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.

We’ve written about this before, but as 2015 winds to a close we find a need to talk money again.

For the last couple of years we’ve used that lovely black donation bar at the top of Warhorn pages to show our quarterly fundraising goal and progress toward that goal. You may have noticed that we haven’t come anywhere close to that goal for each of the last few quarters. Put simply, this is not sustainable. We need to bring in more money or we won’t be able to keep Warhorn running.

As you know from reading that earlier post, we have a number of recurring monthly operating costs – application hosting, monitoring and logging as well as various services that aid the process of developing the site. We also incur various expenses annually. All told, we need to bring in somewhere slightly north of $600 per month to cover all of these costs. During the first nine months of this year we have averaged roughly $300 per month in donations. This is clearly a big problem.

Well, can’t you figure out how to make some money?

We’re working on it:

• We’ve floated the idea of adding features that would only be available to paid subscribers, but we’re not sure that’s the best we can serve the community. This idea remains under discussion, and we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments here or on Facebook.
• We’re also looking into sponsorship opportunities and other types of partnerships. If you represent a business and want to talk to us about a partnership, please drop us a line at info@warhorn.net.
• We’ve considered data aggregation, but that seems to be a pretty sleazy business and we’d rather not get involved with it.
• And of course, while it would be so simple to slap ads on the site, we’ve said from day one that we will never plaster the site with ugly and irrelevant ad banners. Anything we do along these lines has to enhance your Warhorn experience, not detract from it.

In the meantime, we need your donations to keep Warhorn running.

Over 20,000 people use Warhorn each month. We only need to raise $600 from those 20,000 people to pay for Warhorn for that month. If just 600 people each donated $1 we’d cover our costs. That’s only 3% of the total users for the month. Seems like our community should be able to manage that, right?

Put another way, if only 750 of the 30,000+ registered Warhorn users make a one-time donation of $10, you will cover the cost of operating Warhorn for an entire year.

And that’s not even considering the large conventions that host their schedules and signups on Warhorn. Events that have more than a hundred registrations can often make room in their attendance fees to send us $1 per attendee. We really appreciate when they take the time to do this!

Whether you are an event organizer or an individual, you can help us right now by clicking here to send a donation.

We know that some of you have donated before, and we thank you.

Warhorn has been running for almost fifteen years now. Neither of us has ever made a single dime from Warhorn. The fact is, even with all of you who have donated once or many times before, we have been paying out of our own pockets to keep it going. We can’t keep going with this state of affairs, and we’re working on finding more predictable sources of revenue, but in the meantime we need your help to keep Warhorn online.

Since we launched the new version Warhorn last summer you’ve been able to register for any number of events with a single Warhorn account. Many of you have taken advantage of this opportunity! 45% of our users are registered for at least two events. Over a thousand people have registered for 5 or more events. One incredibly active user has an astonishing 59 registrations!

However, we haven’t done much to provide you with tools to manage all of these registrations. For example, while your dashboard lists the events you’re attending, there’s no way for you to see the activities for which you’ve signed up at a glance. You have to go through the tedious process of clicking into an event and then to your personal schedule for that single event – and then repeat it for the rest of your events. What a pain! But we’ve got a solution.

The next time you log into your dashboard you’ll see that we’ve replaced the old “events added since your last login” section with a brand new section listing your upcoming activities. Every game you’ve signed up for, across all of your events, in chronological order. See dates, times, locations, whether you’re playing or GMing, all with a single glance. Check it out:

We’ll keep an eye on this feature to see how you all are using it. We may enhance it in the future to show your activities in the context of a calendar – let us know in the comments here or in an email to info@warhorn.net if you’d like that or if you have any other suggestions for ways to keep up with your registrations and signups.

Enjoy!

Event organizers often ask if we have any Warhorn graphics they can use on their own web sites, to link their attendees to the event’s Warhorn site or just to give us a shout out. We’ve always appreciated this thoughtfulness but for the longest time didn’t actually have any assets to provide. Now we do! You can find color codes and logo graphics of various sizes at our new https://warhorn.net/brand page.

Please get in touch with us at info@warhorn.net if you need anything other than what we’ve already provided. And feel free to drop us a line if you use our logo on your site; we’re curious to see how people incorporate these images. Thanks!

Gen Con is right around the corner and the newest D&D organized play campaign, the D&D Adventurers League, makes its debut there. The first D&D Expeditions adventure becomes available for play shortly thereafter. So it’s a great time to announce that we’ve added support for this new campaign to Warhorn!

The Warhorn home page for all things Adventurers League is https://warhorn.net/campaigns/dnd-adventurers-league. Here you can browse the list of available scenarios and find when and where they’ll be offered at locations near you. We can tell that anticipation for the new campaign run high; as of this writing 78 upcoming sessions of DDEX1-1 Defiance in Phlan are already scheduled for Warhorn events!

As we find out more about how factions work in this new campaign we’ll add more information about them to the catalog so that you can find the adventures that are particularly well-suited for your character.

Please give us a shout at info@warhorn.net if you have questions, concerns or additional information about the D&D Adventurers League. Good luck to those of you taking on the Cult of the Dragon at Gen Con in the first special event of the campaign!