As discussed in the previous post, we recently added a Facebook “like” button to each event site’s overview page. As expected, some organizers weren’t too interested in this feature, so we’ve added the ability to turn it off. Just go into event setup and search for “Enable Facebook integration?”; you can choose “no” here to make the like button disappear.

Other organizers beat us to the punch and had previously established Facebook pages for their events. For these folks, it doesn’t make sense to create yet another page on Facebook when they have established connections with people and existing conversations. To address this situation, we’ve added the ability for you to specify the ID for an existing Facebook page. Search for “Do you already have a Facebook page for your event?” in event setup (if you can’t find it, go to “Enable Facebook integration?” and choose “yes”, and the page ID field will show up). Your facebook page’s ID is right there in the page’s URL; for example, if my page’s URL is http://www.facebook.com/pages/AwesomeCon/123459876534321, the ID is the number in green.

Hopefully these two tweaks will give each of you the opportunity to link up with Facebook (or not to) in exactly they way you prefer. As always, let us know what you think. Enjoy!

Facebook recently added the ability to put a “like” button on any web page. Seems like a nice way to give organizers an additional channel for contacting their users and spreading the word about their events, so we dropped one on the overview page for every event site. The button links to a Facebook page specifically about your event which you can use to communicate with your attendees, upload photos, and so forth. In return, folks can show their support for your event by liking it.

If you’re the organizer for a Warhorn event site and want to access the Facebook page linked to your Warhorn event as an administrator, drop us a line at info@warhorn.net with your Facebook username and we’ll get you hooked up. Similarly, if you’d prefer not to have the Facebook like button appear on your event site, send us a message to that effect as well. Soon you’ll be able to control this stuff yourself through event setup.

As always, we’d like to know what you think about the features we add. Comment on this post or on our Facebook page or send us a tweet. Hope you enjoy the like button!

The last update post was something along the lines of “it’s been a long time since we posted, but here’s a description all the great work we’ve been doing”. I wish I could say the same thing now, but instead I have to explain why we’ve been pretty much silent since the beginning of the year.

As some of you know, I left my job last summer to start Warhorn LLC with Finn and begin the Warhorn 2e project. The plan was to spend my full time on that until I could no longer afford to work without compensation, at which I’d have to go back out into the world, find a job, and transition Warhorn to a nights-and-weekends project. (Luckily Finn has a number of balls in the air with regard to business ventures and doesn’t have the same kind of either-or prospect.)

As work progressed, it became clear that in order to solve the major technical problems with the current site, update the interface to modern standards, and add some features that would collectively make 2e compelling enough for subscribers to give us a few bucks a month, the project was going to take a lot more time than I had available given the available funding. It basically came down to me having until the middle of January to get as much done as possible. Around the time that I wrote that last update post, I started sending out resumes and interviewing. One thing led to another, and February 1 was my first day on the job at Outside.in - in New York City.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past few months – moving from San Francisco to Brooklyn, starting a new job, busting ass on an important, highly visible project for my new employer, and getting settled in my new house and life. And back in the Bay Area, Finn’s been working on other projects that keep him out of the poorhouse.

Things have settled down a fair amount since I first got to NY though, and we’re both itching to get the Warhorn train going again. To get back into the swing of things, I’ve been putting some effort into addressing a few nagging issues that have plagued the current site:

1. The hardware that hosts the site has been upgraded and some components reconfigured to minimize the instances of downtime that had been getting more frequent in the past few weeks. The periods of downtime were due to some inefficient resource usage caused by fundamental architectural problems with the 10-year old site. With the recent changes, I expect these instances to diminish in frequency or disappear altogether.
2. The site request form has been redesigned to be easier to use and to address a number of frequently asked questions. I’m particularly happy that I was able to get some date picker widgets in that form! Sadly it’s not so easy to get them into the event setup form …
3. We now support traditional hyphenated event slugs. The slug is the part of the event site’s URL that uniquely identifies the event. For example, in the URL http://warhorn.net/awesomecon-2010, the slug is awesomecon-2010. We’ve used a number of slug styles in the past, from alllowercase to CamelCaps, but now that an obscure technical limitation has been removed, so we can hyphenate the words in the slug as is traditionally done in blog posts and news articles around the Web. I hope you’ll agree that this makes event URLs more legible and useful.

Now that’s all well and good, but what we really want is to get 2e out there for you all to use, even if only an early version that is a preview of things to come from which we can get wider feedback. We’re firing things back up this week and should start to see progress again quickly.

