Hey all, I’m super excited to unveil a new look for Warhorn!

Four months in the making, this refresh of the Warhorn design is based on Bootstrap v4 with the Materia theme from Bootswatch. Many of your core interactions with the site will be faster and easier than ever before. Information is presented in more approachable and appealing ways using info cards and list groups, and user profile pictures and scenario cover art give more color and life to the site.

Furthermore (fingers crossed), I believe I’ve fixed every one of the time zone issues in the event schedule section that have particularly plagued our users in Asia-Pacific regions.

As with any big change, there are likely to be some bugs. I ask for your patience and consideration as we flush these out and get them fixed. If you experience any issues with the site, please email me at info@warhorn.net and describe the problem, including screenshots if possible to help us more easily troubleshoot.

Finally, I’d love your feedback. What do you like? What do you hate? What should I focus on next? Send your thoughts to info@warhorn.net.

Thanks for your support, and happy gaming!

— Brian

We’re delighted to announce our newest feature, the time zone user setting. For the first time you can tell Warhorn the time zone in which you’d like to see times represented. No more missing games because it requires a math degree to understand when they start!

How does it work?

Everybody’s time zone is Pacific Time (GMT-8) by default, but you can change this in Account Settings. (Go do that now and then come back!)

Because we’re showing times in a time zone specifically set for you, we’ve removed the time zone identifiers from all times displayed around the site.

Let’s say you’re in New York City and you change your time zone setting from Pacific Time to Eastern Time (GMT-5). Instead of seeing Saturday, Apr 7 at 7:31 am (GMT-07) like before, you’ll now see Saturday, Apr 7 at 10:31 am.

If you ever forget what time zone you’re using, just look up to the global navigation bar at the top of every page. On the right side of the navbar, just next to the account dropdown menu, you’ll see a reminder of your current time:

How does the setting relate to event time zones?

The event organizer will still set a time zone for the event relative to the geographical location of the event venue(s). All slot times are interpreted in that time zone but displayed according to your individual time zone setting.

For example, Endgame‘s time zone is Pacific Time because the store is located in California. A 7pm slot start time for Endgame means 7pm in Pacific Time. But when I look at the Endgame schedule, I see a start time of 10pm, since my time zone is Eastern Time.

While an online event doesn’t have a geographical location, you’ll still need to select a base time zone. That can be the time zone of the organizer, but GMT is also a good default. It doesn’t really matter, because everybody will see times according to their individual time zone setting.

That’s it!

The new time zone setting is available now for all users.

We hope that this feature makes using Warhorn easier for geographically distributed groups. Let us know how it works for you in the comments here or on Facebook or Twitter!

Today we’re announcing our second premium feature for Warhorn subscribers: the dashboard activity stream.

We built on the event activity streams feature that we launched earlier this year to give you insight into all of the events you care about right from your dashboard. For now, those are the events for which you have registered, but in the near future we’ll allow you to follow any event you want.

In addition to event activities, you’ll also see the occasional broadcast from yours truly, alerting you to a new blog post or other site announcement.

Down the road, we hope to add more activity notification options, including email, RSS and maybe even desktop and mobile push notifications.

If you’re not yet a subscriber, you get the light version of the dashboard activity stream, with broadcasts but without event activities. You can subscribe directly from the dashboard to get the full activity stream as well as our first premium feature that lets you save profiles for each of your organized play campaign characters and choose a character profile when you sign up for a campaign game.

We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback on this new feature, here or on Facebook or Twitter. Enjoy!

A few days ago we announced a couple of changes related to signups. One of those changes was to require event staff to indicate which attendees are allowed to sign up as GMs by explicitly assigning those attendees the GM role.

We got quite a bit of feedback that this was creating a lot of difficulty for event staff, forcing them to perform a lot of manual work to assign the role to each of their GMs. While the people who want to explicitly choose who gets to sign up as a GM were fine with doing this, there are many event organizers who are happy to let anybody GM for them. And we didn’t respect that with this change. So, as of this afternoon, we’ve pushed out some followup changes intended to address this issue.

We’ve added a new event setup option: “Require attendees to have the GM role in order to sign up as GMs“. This option is turned on for all events by default. If you don’t want to have to explicitly indicate which individuals can GM for you, then just go to Setup > Options and turn this option off. Simple as that.

As a bonus, we’ve also added an indicator to the session schedule page that shows up whenever GM or player signups are not available to explain exactly why they aren’t available. Hopefully this will reduce the number of times people write to us in confusion trying to understand where their signup buttons went!

We hope this shows that your feedback is important to us. Please let us know what you think of the new setup option here, on Facebook, or on Twitter.

Good gaming!

Hey everybody, here’s a quick update on a couple of changes we rolled out recently related to game signups.

First, you can now restrict who can sign up for a session by role. By default, any cleared attendee can sign up, but you can now choose to specify that a particular game is available only to event staff, GMs, or both.

Restricted games will still be visible to all in the schedule, but signup buttons will only appear for attendees who have been assigned the roles to which the session has been restricted.

With this change, we have completely retired the concept of “slot zero” from Warhorn.

Second, the system no longer assigns the GM role implicitly when an attendee signs up to GM a game. Event staff must now assign the GM role manually on the attendee’s manage registration page before that attendee will see GM signup buttons anywhere in the schedule. This means that you now have complete control over who is allowed to sign up to GM your games.

We understand that different types of events have different needs and are very open to feedback on both of these changes. We will tweak them if we think it’s necessary. So let us know what you think!

Today we’re making event activity streams live for everybody.

As I described a few weeks ago, event activity streams provide visibility into the scheduling and signup activities that are the heart of Warhorn. And we’ll be building on event activities to provide dashboard notifications to subscribers for all events you’re interested in.

Please enjoy, and let us know what you think about activity streams here, on Facebook, or on Twitter.

Today we’re unveiling a new feature that we’ve been working on for the past few months: event activity streams!

The new activity stream on the right side of the event home page shows the most recent actions that event staff and attendees have taken – scheduling games, signing up, withdrawing, even changing characters (for subscribers).

As always, we’ve kept your privacy in mind. We don’t show any personal information in the activity stream that isn’t also visible in the event schedule. And, as always, no web search engines or users who aren’t logged into Warhorn can see names or other personally identifying information. Here’s what the same page looks like to a logged-out viewer:

Next up, we’re building on this base to to enable our second premium feature: activity notifications for events you’re interested in right on your Warhorn dashboard. We’d even consider sending them in email or mobile push notifications, so please let us know if you’d be interested in those or any additional notification channels.

The activity stream feature is available only to subscribers during this early access period, but it will be opened up to everyone soon. The premium notification feature will only be available to subscribers, so if you’d like to have a single place to go to find out what’s happening with all of your Warhorn events, then consider subscribing!

We’d love to know what you think about the new event activity streams, so please share your thoughts in the comments here, on Facebook, or on Twitter.