start with http:// or www. will automatically link for you, but you also have the ability to use bbcode

ex: [url="http://www.360voice.com/tag/squidpunch"]visit my blog make me #1![/url]

Smiles can be added by also using bbcode

ex: [:)] =

Enjoy Everyone!

Code night watchlist madness

Squidpunch has been pulling his weight around here... reading the forum and putting together a massive watch list update. Here are the new features:

1. You can now have up to 100 people on your watchlist.
2. The watchlist gadget on your blog shows the top 20 people you are watching.
3. If you go to any blog, you will see a "Watch this Xbox" link if you are logged in. Click it to start watching someone.
4. Your watchlist now comes up in a sweet pop-up with all sorts of options!
5. You can rank your watch list. If you don't rank, it goes by gamertag alpha.
6. You can sort your watch list in the pop-up all sorts of ways.
7. You can also access the pop-up from your blog settings page. (login required)

So go give it a try. Let us know what you think! I think it is pretty sweet and makes "watching" a little easier to do and manage... and we opened the flood gates on the number of people you can watch... although we don't really know how big this will be... so depending on how it all performs... we might have to scale it accordingly.

(Have a comment? Let us know by clicking the title of this post to leave one.)

Super have code night Tuesday action time!

The three-voice boys jumped on Skype... and worked on stuff... the list of stuff is here:

1. Watcher List detail added
   Remember that sweet detail table for your watchlist? Squid applied it to your watchers as well.
2. Your tag added to watchers and watchlist detail
   As requested from the forums, the watch list and watcher list detail pages now include the blog owners tag to compare - its colored green. This is pretty cool because you can sort the table all sorts of ways and see where you fall against your watchlist.
3. 360voice.challenge.details supports tag!
   You can now pass a gamertag into the challenge details web service and it will return you back details on the most recent completed or currently active challenge.
4. Mutual Watch List comments changed to ALL WATCHERS
   Unlock the spam flood gates people... you can now leave a watcher comment for everyone who is watching you. We use to restrict it to only mutual watchers, but now you can blast anyone who is pointing one of their limited watcher spots in your direction! Don't spam too much or you may find yourself losing watchers!
5. # of comments displayed on forum card is unique only!
   We didn't want the number of watcher comments you send to skew how many actual comments you have left... so we are now only displaying the number of unique comments. So you might see your number shattered if you are the kind of person who used CTRL-V comments in the past, or lots of mutual watcher comments.
6. Added a "RESPOND" link on the comments of your blog
   Anyone that leaves you a comment on your blog, will get a little respond link so you can quickly jump to their comment form and leave your own comment. It takes out the number of clicks to do this.
7. Stat for % of 360voice members who play a game added
   A new stat was added to every game page... it will now tell you what percentage of 360voice members have played that title. Check out COD4 for an example... it shows over 56% of 360V members have played that.
8. Fixed the gamerscore distribution charts to be accurate!
   For all the games, if you view the gamerscore distribution chart it will now properly reflect downloadable content. Check out Oblivion as an example.

Fatty Chubs also squeaked in some genre badge updates. We know how you love (hate) those!!

RPG - Added Lost Odyssey
Social - Added Chessmaster Live
Puzzle - Added Poker Smash
Family - Added Spiderwick Chronicles
Strategy - Added Commanders: Attack
Retro - Added Discs of Tron

There are also assorted performance tweaks... code clean up... support emails, etc. But these are the big things!

(as always, click the title of this post to leave a comment)

More Detailed Watching

In addition to the two watchlist community tools (watchlist history tool, and watchlist latest blog entries) that we mentioned on Podcast Episode #3, we had one of our own in the works!  One that is online and available to you all.  If you notice in the watchlist gadget (on the right of your blog) you now should see a little entry at the bottom that says "check out [your tag]'s detailed watch list".  We might find a better place for the link or change the wording, but for now thats how you access this new feature.  This is a link that all users can now look a nice little table of all your watchers, and some various stats on those gamertags you have chosen to watch.  I should alos mention that on this table each of the headers (except gamertile) can be clicked and sorted.

3 w00ts for random Sunday feature releases!  As always click the title to leave a comment, and enjoy!