Furthermore, we’ve done a pretty poor job of communicating with you all. We promise to do better, with more frequent and detailed updates, so that you have a sense of what we’re doing on a week-to-week basis. As we begin to build momentum again, we want you to feel it and get excited to see us driving toward a goal. Part of this will be using the right tools to connect with you. Our main home is here at our blog, but we’re also on Twitter and Facebook and over at the Wizards community site. Follow, fan or subscribe so that you get the latest updates, but also please take the opportunity to let us know how you feel about Warhorn and 2e, and shoot us any and all questions.

We’re excited about the new phase of development on 2e, and we hope that y’all are too. Stay tuned for updates. Thanks for your support!

Just a quick note to announce planned downtime on Sunday, 4/18 from 12am to 4am for site maintenance. During this window, the site will be completely offline. We will follow up with a blog post and a message to the discuss list when service is restored. Please let us know ASAP if you anticipate any issues with this maintenance period. Thanks!

It’s been a while since our last post, but the cold and rain (and latest World of Warcraft content patch) haven’t kept us from our duties. As the year draws to a close, I want to give you all a peek behind the curtain to see what we’ve accomplished in the last few months.

Terminology changes
As part of the process of taking a comprehensive look at the entire system and thinking about how it should work for all types of games and organized play groups, we’ve changed a couple of the terms we use in Warhorn:

• The attendee role once called “judge” is now called GM
• The use of “game” to describe an activity occurring in a schedule slot was confusing in a lot of different ways, so we now call this a game session or more generally an activity session

We’ll be continually adjusting the vocabulary as we go forward, especially as we start to look at enabling Warhorn to better serve non-RPG games and even non-game activities such as talks, classes, performances and other types of shenanigans that people get up to at gaming events.

One account to rule them all
Probably the most requested feature through the years has been the ability to have a single Warhorn account for all events. This was the first feature we built, and I think it will be one of the most welcomed. Now when you become a Warhorn member you have access to every event in the system (except private ones to which you haven’t been invited, of course)! No more confusion around why you can’t log in to AwesomeCon’s site when you already registered for FLGS Weekly LFR games.

Your account has many of the goodies you’ve become accustomed to with sites like Facebook, such as profile pictures and friend relationships. We recognize that gaming is at its core a social activity, and we are embracing that notion with 2e. Future features for paying members will make it super easy for you to find the events your friends are attending and sign up for games with them.

You can also specify your geographic location so that in the future we can help you find events occurring near you. We’re very interested in any other location-based services that will enhance your gaming experience, so if you have any ideas, let us know!

Dashboard
When you log into Warhorn, you immediately land on your dashboard. This page gives you quick access to the upcoming events that you’re attending and those that you’re organizing as well as public events that were published since the last time you logged in.

We’ll be enhancing the dashboard over time to provide search capabilities so that you can find events based on the games and other activities they’re offering, whether or not your friends are attending, and other factors. We’re also planning even more advanced search and notification features for paying members.

Event setup
Finn’s done a great job of making sense of the current site’s messy event setup interface and breaking it out into a number of simpler steps.

Perhaps the most noticeable new setup feature is the ability to publish your events without having to fill out a request form and waiting for me to approve it. Set up and publish your event on your own time while I play Rock Band and tank Icecrown Citadel!

Event setup is accomplished with a wizard-style, step-based interface that guides you through the entire process. When you’re done, you can publish the event so that it appears in the public event listings, or you can keep it as a draft and come back to re-edit later.

Event URLs
I have been very fickle through the years with my URL naming schemes. You may recall how I went through a http://www.warhorn.net/CamelCaps period of a year or two before switching back to http://www.warhorn.net/alllowercase URLs.

There was a technical limitation that kept me from being able to follow the lowercase, hyphen-separated convention typically used for news article and blog post URLs, but that’s gone with 2e. Now your event’s slug (the part of the URL that specifically identifies your event) is computed based on your event’s title. If your event is named “Awesome Con 2009″, then its URL will be http://warhorn.net/awesome-con-2009.

In the future we want to give you the ability to customize the slug. Use your own naming schemes, not one imposed on you by the man!

Venues
When you enter the details of an event’s venue, you can specify a street address, which gives us the ability to generate maps and include your event in location-based searches, and you can choose to make the venue private so that those who aren’t registered for your home game can’t show up on your front step 5 minutes before game time. Venues you create are saved so that you can use them again for subsequent events.

Overview content
The content that appears on your event’s overview page has been completely overhauled. Remember how the page had huge holes in it if you didn’t specify any “hotel” or “community” information? That goofy layout is gone. Also, we provide a full-featured WYSIWYG rich text editor so that you can format your content without having to be an HTML monkey. And you can preview the content as it will look on the overview page so that you can get it right before publishing the event.

