New Kongregate Version! (CR 2009.05.20)

New Kongregate version already? Yup, it’s true. Our developers are on fire! [insert NBA Jam announcer for anyone who’s old enough to know what I’m talking about] We’ve got a few new features as well as some bug fixes, mostly focused on getting our chat rock-solid and packed with cool stuff. We hope everyone enjoys!

As always, please feel free to add comments, questions, and suggestions to this thread.

I’ve included the newest changelog below, though you can also view the full (non-incremental) one at any time here.

CR 2009.05.19

Users:

- Fixed a bug where you couldn’t post messages with a " in it (this was actually patched last week as a quick fix rather than with a full deploy).

- You will now get an error explaining a session conflict or expiration in chat, which happens when you log in to another chat window or tab with the same username.

- We’ve added some new tracking statistics to help us debug any remaining connection issues that users are having. If you’re still having problems connecting, please check out my sticky either in the Kongregate forum or the Tech Support forum.

- You will now no longer be told you have a high score of “0” on newer games without high scores recorded yet.

- If you are using a version of Flash that will not work on the site (we support only Flash 9 or later) you will now be prompted to update your Flash player on games pages.

- For any Reddit users, when you use a Reddit link from a game it will now automatically submit to the gaming sub-Reddit section.

- Removed a problem that was causing issues with our lightbox registration in Opera.

- The Achievements tab will now automatically highlight your easiest unachieved badge on a game.

- Fixed a bug causing some people’s scores to be totaled with one badge’s points missing. Also ran a script to run through and fix any scores that were wrong, so everyone’s totals should be right now.

- New AFK feature! If you’ve been idle in chat for 15 minutes, your name will be grayed out in the userlist to show that you are currently away from your keyboard. It will automatically come back when you chat again or send a PM.

- Added a new feature that allows you to see how many people have earned each badge. Now you can know how truly awesome you are for having sat through the entire Balloon Invasion impossible badge (screenshot below).

- Last, but not least, back by popular demand: /msg! We have re-enabled /msg as a method of sending PMs to users. Sadly, we now have to remove the “No MSG” sticker from our label. :-(

YAY UPDATES

I’m sure they’ll be awesome. Waits for CL :D

- New AFK feature! If you’ve been idle in chat for 15 minutes, your name will be grayed out in the userlist to show that you are currently away from your keyboard. It will automatically come back when you chat again or send a PM.

! Win.

Kyru, seriously, you’re scary.

New AFK feature! If you’ve been idle in chat for 15 minutes, your name will be grayed out in the userlist to show that you are currently away from your keyboard. It will automatically come back when you chat again or send a PM.

No more lurking for me.

EDIT: And where’s this screenshot?

Looking good.

Now that I think about it: Should sending a PM really take you off of AFK? Some users may not want the entire room to know that they are back/present.

I think this afk feature should have a user-initiated toggle.

Does the “easiest unachieved badge” thing put Cards ahead of Easy (so the achievements go from top to bottom?). I have both the cards right now so I can’t tell!

EDIT: Also, I’m not sure that “number of badges awarded thing” is working. It says 0 people have the Shift 1 achievement. Besides the fact that that would be ridiculous anyway, I have the Shift 1 achievement. Just doesn’t make sense.

And it appears as though the count on the total number of times a badge has been earned isn’t somehow dug out of the system, but is registered when those people log on, so the actual number will be a bit smaller than the actual number, depending on how old the badge is.

EDIT: Yeah, I’m just wrong. It’s just taking time to pull the data.

We’re planning to have a user-toggle, but had some security issues crop up near the end, so we pulled it for this release rather than delay the whole thing. We hope to have that feature next time.

Also, the number of badges earned is being updated – those numbers should be correct later tonight, or tomorrow at the latest. We have to run some database scripts to do some work to count them up first.

Screenshot is coming, but I was waiting for us to get the badge counts updated. :)

I was wondering I appeared to be silenced…..lol

Awesome AFK feature! :]

Awesome! :D I like to see Kongregate get better day by day

Originally posted by rawismojo:

I think this afk feature should have a user-initiated toggle.

I also think this, because what if we are gone for like 5 or 10 minutes.

The afk feature confuses and ANGERS POE.

But seriously, it confused me lots. :P

Oh, I meant to turn the feature on and off entirely. Personally, I sit and watch chat for up to 15 minutes easily without talking, but I’m not afk. Disabling it when I’m playing games would stop it from sending false positives about me being afk.

Poe – basically the AFK feature just changes your name to grayed-out when you haven’t typed in chat for 15 minutes, and then comes back when you type again. It lets people know when you’re idle or not around. By the way, in case someone doesn’t know, AFK = “away from keyboard”.

that afk feature is awesome!

Yum. At first I thought the greyed out people were silenced.

Anyway, thanks for the “Badges Awarded” feature – but is it done implementing yet? I’m looking at the Kongai statistics, it only registered the badges awarded after the update.

Silenced players go on the bottom :P
At least now we know who is not here

Hey Anthony- Did you guys also change the color of the options when mousing over a user in chat? The red seems a bit lighter than it used to be. I can actually read it when looking at my monitor from a distance now.

Is there a difference between the appearance of an afk user’s name and a silenced user’s name?
(Aside from the silenced being at the bottom of the chat list)

Phoenix: for the achievement thing… what will happen if you have all badges? It’s really annoying getting messages telling me to earn badges when I have them all already.

PS – can we get a list of the top25 most/least earned badges?

Nice!
=D

Originally posted by rawismojo:

I think this afk feature should have a user-initiated toggle.

Originally posted by Kyru:

Now that I think about it: Should sending a PM really take you off of AFK? Some users may not want the entire room to know that they are back/present.

i agree……i don’t like users to know whether i’m afk or not. a lot of times i’m at the computer but busy elsewhere :/ i don’t want them to know i’m really there Dx