Your Xbox can Microblog

We are rolling out a new feature today... one you might have seen some people beta-testing for us... it is called microblogging. You can go to your Xbox blog while playing any retail title, arcade title, or demo/beta and submit a real-time comment that will be pushed immediately to your blog. It looks like:

This really comes from a desire to make the blogs a little more active than once per day. The idea was stimulated when I was playing Guitar Hero III and I completed a song on Hard that I had been trying to beat and I wanted to tell the 360voice world about it and I had to wait until my blog entry the next day to do it... now you can do it in real time!

With the launch of this feature, there is another added benefit, you can lock in a streak!

Are you obsessed with your streak badge? Do you want to do everything you can to keep it? Well now you can put in a game or demo, submit a microblog entry, and your streak will be saved! This next part is very important:

With the launch of microblogs we will no longer be reseting streaks for any reason.

With the microblogging you have the ability to lock in a game manually! We are putting the power to keep your streak directly in your hands!! Take the power! Learn it! Love it! Use it!

(As always we are open to feedback, click the title of this post to leave a comment!)

New Public API Available

Well I just realized (as in ChangeAgent just reminded me) that I didn't post on the devblog on code night about a new API that I added to our long list of public APIs. 

Originally requested by lqDFx there is now an API which you can get all the current details of a challenge, such as the challenge title, the dates the challenge runs, the prize up for grabs, and all the current challengers with their starting, current, and total gamerscore gains on this challenge. 

Don't forget if you develop something with our public API make sure to post it in the Community Showcase, not to mention you join our XML Ninja brotherhood (currently 50 members strong!)

Everyone Likes Signatures, Right?

Well as mentioned on the forums, one of the things people were going to miss from theliveeye was the images for all your games completed.  Which then got me thinking that this your completed games are available here in your games list.  From that we bring you a completed games signature, which you can see on your share page, complete with code needed to display your completed list proudly.

I don't mean to flex my gaming muscles, but if you check the 360voice team, my completed list, is larger than Fatty Chubs AND ChangeAgent.

As always click the title if you wish to leave a comment - and enjoy!

More Code Night Goodness

In addition to all the Genre Changes that  Fatty Chubs mentioned earlier, you might notice we recently put your challenge stats on the blog page (look down under the watchlist).  This is was one of the changes I hinted about in my first official dev blog post.  So if you are like me (0 for 7) it's nice and easy for everyone to see.  I better get cracking and actually get a win under my belt.  So head on over to your or your friends blog and see how they are doing in the world of challenges.

Finally just in cause you don't have time to leave comments on the blogs over the web - you are in luck you are now able to view and post comments on the mobile version of your blogs!

Genre Updates

We are still plugging away at tweaking the badge systems, but we heard the cries and did some genre updates.  The following are all additions to the genres.

• Puzzle - Boogie Bunnies
• Sports - NBA 2k8, NBA Live 08, NCAA March Madness 08
• Retro - Tron, Tempest, Asteroids Deluxe
• SHMUP - Mutant Storm Empire, Omega Five
• Family - SpongeBob UnderPants!, Cars: Mater-National, The Golden Compass, Looney Tunes: AA
• RPG - Arkadian Warriors
• Music - DDR Universe 2
• FPS - Fear Files, Timeshift

Did we miss something? Make a mistake? Or do you just want to congratulate us for an awesome job, sound off here!

Hey Look it's the new guy

Well just in case you missed when it was officially announced, or listened to the latest podcast the team of 360voice is now 3 people strong!  Thanks to Trapper and Steve for giving me a shot, and thanks to all of you who have sent congrats to me in pretty much every form except a letter via the us postal service.

I have been spending time understanding the current code, database layout, and the support tools that we have here at 360voice (many of you might have gotten a response to your support request from me over the last couple days), as well as working on some small enhancements here and there.

If you haven't noticed when posting on the forums over in your gamercard area you now have a running count of how many comments you have made on your (and others) blogs.  Its pretty impressive the number of comments some of you crazy folks have made thus far.  Yes I am talking to you Fshguy with your almost 6k comments left.

More recently you might have noticed a small change in your challenge page.  Specifically in the table that lists all the challenge participants your gamertag will be colored so you can easily find it, and as you hover over the other members you can see how far above or below you are from that person without pulling out your TI-82 calculator.

I have a few other things in the works that will probably be available soon keep an eye on your blog, and the mobile version of your blog and you just might notice them before they get posted officially.

