Mid-week Update
Please welcome Dave, Ray and el Piloto to the newly-revived Admin role. They have already powered through the backlog of support requests and pending BSEC actions - I personally apologize to anyone I ignored in email in some of these busy periods. The crew is now empowered to keep me from acting as a bottleneck in the future.
We've all also been busy with a slew of bug fixes, and we pared a couple gigabytes out of the database for the new year. If something's still broken for you, please let us know. One of our next game priorities is bringing the search function back online with its new functionality. The game math is getting dusted off, too, toward destinations unknown. In the interim, here are some new features: Blogs have settable public descriptions now, with UBB markup support, so you can customize your claimed blog's BlogShares profile with your logo and whatever strikes your fancy. UBB tags themselves have been enhanced and documented. More RSS and conversation links have been scattered about to aid communication.
You'll notice new experimental ads in the left sidebar. The 'punch the monkey' ads are going away, I promise. The less freakish ones will probably remain as we work toward making BlogShares self-sustaining.
Folks percolating up the roles list, and a couple resignations due to other obligations, have left some open seats in some groups. The BSEC investigates player fraud, and the Index Managers cultivate the industry categories and the blogs within them. If you're interested in participating, see the appropriate forums.
Comments
Jay, thanks again for having confidence in our work, and for taking in 3 players who really just love playing the game and trying to make it as successful as it can possibly be.
Believe it or not, Ray, Pilot, and I are just regular players who happened to step up when volunteers were needed, and got many tedious, much-needed things done. The BlogShares community is the biggest part of the games' success, and it looks to only get better.
Any players who would like to have the opportunity to see what goes on behind the scenes should take the time to visit us in #blogshares often. It is the very best place to find out what is going on. Please read the tutorials in the Help docs before you login for the first time. Hope to see you all there!
--ID
Posted by: Island Dave | January 5, 2005 06:19 PM
re: the left sidebar ads....
One wonders how valuable a premium membership really is if we still have to look at ads usually delegated to FREE services like hotmail and internet porn loops.
How about making these ads go away to paying members? I was fine with the pre-existing ads-- but these are obnoxious.
Posted by: eric wilcox | January 6, 2005 08:18 AM
Eric,
Jay is literally taking your views to heart, and he agrees with the way you described the ads. He's removing some of the worst ones right this second, so hopefully, what remains will be more appealing to you.
Remember, BlogShares has to pay for an extremely heavy usage of bandwith, along with costly servers and dbs, so the site has to host ads of some sort or up premium costs. At this point, it seems it is much easier and more fair to simply use paid ads to help cover costs than to really shift the burden of expenses onto players (and we are talking /large/ expenses to keep the game running).
Posted by: Island Dave | January 6, 2005 11:06 AM
I have just made a few purchases of stock and the price of the stock is not changing..it is like stuck. this has happened for about 3 purchases...normal the price will go up as you buy. is there a glich somewhere? ..also the chip transaction screens are unavailable.
Posted by: hodgepodger sun | January 7, 2005 01:03 PM
Forget the punch the monkey ads, I just got one for a "smart spin" storage system that had audio in it. Now THAT is annoying.
Posted by: andrewdski | January 7, 2005 09:48 PM
One database incident caused spider and cash and stock problems - everything should be working now. I also just changed the ads away from what they call 'rich media' and to standard annoying skyscrapers.
Posted by: jay | January 7, 2005 10:28 PM
The ads with audio are the worst.... I'm at work, in a SILENT environment.... with 60 ears surrounding me, and all of the sudden..... well, you get the idea. I had to give myself detention.
Posted by: sarabear | January 9, 2005 03:55 PM
LMAO
No, seriously, I HATE audio ads too.
Posted by: Island Dave | January 9, 2005 06:41 PM