Registration fees
We’ve also totally reworked the registration fee system. Rather than giving you a very low level, hard to understand system of “payment packages”, we’ve addressed the most common use cases for organizers who need to charge registration fees. We support all-access and daily registration, early registration discounts, and other arbitrary fees and discounts.

As before, we use PayPal to process payments, but this time around we’re integrating more tightly with them so that Warhorn will know when payments have been processed in order to automatically clear people to sign up for games. Attendees will no longer have to wait around for you to get email from PayPal and then come to Warhorn to manually clear them.

Slot management
After you’ve done the initial setup of your event, you’ll want to specify the event schedule. You do this by creating “slots”, or blocks of time to which activities are assigned. The existing site’s slot management interface is a morass of menus; 2e’s is much more compact, and the menus are hidden until you need see them.

Scenario management
Another long-standing complaint about the current site is the need to re-enter scenario information for every event. With 2e, we have created a site-wide scenario catalog. Over time, with your help, we will populate it with every known scenario, so that when you go to schedule a game session, you’ll simply type in the first few characters of the scenario’s name and choose the appropriate one from an auto-completed list.

Paying members can create customized scenarios for their events, either based on existing scenarios from the site-wide catalog or totally from scratch.

We’ve also built a much more comprehensive list of RPGs (295 at present) and given you the ability to add new ones yourselves without having to email me.

Finally, we’ve added the ability to tag a scenario with the level of rules knowledge needed, the scenario’s thematic content, and who’s responsible for providing characters (the GM or the players).

GM approval
Organizers need better tools to manage which people are allowed to function as GMs, so we’re giving them to you. The first such tool allows the organizer to approve or reject attendees who sign up for game sessions as GMs. Only approved GM signups are included in the summary counts for each session. When a GM is approved, if a game session has been configured appropriately, a new table will be opened (subject to available capacity) and the player waitlist adjusted.

In the future we’ll be adding additional GM tools for paying members, such as the ability to maintain a “whitelist” of trusted members whom are always approved to act as GMs at events you organize.

Registration management
As those of you running large events know, the current site’s registration list gets unwieldy very quickly as the number of attendees grows. And because the list shows so much data, it’s hard to focus on the specific information you need when you’re just trying to perform a routine management function. I’ve felt this pain myself, and I think we’ve got a pretty good solution to the problem.

The 2e registration list is automatically filtered to show you only particular sets of attendees, specifically those who are cleared to sign up for sessions, those who are pending (not yet cleared), and those who have canceled their registrations. You can clear pending attendees directly from the list, and for those who have canceled, you can see how much of a refund they are owed and their reason for cancellation.

There are also filters for those attendees who have been approved for GM sessions and those who have sessions which are still pending approval. The list shows the game sessions for which each attendee is signed up as a GM and allows you to approve pending signups.

The list is paged, so that you can scroll through the list 25 (or 50) attendees at a time, and you can sort it by a number of different attributes. These techniques keep the page size small and focus you on the set of attendees you need to work with to accomplish a specific task.

We’re still in the process of building the registration management section, so things may still change before you we roll it out, but I hope this gives you a good idea of how we’re addressing problems in the existing site.

What’s on deck?

Oh man, there’s still a lot to be done. Right now there’s no way to create game sessions and assign them to slots, and there’s no schedule interface for attendees to browse or use to sign up for sessions. We also have a bunch of work ahead of us to enable registering for an event and managing user account profiles and settings. And there are a number of additional features we’ll be building for paying members, such as table mustering and the character registry. Finally, let’s not forget visual design, where we put a skin on the as-yet-unadorned bones of the site.

When can you see it?

Though a small group of alpha testers has been working with us for months, we still need to take care of some of the work I mentioned above before we’re comfortable opening up the new site to a wider audience.

Those of you who are in the software business will be familiar with the phrase “release early, release often”. I’m generally in favor of this practice, but frankly, we are in a strange situation with 2e; we have 8 years’ of expectations built up as to what our site is supposed to provide.

We don’t want to make 2e available simply as an unattractive patchwork of disconnected features that winds up giving people a bad impression of what we’re ultimately trying to accomplish and driving them off. So, we’re waiting to show it off more widely for a while longer, until we’ve reached a point where we think people will be able to get really excited and see a migration path away from the current site.