Just a real quick reminder, we also set up a tool to make it easier for us to share the support tickets you guys are sending in, to make sure your request is handled as fast as possible when sending a direct email make sure to send it to support@360voice.com.  The mail@360voice.com address is still a valid address to contact us, but we are trying to funnel all support requests to the support address.

Once again thanks for all the congrats and the huge welcome I got from everyone when I joined the team.

Join Challenges Easier: Auto-Challenges!

We have been hearing that joining Old Spice Experience Challenges can be hard if you are new to the site or if you don't have a ton of friends with which you can create your own... so we are going to try something out... Introducing, auto-challenges:

What are Auto-Challenges?
Every week we will put everyone who has elected to be in an auto-challenge automatically into a tier 1 challenge to compete! You won't have to do anything but click a button.

How Does it Work?
Go to your blog settings and select "Auto-Challenge" from the Gamerscore Challenge section. Click the button to turn it on and that is all you have to do. Information about the next auto-challenge will be available on that page.

So go check it out... the first auto-challenge launches this week!

The first code night in a long time...

For the first time in a long time, both Fatty Chubs and I (ChangeAgent) have been able to work on the site at the same time! That means: Fun stuff for you!

But first... a quick word about STREAKS. People seem to be losing them all over the place for reasons that seem beyond their control. I really thought today was going to be a streak-fix night, not a code night... so I post here for everyone the "tricks" to keeping your streak:

1. ALWAYS play more than one game.
   This is just a necessity. Your game data is most regularly updated when you STOP playing a game. Playing at least TWO games a day ensures that you stop playing one of them... and leads to many more captures.
2. ALWAYS be signed in to Xbox Live.
   Even if you are playing single player games, please, please, please be signed in at all times or your data might be missed.
3. ALWAYS quit to the dashboard before powering down.
   This is much more important than people think. Because the capture is more accurate when you STOP playing, if you just power off your Xbox in the game, it often never updates that you even played the game at xbox.com. So please do this.
4. ALWAYS play 360 retail titles and XBLA full version titles.
   In the past, XBLA trials worked, they no longer do all the time due to changes to the gamercard in the last dashboard update. Also, sometimes we capture the occasional demo or Original Xbox title, but rarely these days due to feed performance. So please follow this advice.

So that is it. 4 easy steps! Now on to code night results:

1. Added an "About the Gamer" tab on blog page.
   If you go to anyone's xbox blog they now have a new tab that will display the Location, Motto, and Bio from the gamercard, as well as your Forum signature if you have one. My idea with adding the forum sig is that it gives people a place to put links and information to share with others... now not just in the forum, but on their blog page. So let me know what you think of that idea.
2. Location/Motto/Bio added to gamertag-profile API service.
   If you are someone who uses our API, the fields we use for the About the gamer page were added to the gamertag-profile service, moving that to version 1.8. So have fun.
3. Added new Retail and Arcade complete badge levels.
   The badges for this have been made (and sitting in the list!) but the logic wasn't complete to populate them. So, you will now get an upgraded badge for 60,70,80,90, and 100+ completed retail and arcade titles if you qualify... to be considered completed you have to have 100% of the possible gamerscore with DLC included.
4. Added a new Badge: The In Crowd
   Starting tomorrow, if you were one of the people who played the #1 game at 360voice for that day, you get the In Crowd badge. Lately it has been COD4, but it isn't always that... sometimes when big arcade titles are released or new DLC is available, another game shoots to the top of the list. If this happens and you didn't play it, the badge is gone. It is a new badge idea... so leave us feedback.

So that is it for tonight! A pretty good little evening... in addition to this we worked on some stuff with presence encoding... misc business issues... repaired a lot of streaks, changed a lot of tags, deleted some members... the usual churn.

I am not sure there will be a code night next week as I have family coming in from out of town... but anything can happen. Keep the suggestions coming.

(to leave a comment, click the title of this blog post)

Mutual watch list comments, and the directory

I have been playing around with a few things...

The first is some mild enhancements to the Directory. You can click a link to see all of the new users... and actually you can just put any date in the address bar and check out who registered on that day. When you search the directory you also get more information about the person. I was going to put the gamer pic in there but man... with live being so beat up lately it slows the page down too much to have that on there.

