You may remember previous blog posts describing various attempts to update Warhorn for the new decade. Turns out every one of those attempts was doomed to end in failure. Now we’re breaking that trend with a long-awaited alpha test of the new Warhorn! We’d like to explain a few things about how we got here, what’s different about the new version of the application, and what “alpha testing” means to us.

How’d we get here?

In retrospect, it’s kind of hilarious how many checks we wrote with our mouths that our butts couldn’t cash. When Finn and I first decided to work together to make Warhorn something bigger and better than it’s ever been, we spent a lot of time in business strategy and product design meetings, and I put in several unemployed months working on a brand new vision of the app that inherited almost nothing from the original one. What we learned over time, and shared with you through the years, is that we had much more ambition than time, money and room in our lives to realize that ambition.

The question then became, how do we make the most of the time, money, and life balance we’ve got? Start small and update frequently. The new Warhorn has all the features you rely on from v1 and a couple more besides, all overhauled for stability and a great user experience. You’ve given us a robust list of improvements to work on from here, so that’s what we’ll be doing next. We’ll make updates to the application as we finish up new features or make tweaks to the existing ones rather than dumping a whole bunch of stuff out in one go.

As part of the process we also decided not to migrate data from the existing app into the new one. While it’s technically possible to do so, it’s an extremely challenging task. Removing that requirement allowed us to simplify a lot of things that would otherwise have been complex (see the notes on unified accounts below) only in order to support data migration. The old data won’t be going anywhere, and we may decide to migrate it at some point in the future, but for now we’ll be starting with a clean slate for the new application.

So what’s changed?

First let’s draw a distinction between “things that are new” and “things that are better”. In terms of large categories of functionality, there’s not that much that’s fundamentally new. However, the design of pretty much every aspect of the application has changed in some way. So while the concepts embodied in the app should be familiar, how you find them and interact them is in many cases completely different.

As far as totally brand new elements, the most obvious one is the fact that you no longer have to create a new account for each event. Instead, you create a single account for the entire app and then, for each event that you plan to attend, you go through a short and sweet registration process. There’s a dashboard that gives you a single location to go to see the events you’re registered for, the ones you’re organizing, and events you’ve attended in the past. It even has a very simple discovery tool, listing events that have been added since your last login, which we plan to greatly expand over time to incorporate search by location, game type and other criteria. I want to emphasize that this unified account is the number one key feature of the new app; more than anything else, this is the element that opens things up from a technical perspective so that we can make subsequent improvements to the user experience. We’re super excited to get this done!

The layout, structure and navigation system of the app have all been totally redesigned. Every part of the application uses modern UX design and Web application frameworks to make the interface simpler, cleaner and more responsive. Some sections of the app are almost ground-up rebuilds (the event schedule and the setup of registration fees are two that come immediately to mind) while others are fairly similar to their existing counterparts.

We’re convinced that the new app is superior to the old one in every way. If it’s not easier for you to use the new app to perform any particular task than we haven’t done our job well enough.

Okay, so what’s an alpha test?

In traditional software development, an alpha test is a period of testing conducted by a team of users who work with the developers but are not the developers themselves. This helps to find bugs and missing features caused by factors such as incomplete product specifications, developers making assumptions that don’t hold for real users, etc.

Since we’re a team of two and our only product specification is our understanding of the existing app, we’re using the term to indicate a period of testing conducted by a small group of long-time Warhorn users who have a deep knowledge of the existing app and/or a professional familiarity with the details of software development and testing.

This first phase of testing will give us the most bang for the buck in terms of discovering the less deeply hidden bugs and those that we’ve overlooked during development. All those pairs of fresh eyes will give us rich, high quality feedback about the design choices we’ve made. We plan to spend at the very least a few weeks listening to the feedback we gather from this period, fixing bugs and potentially reworking features if we deem it necessary. We’ll also be listening to feature requests from the alpha testers and incorporating those into our future features list.

Once we’re comfortable with the state of the new app, we’ll open up the new app to everybody for a public beta period. We’ll continue to run the existing app side-by-side with the new app so that you can compare the two, report bugs and feature requests, and generally get to know things. We consider it a bug if there’s a task you can perform in the existing app that you can’t in the new one, and we’ll stay in beta until that’s no longer the case. At some point we’ll exit beta, launch the new app and provide guidance on when we’re shutting down the old one.

It’s important to clarify that we aren’t yet committing to any timelines. Our alpha test may only need two weeks or it may need twelve; we just don’t know yet. It will depend on our schedules and those of the users participating in the test. We’ll let you know more as the timing becomes clearer to us. Keep an eye on FB/Twitter/blog – as the alpha test goes on we’ll be making a series of posts going into depth on the changes in the new app, including screenshots and maybe screencasts if we can figure out how to make that happen.

