We’ve been very busy behind the scenes today trying to optimize page loads and fix broken things on the site. A quick rundown follows:

• Blog Alert Messages: If more than one player was watching a blog, a list of other players’ cancel Alerts links would be included in messages. This has been fixed.
• Leaders: This page has been significantly cleaned up. It went from load times of 8-12 seconds down to consistently under 1 second. Huge improvement for the db.
• Artefact Result Pages: You now get a P/E on the result page of Hypes and PRDs to give you some extra info on the price movement.
• Unknown Blog on Artefact Use: If a blog had no title, an Artefact could not be used on it. This has been fixed.
• Press Releases: There has long been an issue with blog owners trying to issue a PR on their own blog whenever someone has performed an Artefact action in the last day. Now, owners can post a PR on the blog even if Artefact functions have also posted automatic PRs. Also, the entire PR system was upgraded to really solely on BSIDs rather than the much slower-in-the-db URLs. This shaved 1-2 seconds of blogs.php load times.
• Bonds A bug with failure messages when trying to bond out at the new 10,000,000 Ideas level was fixed. Also, the sort by time bug which caused it to sort by hour of the day rather than by date has also been fixed.

Thanks to some keen insights from a clever veteran player and some detective code work, we have finally solved the mystery of ‘Silent Drops’. First lemme explain what this is for those who don’t know:
Silent Drops occur when a player reindexes a blog, expecting a rare industry listed in the top 5 industries of the blog’s page to have Ideas produced, but finds that no rare Ideas are produced. Even when the rare is listed as the top industry, it still does not get produced. In fact, once the blog is voted into 5 or more /other/ industries, the rare will never produce on that blog again.
Ever.
This has been both a frustration for some and a nifty bit of knowledge for some keen strategy by a select few. It’s not a bug in a traditional sense in that the code did exactly as it was expected to.
However, this effect was never the intended result, and as such, a change is being made immediately. The problem centered around the query used to select which industries to produce ideas during the drop. It did not consider total votes. So, for example, if Gaelic Football had +12 votes, and English, USA, Male, Sports, and Life all had +6, Gaelic Football would /never/ be produced because the query only looked for the first 5 Industries meeting requirements for production. That order was decided solely by industry id #, so older (and almost always /not/ rare) industries produced every time on that blog. Gaelic Football would never again have a chance to produce.
So, the change being made is to add an ORDER BY which considers vote total in order to select the 5 industries for production.
Be Forewarned This may well be a major change in Idea play. It means rare industries have significantly /underproduced/ over the past couple of years. We could see significant drops of previously rare or dead industries, we may see cash crunches hit the market, and many former great investments may slump as a result. All in all, this change /should/ be a very good thing for the economy since it will force the investment decision making to be proactive rather than inactive as it is now. As cash is consumed, purchase decisions will become more complicated.
This change will be made immediately, but you will only gradually begin to ‘feel’ the effects as blogs which haven’t produced rares in a long time are being reindexed. The effects will become significant over time, and the medium to long term market is not easily predictable.
Good luck!

You can now filter the bonds market on the player who issued bonds, so you no longer have to hunt and peck to find her/him. Also, added new amounts which you can select for Idea amounts in your bonds, now up to 10,000,000 Ideas (!!!). Other new amounts offer middle ground between previous amounts, so if you would have issued 5 bonds of 100,000 ideas, you can now do one bond of 500,000 if you so choose.
Players have request bonds be offered in quantities of 1 Idea. Would love to do this, but the net effect on the bonds table, and more importantly, page load for the bonds market would make this absolutely untenable. We’re still working on either revamping the Players Market (not in the near future) or creating a way to gift or sell 1 idea at a time.

Yeah, this was kinda out of the blue. Jay and I had talked about having a slot machine/scratch ticket type game for some time, and many players have suggested it over the years, but it was really nothing more than a ‘want’ for the future. Well, Sunday i just ‘knew’ how to build it, and by Monday night it was mostly done. #blogshares IRC regulars helped us work out a few bugs Tuesday.
You can win shares in blogs (almost always old and dead, so like suggested elsewhere, check them and report them for sigma and more chips!), chips, B$cash, ideas in any industry that has already produced (even if there are no blogs. Matt Williams hit a great jackpot of Biathlon ideas earlier today), artefacts (only ones that you need), Pixel blocks, Raffle Tickets in a current raffle if available, and 1 day, 7 days, 1 month, or 1 year of Premium Membership (off-it snagged a year earlier today).
Chances has been written carefully to be extremely light on the db, with PHP handling most of the math behind it. Now, I can’t guarantee that there won’t be load issues at some point on this, so BE FOREWARNED that we will take it off line if necessary to keep the rest of the site from lagging.
The only folks who know the exact odds of things are the Admin, GIC, and the BoD. Even so, knowing the odds doesn’t really help you much since every prize/failure is a random event from a freshly seeded mt_rand() function (just generates a random number to be used later on in the calculations).
We’ve also got a way to work in some unique random prizes, which will be coded in soon.
We’re also keeping a close eye on the economic effects on the game due to Chances. Hopefully, this will help improve the overall health of things by finally having something to create friction, which should drive demand for chips and cash especially. However, if we find that Chances is destroying the economy in a non-recoverable way, we will take it offline.
So bottom line is, please enjoy it while it is available. We do not plan to take it down, but should events cause its necessity, it will be done. Please feel free to offer your feedback here, let us know what you think of it, how it may affect things, and as always, if you find a bug, please PM me immediately. Cheers, and good luck on Chances!

We’ve added Industry descriptions for each vote so that moderators can quickly understand what the Industry should contain. Descriptions are trimmed to the first 260 characters, which should give you the gist of it. The layout is the same as before, but it may take a bit of getting used to if you mod a lot. Hopefully this helps everyone out. Also, any blog titles on the mod page of more than 30 characters will be trimmed so the page doesn’t display like crap.
Also, as most of you know by now, moderation rewards increased significantly a few days ago. As a result, we’ve seent the pending vote queue go from around 20,000 to about 9500 this evening. Outstanding work, moderators.