The second is called "Mutual Watch List Comments" (login/Full membership required) and allows you to post a comment to the most recent blog entry for everyone on your watch list who is also watching you. This should allow for easier communication across your friends... let me know what you think. Thanks to HeNaniGenz 510 for the great idea!

(click the title of this post to leave a comment about these little enhancements)

Genre Updates

So much needed genre updates have been made, here is the rundown.

RPG: Mass Effect Added
Racing: NFS Prostreet and Flatout Added
Sandbox: Assasin's Creed Added
Sports: College Hoops 2k8 Added
SHMUP: Crystal Quest Added
Music: Rock Band Added
Family: Lego Star Wars TCS
Fighting: SmackDown vs RAW 2008

Special thanks to Fshguy for helping compile these and continuing to run his awesome site.   Keep an eye out for an announcement of an upcoming chat night and game night.  We will be holding a chat on badges, and then playing some games next week.  Once I lock down the date and time I will post it here, so if you want to share your thoughts on badges or kill me over Xbox Live for not updating badges, keep an eye out for the announcement.

List of winners added to reward pages

We are now listing all the winners of a specific reward for the Old Spice Experience Challenge on the reward detail page. You can get to this page by going to the challenge reward calendar and clicking any reward title. On the page (if there are any winners) they will be listed out.

Check out the $20 gift card for Amazon as an example.

Want a gamerscore graph image?

rwgriersr, creator of the iPhone360voice interface has also released a pretty cool gamerscore chart image! This will allow you to embed a chart of your gamerscore history captured by 360voice anywhere you can put an image. Here is mine:

http://iphone360voice.ryangrier.com/graph.php?gamertag=ChangeAgent

All you have to do is substitute your gamertag where mine is and you are all set. Give it a try!
 

Find gamertags in challenges

While I was messing with some stuff this evening, I added in a search on the challenges page. You can now type in an exact gamertag and see all the pending/active/complete challenges that the gamer has or is participating in. Makes it fun to look up people's past history... it might also be good for strategic planning! You can look up the full history of people in advance and see how they played their other games... the type of trash talk they threw down... did the bluff? Did they play it straight? You have the tool to research that now.

Delete comments from your blog page

Because we rolled back the blog comment filtering, I have added the ability for logged in FULL members to delete Xbox blog comments directly. No longer do you need to go through the blog settings to delete comments. You can do it right off the page. Look for the little red X off to the right of the comment information. This should give all of you a little more control.

This functionality was available for the Old Spice Experience Challenge Trash Talking so I just moved it over to the Xbox blog comments. Easy enough!

Leaderboards display "comments enabled" star

This request came from Syndelin. She wanted us to at a "*" next to the names in the leaderboards to denote which gamers have comments turned on for the Xbox blogs. You ask and you shall receive. We thought this was a great idea so I whipped it up this evening. Check out some of the leaderboards to see it in action... and go leave some comments!

• Achievements
• Challenges
• Completionist: 1 - 9
• Completionist: 10 - 24
• Completionist: 25 - 49
• Completionist: 50 - 99
• Completionist: 100+
• Gamerscore
• Gamerscore Change
• Gamer Tiles
• Games Played
• Streaks

Do you have your comments enabled? You have to be a FULL member. After that you can log in and make the change from your blog settings.

Challenge rank added to the leaderboard gadget

If you have participated and won any Old Spice Experience Challenges, you have been earning score towards the Hail to the King (HTTK) badges. Your score also puts you on the challenge leaderboard. Your current rank is now displayed in your xbox blog in the leaderboard gadget. Scroll down the right-column to see it. If you don't have any challenge score, you won't be on the leaderboard and therefore won't have a rank and won't get a link in that gadget.

Everyone having fun with the challenges so far? Some interesting news:

1. Gary Leeds was the first gamer to win the viral badge by conquering Fatty Chubs in a challenge.
2. Over 400 people have participated in the challenge beta.
3. Over 280,000 points of gamerscore have been earned  in challenges so far!
4. Word on the street is that challenges make you play more! Streaks are going up!
5. Avatar has become a very popular game for winning challenges. :)
6. Reminder: If you are looking for  a challenge or need challengers, post in the Challenge Invite forum.

(click the title of this post to leave a comment about gamerscore challenges!)