We’re excited! We hope you are too! Let us know!

UPDATE: We’re amazed by the outpouring of goodwill and generosity we’ve received since yesterday. We asked for help, and you answered us loud and clear. We’ve now met our Q3 goal. We’ll update the banner ASAP (we have to do it manually) and I’ll get cracking on updates to the Donate page to give our donors the recognition they deserve. Look for a followup blog post later today with more thoughts about fundraising and where we go from here.

- Finn

The nine months since our last status update have seen a lot of chaos in our personal lives (mine especially) and correspondingly slow progress on Warhorn improvements. At this point we know better than to give you all a forecast but we’ve started doing monthly “hack days” to keep our momentum and motivation going. We’re keeping the current site chugging along while we chip away at our backlog.

All that being said, Brian and I have finally admitted to ourselves something that’s been obvious for a while. I’ll be blunt: Warhorn can’t continue without your donations. Most months, a few people donate to us and we are incredibly grateful to them. The harsh reality, though, is that the efforts of these heroic few don’t cover the minimum monthly costs to keep the current site online.

Brian and I have spent literally thousands of dollars out of our own pockets to keep Warhorn running and pay for the tools we need for new development. Continuing that financial outlay has become untenable.

Twenty people contributed to Warhorn in 2011. That’s less than one-tenth of one percent of Warhorn’s total users. We’re asking the remaining 99.9% of you to pitch in. There’s a donation banner on the site now that shows the amount we need to raise by the end of September. If we hit that goal, we can keep Warhorn going and set another goal for Q4. If not, then Brian and I have some tough decisions to make.

Thanks for helping us help you make your awesome gaming experiences possible.

Finn

Warhorn was offline for about 4 hours this morning. The outage was caused by the server’s disk filling up as a result of 1) last night’s automated backup and 2) a proliferation of old log files. Because we don’t have any real alerting systems in place, we didn’t notice the outage until users started sending complaints in email. Once we were aware of the situation, we made some space on the disk and got the service running again.

Takeaways from this incident:

1. We need real alerting systems in place to let us know as soon as some part of the system fails. It is unacceptable for hours to go by before we discover that something’s wrong. We have two options: set up some basic monitoring and alerting tools, or pay some third party to handle monitoring and alerting for us. Given my lack of free time and experience with managing that kind of thing by hand, we’d prefer the second option, but that depends on you folks giving a little more money a little more often than happens now.
2. Backups need to be stored somewhere other than on the server. This is already in place; I set it up just after this morning’s incident. ~10G of space has been reclaimed, and our hosting provider’s automated backup system has now replaced our old system (at an additional monthly cost, which we’re crossing our fingers will be covered by donations).
3. Log files need to be pruned after some amount of time. I gotta just roll up my sleeves and make that happen; nobody’s gonna do it for me.

I think it’s pretty obvious that we’re running Warhorn on a shoestring budget. We get very little in the way of donations and therefore don’t have the budget to afford to pay other folks to help us with the system level stuff that I don’t have time and/or expertise to deal with. So if you value the service we’re providing, please consider donating a few bucks to help us get Warhorn working better. If we could bring in even just $100 a month we could afford to run this outfit in a much more professional manner Thanks very much to those of you who do support us financially, we sure do appreciate the help. And sorry for the outage – we’ll keep doing the best we can to keep this creaky old ship afloat.

Wow, it’s been a year since the last blog post. That’s just sad. Although I did give a quick update on Facebook a few days ago, I wanted to spend a little more time over the holiday weekend to share a little more about what’s been going on (or not) behind the scenes with us. You guys deserve better than a year of silence between updates.

Before I get to where we are now, let me review how we got here. As you may recall, we spent several months back in 2009 plotting and building “Warhorn 2e”. We talked to a wide variety of event organizers and long-time site users about how they used Warhorn and how it could serve them better. We began to conceive of Warhorn not only as a tool for helping organizers schedule and manage events but also as a community site and social tool for gamers. We also thought of a number of business ideas that could be layered on top of the core functionality that you’ve enjoyed over the last ten years. It was a super exciting time, but ultimately we were unable to deliver on our vision.

