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.

Just a quick note to let you all know about a couple updates we made to our game and convention search engine.

1. Better location filtering. Many of you have written to complain about our extremely poor location filtering. When you type “oakland ca” into the filter box, you expect to only see games or events in that city, but until now we’d show you games from all over California and (wackily) Canada. The newly tweaked search engine will now return only results for Oakland as you’d expect. You can even combine location filtering with other types of filtering; for example, “oakland pfs” will return only Pathfinder Society games in Oakland.

2. Filtering for online games. Just like you can find games in a particular location, you should also be able to find online games, but previously you couldn’t. Now, entering “online” into the filter box will work exactly as you want, or even “online pfs”.

We hope these changes help you find the games you’re looking for more quickly and easily!

In other news, our “pledge drive” has been phenomenally successful. We’ll be writing a full blog post on this topic very soon, but in the meantime, thanks so much for all of your support! If either Finn or I had any hair, you’d have blown it back with all of the money and kind words you sent our way.