Comment filtering disabled by popular demand

Recently I turned on a swear word filter on the blog comments. I had to build one for the challenge comments (for legal reasons) and I figured I would turn it on the blog comments to keep the level of drama down. First of all, it didn't prevent drama ;), second of all, lots of people are complaining about it.

After thinking about it, I remember saying that the blog comments are your space... so as such, you should be able to paint whatever picture of yourself you want in those comments to your Xbox. Therefore, by popular demand, the comment filtering is now off... feel free to swear to your heart's content. However, I do read them all and particularly nasty/racist ones will still get manually deleted by me so my domain doesn't fall into the "bad kids" filter. I reserve that right.

Sites that Rule: Hawty McBloggy

In the world of a billion blogs and community sites out there, I am always interested to find one with a unique personality and better writing then I can muster.  I have recently started reading HawtyMcBloggy.com and have found it entertaining, well written and mature.  It's got an Xbox 360 focus, and the sole author describes herself as, "I am a geek. I am a gamer. I am a girl."  It's like having a hip artsy friend, you can talk gaming with.  So consider adding it to your daily routine, or RSS reader.

Also she has created the ultimate Halo card to get for your favorite gamer, it has PG-13 related content but if you are of age I suggest you check it out.

Where did you get that gamer pic?

During code weekend, we didn't even realize it, but we have been receiving the source of your gamerpic all along... we just haven't been showing it! So I took a few minutes and added this in.

If you hover over anyone's tile in their blog, it will give you a little pop-up menu that tells you the source of the picture. You can click the link of the source to see other pics from that source, our you can click "Who has this tile" to see other gamers who have your pic.

There is also the gamerpic leaderboard where you can check out the most popular pictures of all the members at 360voice as well as sort by the LEAST popular so you can find some choice pictures that not many other people are using. You can filter by source on that board as well.

As with all our data, we can only show the data of our members, so this does not show tiles that no one in the system has. Enjoy!

360voice T-shirt @ Zazzle

Steve and I have been messing around with the Zazzle API and came up with a T-shirt idea that you can customize with your own gamertag. You can find this link on any blog page under the Links & Community gadget. It looks like this:

Buy a custom shirt! (ChangeAgent)

If you have never used Zazzle before, you can customize the product. So if you want a Women's version of the shirt, or a different color or shirt style, you can play around with it before ordering.

We get a small cut of each sale (10%), but don't worry about doing it for us. Steve and I made these for ourselves, so feel free to join us if you like! If anyone wants any other products, email in and I will see what I can whip up.

This is just an experiment, and if you order something and don't like it, you have to take it up with Zazzle. Steve and I enjoy the products we have purchased so far, otherwise we wouldn't be posting this to the site... but if you don't like the shirt when it arrives, you can always use it as a super awesome dish rag... or maybe a dust rag for your precious 360!

New chat software by Geesee

I was sick of Gabbly always breaking down, so I am trying some new chat software for the site. It is by Geesee and it seems pretty sweet. The button to join the chat is on the homepage and an embedded version is found in the nav drop down under Forum. Let me know what you think.

If you had a Gabbly account, you will need to register (if you want a custom profile). This software allows moderators, co-moderators, as well as private msging and such... so it is a little more full featured.

(click the title of this post to leave a comment)

Code-it Tuesday time

Man, things have been rough around here lately... we are rapidly outgrowing our hardware which is causing all kinds of joyous problems... so we are continually fighting fires these days. We plan to upgrade as soon as humanly possible. These days, it isn't an easy process because our database is so big... and besides we are looking at some pretty beefy stuff and want to get the specs right. In the meantime, here are some new features/tweaks to show that we aren't completely slacking!

1. New blog processing order
   The blogs use to process in order of registration... so the oldest members got their blogs first, the newer members, later in the day. I have switched this to now factor in your community involvement. I don't want to give away the formula, cause I don't want people manipulating it... but I am confident that the most active community members will get their blogs within the first 10 minutes of daily processing. You will still have to clear your cache to see them... but you will have that option.
2. New Leaderboards: Completionist
   There are a set of five (5) new leaderboards that rank you by your completion percentage. To keep it somewhat fair, we broke them into 5 levels by the numbers of games that you play. It isn't perfect, but let us know what you think.
3. Boosted the Watch list to 20 spots
   Everyone was asking for it so we decided to do it. You now have 20 spots available for your watch list. To use the watch list you must have a forum account.
4. Genre Changes
   Fatty Chubs decided to shake it up a bit this week with some genre changes. I think this is only the second time we have removed a game from genres. Give us your feedback.
   Sports - Added Madden NFL 08
   Puzzle - Added Hexic 2
   Race - Removed Import Tuner Challenge.
5. A few new blog sayings
   Cluskevird sent in a few sayings so I worked those into the Personality Processor.