We never shipped 2e because we were much too ambitious given our limited resources. We chose to build a brand new site from scratch with all of the existing site’s functionality but with a wholly different interface and all new technology. There were excellent reasons for redesigning both the interface and the tech – they were both ten years old, the interface was far inferior to users’ expectations of how web sites work in the modern world, and the tech was limited in certain ways that effectively prevented the development of new features and even made bug fixing a great challenge. Unfortunately, we couldn’t afford to take enough time away from our day jobs see this project through to a point where it could be released and take the place of the existing site. It didn’t make financial sense to try to raise the money we would have needed to get to completion, and the experience kind of burned us out. That’s why you didn’t hear from us during the first few months of 2010.

After some time away from the project, we regrouped last spring and made a dramatic change to our strategy. We decided that since the “scorched earth” approach of rebuilding the tech and redesigning the interface simultaneously wasn’t possible, we’d try instead to start migrating the site to a new technology platform but keep essentially the same interface. The first major goal would be to achieve “single sign-on” – rather than having to set up a separate account for every event as you do today, you’d have one site-wide account that worked for all events, and a dashboard giving you instant access to every event you’re organizing and attending – far and away the most frequent feature request. We hoped this approach would give us a stable basis for incrementally updating the interface over time as well as solving the number one issue that was keeping us from being able to deliver truly new features. We called this project “v2″ to distinguish it in our minds from the failed 2e project.

Our progress over the next several months seemed to prove out the strategy. The v2 rebuild proceeded very well, and we also were able to make some small but really nice improvements to the existing version of the site, including targeted redesigns of the home page and event listings. However, this project also eventually stalled toward the end of the year, as evidenced by the blog post previous to this one being date September 18, 2010.

Even though the v2 project was less ambitious than 2e, I think the fact that we weren’t able to take time off from our day jobs to work on Warhorn really killed our momentum over the months. There was a time in my life that building software and creating web sites was all I wanted to do, and I was happy to work a 10 hour day for somebody else and then come home and put more hours into my hobby projects – that’s how the original version of Warhorn was built. But these days I have a lot of other interests, and frankly I have less energy to code all day and then come home and code some more on nights and weekends; most of the time I’d rather go see a movie or a comedy show or hike up a mountain or spend time with friends. And Finn feels the same way. Consequently, the enjoyment we got from working on the project diminished over the months, as did our progress.

On top of that, I wound up moving back to San Francisco this spring to become the first employee of a brand new company, which as you can imagine requires as much commitment and energy as one can possibly give to their profession, further intensifying my need to get away from the keyboard whenever possible and stifling even the minimal progress we had been making on v2.

So, where do we stand today? The v2 project is actually mostly done. Single sign-on is functionally complete (albeit only tested as well as Finn and I can – we’d need lots of other users helping us bang on it before we’d feel comfortable rolling it out to everyone). The site is still missing the core schedule and signup functionality, and organizers can’t yet manage games, but that’s actually only 10-15% of the functionality of the site (if you’ve ever set up an event site on the live Warhorn site, you know that there are a lot of tools for managing the event that regular users never see, and single sign-on required a lot of new user features – dashboard, account management and event registration management). So with some sustained effort, maybe as little as two to three weeks of full-time work, I think we could get over the hump.

That said, as things stand now, we’re not likely to have that last 10-15% ready anytime soon. The factors that caused our progress to slow to a slow crawl are still in play. I’m working 60 hours on my startup every week, Finn has lots of balls in the air, and we’re both trying to have lives outside of that. I do get the urge to spend some weekend time hacking on v2 every once in a while, but the fact of the matter is, unless something dramatic happens in my professional life, the status of the v2 project is unlikely to change.

Now, if I somehow find myself unemployed, it’s certainly possible that I may try to raise enough money with a Kickstarter campaign to fund the completion of the v2 project. We’ve also kicked around the idea of releasing the v2 code under an open source license and/or setting up a nonprofit to allow more people to contribute to the operation and ongoing development of Warhorn. So there are a number of longer term options. We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

And just to be clear, we are absolutely dedicated to keeping the current site running, and we’re happy to add new game systems and campaigns whenever you guys want them. The DNS hiccup this week was my fault – I knew that we needed to migrate from the old provider to the new one a long time ago (although in my defense the last communication I received on that topic was in March, and I got no heads up about the planned outages that we experienced). In any event, rest assured that the Warhorn site you’ve been using for ten years isn’t going away.

So there you go. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I know I’ve promised to communicate more frequently before, but I don’t seem to be very good at that when I’m not putting in the effort on the coding side. I’m thinking maybe shorter updates over on Facebook may be a more sustainable practice – we’ll see. Definitely make sure to check in over there from time to time as well as here. And as always, let us know what you’re thinking, good or bad.

Thanks, and good gaming!

Brian