Finn and I would love to hear what you think about all this. We welcome comments on this blog or on our pages at Facebook and the Wizards community site. Or, if you’d rather talk to us in private, drop us a line at info@warhorn.net.

Thanks! -bcm

Slot setup and scheduling enhancements are nearing alpha test. We’ve got some neat “drag and drop” functionality that should make setup and viewing a lot easier, as well as some new auto-setup features and a workflow that speeds the setup process.

In the course of building these features and planning the event signup interface, we’re making plenty of tough decisions. Building a platform like Warhorn with a team of only two people requires constant re-evaluation of the features we include and the way in which we implement them. Some features we considered initially have been thrown out. Some are under evaluation for later releases. Some have morphed into different shapes than we envisioned at first.

Most importantly, these constraints have helped us keep 2e clean, tight, and extremely functional. You know how a certain office suite just keeps spamming out feature after feature after feature, resulting in a confusing interface that seems to want to keep you from actually writing a letter or building a spreadsheet? You won’t find that in 2e.

As an interaction designer, I’m very pleased with the lack of clutter and the focus on task flow that we’ve manage to achieve thus far. Trimming the fat is sometimes frustrating but I can’t argue with the results.

We just finished alpha testing for the event setup function. Our alpha testers gave us some fantastic ideas and critiques—thanks, everyone! Testing cycles don’t just point out problems and opportunities in product functionality. They also improve our understanding of how you think about your events and how you expect your software to behave.

While Brian makes updates to the code (and spends some time out of town), I’m moving forward on design for the slot/scenario/table setup function. We’re entering our next “sprint”—a block of time in which we develop a section of the new site. Sprints are part of a methodology called “agile development”. The idea is that you prioritize the project into manageable chunks, prioritize working software over comprehensive intra-company documentation, and rapidly iterate instead of exhaustively spec’ing. Put simply, you cut as much waste out of the process as you can without sacrificing usability or stability.

Agile is a development model that works well for small teams like Brian and me because it keeps both of us busy all the time. During each sprint, I test the things we built during the previous sprint and spec the things to build during the next sprint. This (theoretically) keeps Brian’s task list full of revisions and new coding. In a more traditional system, he’d be sitting on his hands a lot of the time waiting for a big pile of documentation from me—and then I’d spend a big stretch of time waiting for him to work through all the coding.

The slot setup design is pretty challenging so far but I think we’ve got some neat interface ideas that should make it easy and intuitive. Stay tuned!

One of the things Brian and I are bringing to Warhorn 2e is improved support for other Organized Play (OP) systems beyond the RPGA. In order to make sure we do it right, we’d love to talk with coordinators for any and all OP systems out there. If you know an OP coordinator (or if you are an OP coordinator), please drop me an email at finn [at] warhornllc.com with contact information! Much obliged.

I’m deep into 2e task flow documentation now. Put simply, it’s the process of breaking down every little thing you can do with Warhorn to a fine level of detail. You don’t just set up an event: you click a “set up a new event” button, enter an event name, shift your attention to date entry, decide whether your event is recurring or one-time, input that choice into Warhorn, and so on.

It’s a long and fatiguing process, but it’s a majority of the brainwork for how the site is structured. Thoroughly documenting interactions ensures that we catch the tricky questions early on in the process. For example, if you’re “cloning” a previous event (a new feature in Warhorn!), how many options does Warhorn display? Every event you’ve ever organized? Only the most recent ones? If the latter, what does “recent” mean? These are questions we want to answer right up front so we don’t get caught in the middle of coding and have to backpedal.

I find this part of the design process fascinating because it’s the first time I get to put myself in your shoes. I’m not worried about how hard it is to code, or how the pages are laid out, or even what functions go on what pages. I’m solely concerned with how you, a Warhorn player or event organizer, go about your various interactions with Warhorn. Once I’ve got those down, I can start building screens that make your interactions easy to accomplish.

There was a complete service outage this morning, from approximately 4-9am Pacific time. The outage was caused by a misbehaving database backup procedure and was extended by the fact that we haven’t yet gotten a monitoring system up and running on the new server.

Please keep in mind that for now Warhorn LLC is still funded by donations and that we’re putting most of our effort into designing and building Warhorn 2E, the next generation of the site. This necessarily limits how much we can do to build out the infrastructure for hosting the existing site on the new server. That said, we will absolutely work to minimize or eliminate service interruptions. We simply ask for your patience and understanding during this time of transition.

Rest assured that when 2E launches, it will be professionally hosted and managed by expert system operators. Part of the value of Warhorn 2E will be an increased level of support and reliability across the board, for all users, whether free or paid.