So that is really it for new features... most of our work has been in the area of data fixes... as we get bigger and bigger... even the smallest little discrepencies snow ball out of control and you all call us on it! So here are some of the things we were playing with this evening:

1. Game stat cleanup
   People had been reporting situations where their points and achievements weren't up to date. This should be pretty much cleaned up. Remember it takes a full 24 hours for any games you played to fully update across all your stats.
2. More tweaks to manual game data fixes
   If you submitted game data fixes, we were having some problems with the right info going to the right places. Let us know if you submitted game data fixes and they still aren't there, even though they are showing APPROVED in the history section. Let us know via the contact form.
3. Investigating missing records from the 16th
   The queries to try and rip through the database and find everyone just aren't performing... so if you are still missing entries around 8/16, use the contact form and let us know! We will fix it on a person by person basis it only looks like a handful of people.
4. Presence downtime
   Over the last few days presence (which we use to track demo/beta/backcompat gaming for anyone with a forum account) has not been working very well. We rebooted the server and are investigating the issues. It should be on track now (for tomorrow), but we will have to keep an eye on performance. We hope to build some automated reporting to let us know when it fails so that we can catch it sooner.

So it has been a busy and productive night... many more nights like this to follow. Steve and I are also planning a code weekend for September. He will fly to Chicago and we will code for 48 hours straight to knock out a few bigger items.

(to leave comments, click the title of this post)

Update 8/22/2007 7:12am  CT

Tiger 08 hasn't been released yet and has been removed from Sports for now. It was added, but you correctly pointed out that it hasn't been released. That slipped in on accident.

Welcome back Game Data Correction!

It has been a battle, but we have finished our improvements to the Manual Game Data Correction system. What this allows you to do, is IF you have a forum account, you can submit corrections that need to be made to your game data at 360voice.

When you register your blog, we only get the last 16 games you played from Microsoft, so if we are missing any of your past games, you have two options:

1. If you still have the game, just put it in the Xbox and play it one time. The next blog entry will pick up all the missing achievements.
2. If you do NOT have the game, use the manual game data correction tool.

You get to it by clicking the "blog settings" link in the upper right of the page when you are logged into your forum account.

Please note. You CANNOT submit arcade games. If you are missing arcade games from your profile, you have to download them and play them. We do this so there is less to have to verify. So have fun getting your profiles up to date! We will do our best to verify and submit the requests in a timely manner.

One more special note. If you submit multiple game data fixes, they ALL must have the correct lastPlayed dates, achievements, and gamer score, otherwise your entire set of submissions will be denied. So watch the typos! We don't want to see you wasting your time!

The first code night in awhile...

It has been far too long since Fatty Chubs and I have gotten to write a little code together. While we didn't get everything done that we wanted (*cough* game data fixes *cough*), we got a good selection of things in that we have been meaning to add.

1. Renamed the Style badges to Gamer, Elite, and Jedi.
   We were getting lots of feed back that people with 25% of the completed achievements, didn't like being called "Dabblers" so we decided to switch up the badge names a bit. Are you an achievement Jedi? Not many people are...
2. Created an API for the top 20 most popular list
   A few people were asking for this (if I remember right). So if you are interested in tracking the most popular, you can now get it from our API via an XML feed.
3. Created the Streak leaderboard
   With so many crazy people landing streaks past 365 days, it was high-time that we start looking at where everyone else falls on the list. Go check out the streak leaderboard. It also appears in the leaderboard gadget on your blog so you can easily see where you rank. I pretty much figure that this will be a support nightmare for us as we already get lots of people who lose their streaks... so PLEASE PLEASE read the Streak Guide to keep your streaks alive. And if people at the top of the list can do it, I know you can to.
4. Blogging about the Watch List
   So this is some cool functionality that was sparked by a forum thread by Jimy bananas. Your Xbox will now make periodic comments about the people on your watch list and their gamerscores. Look for it on any day divisible by the number 5... so on 8/10 will be the first one for people. It has been awhile since we added new blog content so this was fun to work on.

So thats it for now! It is late and we will probably turn manual game data fixes on tomorrow... a few more tweaks left on that one... so look for it soon and you can all submit your missing games so that you can get the badges that you should have!

We also have some super-massive things brewing over here... so even if it looks like we aren't working on anything, I guarantee you we are... oh man are we ever.

Tweaky Tuesday

We didn't do a ton of coding this Tuesday... Fatty Chubs is swamped at work and I am swamped with life. Here are a few things that have been on the list for awhile:

1. Added "Member since" to blog page
   At the top of your blog it now has when you registered. I know some of you have probably registered and then changed tags. Our old tag change system didn't preserve your date, so if you want your date changes, just email us at mail@360voice.com and we will change it for you. In order to do this I had to swamp out a bunch of duplicate code with some shared stuff, so it was an opportunity to optimize the blog pages as well.
2. Added "How did you hear" gadget to the homepage
   Scroll down below the list of most popular blogs and you will see a random entry from our member database of how people heard about us... innocent little fun. Once I started collecting the data, I wanted to put it SOMEWHERE!
3. New gamertag change process
   Remember in the past (if you changed your tag) how you had to create the account first and then email us? Well that is NO LONGER the case. Do NOT create your new blog. Simply email us the old tag, the new tag, and if you have a forum account and our new tag system takes care of the rest.

Oh and let us not forget, Fatty has some genre updates for you this week!

1. FPS - Added Darkness
2. Strategy - Added Band of Bugs
3. Family - Added Ratatouille and Harry Potter OOTP
4. Social - Added Carcassonne 

So thats it for this week. Stay tuned for more things coming at you all the time...

360voice, OpenSearch enabled

A1337Haxor sent me an email asking if we could OpenSearch enable our search box... this allows you to use Firefox or IE7 and add the search directly to your browser. If you drop down your browser search options while on the homepage or your blog page, you will see our search as an option:

Simply click it and you can then search for, or jump to any gamertag in our system. I have always wanted to research how to do this. Thanks for giving me a reason!

New Services: Badge API calls

A lot of people have been doing a lot of cool things with the badge data. I hope to do a special feature in the dev blog on some of these products shortly. To make everyone's lives easier, here are some new services as requested, specifically for badges:

360voice.badges.list
Description: Lists out all of the available badges for the site in alphabetical order.

Arguments: (none)

Sample:
http://www.360voice.com/api/badges-list.asp

- AND -

360voice.badges.list.gamertags
Description: Lists all of the owners (gamertags) of a specific badge. Tags are listed alphabetically.

Arguments: id (required)

Sample:
http://www.360voice.com/api/badges-list-gamertags.asp?id=32

Hopefully these will make all of you doing such awesome and talented things able to do things more awesome, and more talented. :) I am really happy how much people are using the API though... it is really great. Thank you all! It is fun to watch the great things you are developing.

Hopefully in the short future we will have a way of better advertising some of the great work and including it back into the site so people can take advantage of these great tools!

New "leader board" for gamer tiles

I was in the mood to change my gamer tile... and I know this has been done on other sites, but I decided to whip up a quick "leader board" that lists out all the gamer tiles ranked by popularity in our system. You can also view them by least popular to find uncommon and therefore original tiles... although you are on your own figuring out which tile is in which pack. :)

You can't really call it a leader board, but then again there is a leader board for countries... so why not tiles? But you can click the tiles and see which gamers have them!

So yeah, I am trying to find a new tile that I can just enjoy and stick with for a long time... so I am off to browse and see what strikes my fancy!

Added top 20 players for each game

DaSneakE1 asked in the forum that we show who the leaders are for the number of days playing games. My initial plan was to make a leader board, but that is far too complicated to knock out in a few hours (which is all I had) so for now, I have added the top 20 days played leaders to every game page. Check some of these out:

1. bentron has played the most recorded days of Gears of War on the site.
2. You would think Trixie 360 would be tops at Zuma, but it is drukyulgoods that steals the crown.
3. xxx TAMMY xxx plays ALOT of UNO.
4. Geometry Wars is an XBLA launch title, but that doesn't stop H3LLRID3R from playing every day!
5. DiRT isn't released yet, but that doesn't stop SWILL W from getting a head start!

There are all sorts of fun new blogs to explore! Enjoy!

I wanted to add a few more fun stats to the game pages, but each stat I add requires a new database index and that brings down the site for about 2-3 thousand seconds... which is pretty rough... so maybe I will try and sneak those in later.

Games page daily change

This has been up there for a few days now, but in case you didn't notice, we added the daily change (+/-) to the games page. So for the top played games of the day, there is a green up-arrow or red down-arrow with the number of players. This allows you to easily see the change to get a feel for the trend without having to click through and look at the chart.

It's a little thing... but it makes it easy to see when a game is climbing or another game is fading in popularity day to day.

360voice goes mobile!

This week we are launching a slimmed down, scaled back, mobile version of 360voice. A new link has been added to your blog in the Links & Community section. To access any mobile version use the url http://m.360voice.com/t/gamertag. Here is mine.

For those of you without phones, here are some photos of the mobile version in action!

Homepage

Blog page (top)

Blog page (watch list)

My main reason for wanting to do this was so I could access my watch list from my mobile device to see what people are doing and easily click over to their blog to see what they are playing... also to get the latest entries while I am commuting in the morning. I was going for something fast and simple. If you have any comments, let me know!

(to leave a comment, click the title of this post)

Genre badge changes this week

For all of you out there hunting down the genre badges, here are the changes for this week:

1. Added Command and Conquer 3 to Strategy genre
   I think this one is self explanatory.

2. Added Pimp my Ride to Oddball
   It's not racing, it's not open world, it's not that great.  For the bad voice work alone this is going in oddball!

3. Removed Tiger Woods 06 from sports
   This is a small step to balancing out the sports genre, yes it's a sports game, but the achievements are all online, some are glitched and not a lot of folks have them regardless.

That's it for now! If you have questions, direct them at Fatty Chubs! He is the badge master! As always, feel free to discuss these changes in the forum!

Sneak Preview on your profile page

Now that we are tracking presence information for forum members, I have added in a "Sneak Preview" feature on your blog settings page. The way it works, is we watch what you play during the day, and put up anything we capture. This will allow you to confirm if we have captured any games about you in case you are worried about your streak.

Remember, the BEST way to ensure you keep a streak is to register for a forum account, and play something for more than 20 minutes. If you do, it will show up on your profile and you can feel safe and secure about getting a play-entry that day!

Take a look (or get a forum account to see it!) and let us know what you think!

(click the title of this post to leave a comment)

API Change: blog.getentries

For those of you addicted to the 360voice API, Cormyre made a good suggestion to add the ability to filter the 360voice.blog.getentries service so that you can see entries for played and not-played. I have also added a few more nodes to the service for total achievements and total gs increase for the day. Here is the latest info:

360voice.blog.getentries
Description: Lists all of the blog entries for a supplied gamertag in date descending order (newest to oldest).

Arguments:
tag (required)
num (optional)
type (optional) 1=recaps only 0=entries only
played (optional) 1=played entries 0=non-play entries

If you have any questions, you know where to ask them!

New blog layout: 1024x768

I am launching a new blog layout today. I will slowly be changing over the entire site (well not SLOWLY... hopefully in the next day or so), but for now, the blog pages are done. Check it out:

We tried a 1024x768 layout previously, and it really didn't work... people complained... etc. There are a few reasons we are doing this again now:

1. There is only 3% of our users who run at a resolution less than 1024x768, so why not use all that blank space right?
2. In order to get better ad revenue to support and grow the site, we need a 728x90 pixel banner space. In the old layout, we could only put in a 468x60.
3. With more columns on the pages, we can position some of the gadgets higher up therefore, less scrolling for the data you want to see.
4. We are shifting a lot of the data to pages with tables (like the games played page for instance) and as we add more columns and data we need mroe space to add it.
5. More space allows for other ad block types, like 250x250 spaces which can show image ads.

Now you are probably saying "Trapper, it sure sounds like lots of changes for ads" and I would have to admit, that you are correct. The primary reason was to get a 728x90 space on the site. We are running four servers now and our bills are climbing as more of you join up. In order to keep your experience high, and the features coming... we need the cash-money. Ste