Kongregate Changelog
CR 2009.11.20
Developers:
- Added a new avatar crop/replace API, which you can read about here. It is integrated into our AS3 API and allows you to create custom avatars for players to use on Kongregate. We look forward to seeing what you all can come up with using this tool!
- Fixed a formatting bug that was causing numbers to be out of place in IE and Opera for the kred revenue reports.
- The Contests page now lists the top nine games for a month (instead of just five) since we give out nine prizes each month.
- The user's .json feed now has a count of how many Awards (raffle tickets, medals, etc.) a user has.
- Added a link to the Longest Lasting Game Contest on the main Upload page. If you uploaded a game during the contest period and didn't put it in the contest and wanted to, please use the Developer Support option on our Contact Us page and we can add it to the contest for you. Good luck everyone - there's a huge $10,000 prize for the winner!
Users:
- Added the new Dragon Age Forge event. Check it out here to get your collection started and earn a ton of Kongregate points in the process!
- As mentioned above, we have a new avatar-replacement API that developers can use in games. You'll see the first example of it in Dragon Age: Journeys, where you can use the feature to add one more forged weapon per day. Please note: this is not like the L4D2 promotion where we revert to your old avatar later. Please keep a copy of your old avatar on your computer if you want to switch back later.
- There's an undocumented Forge feature for users in chat: if you use /inv (or /inventory) in chat it will tell you what you currently have collected and how many weapons you can still give away.
- Increased our room full limits to 150, in addition to creating some new rooms, in order to accommodate the awesome growth we've been having recently.
- Multiplayer game chat rooms were renumbered to always use two digits, so Room #1 is now Room #01. This will make finding rooms easier for games with lots of rooms.
- Popular demand for lots of kreds has led us to create a larger package option, so you now can purchase kreds in $5, $20, or $50 sets.
- Fixed a problem with the kreds purchase page that was logging users out in IE7.
- Fixed a bug that was causing some pre-game ads to keep playing the sounds in IE even after the ad closed. Yodeling is great, but there's a limit I suppose. :)
- OCD Fix of the Year: So, I hesitate to even point this out for fear of it overshadowing the fantastic work done on the Forge event and the other fixes in this release, but we finally got the big one. The one everyone's been talking about. Which one? I'll give you a clue: I posted this thread "a few seconds ago".
CR 2009.11.2
Developers:
- Lowered the limit so that only 40 ratings are required to get out of judgment for a game.
- Fixed a bug that was giving the share percentage in a dev's kred sales report as NaN% if they hadn't sold any kred items. This will now (correctly) read as 0% (yes, the theoretical share is normally 70%, but since nothing has been earned the most accurate statement is 0%, which is a weighted average of your actual earnings, not theoretical earnings).
- We have completely rewritten the API documentation so that you no longer have to search through long forum posts to try to get the details that you need. Check out our new documentation page to see the results!
Users:
- The big news of course is the awesome new badges browser. We've been wanting to redesign this for a while and finally had the opportunity thanks to a sponsorship from Dragon Age: Origins. You can now easily view all of the badges on the site and look at various subsets using the dropdown options. You can select a game genre on the left, then choose a filter such as all "Unearned Badges" or only "Medium Badges", and then sort by things like date or even which ones have been earned by the fewest number of people!
- Additionally, we're excited to announce a new type of challenge at Kongregate: the Badge Quest! In these challenges you set out on a journey across numerous games to collect a specific set of badges in order to earn a medal and potentially additional points. We have two badge quests to start off with: a Beginner's Quest of easy badges and a special Dragon Age: Origins Quest that will provide a little more challenge with some great RPGs on the list, and a limited-edition medal as your bounty. Good luck!
- Fixed a bug that was causing abuse reports to only confirm that it was handled to one of the filers instead of all. That is, if three people reported someone, and we ended up banning them, only one of the three was getting a whisper saying that we acted on it.
- Removed a bug that caused extra whitespace to appear to the right of game pages in Safari (which was often apparent if you use two-finger scrolling and accidentally scrolled a little to the right).
CR 2009.10.11
Developers:
- Removed the "ad impressions" column from the revenue report. We weren't actually using this statistic to calculate anything related to revenue and it was confusing to have it on that report. This will in no way change how we calculate your revenue, we're just removing extraneous information.
- Fixed a bug that caused a few games to end up in a "half-published" state where they were marked as published but not showing up in public listings.
- Changed "Tip Revenue" to "Kred Revenue" and includes a more detailed listing for developers who are using microtransactions.
Users:
- Completely redid the design of the games browser to be slicker, quicker, and include more information (specifically game descriptions are now visible as well). It also now features the top two results in a sort, giving our best games some well-deserved extra attention.
- Removed a token from the user RSS feed that created a security risk as well as added a number of security fixes and improvements. Thank you Ventero!
- Modified the text of the shared content check box to make it clear that unchecking it will remove it from all public listings, not just keep it off of your profile.
- Fixed a bug that caused some ads to appear on top of our lightboxes.
- Changed an apparently long-standing subtle bug (that we just noticed) that caused a certain type of stat to double-count the first time it registered. For example, the first level you beat in Fancy Pants, if you got 8 squiggles, you'd get credit for 16. Each level after that would have been normal. In any case, it's fixed now.
- Fixed a bug that sometimes would have game listings sorted by rating show games that were still under judgment.
- Fixed the behavior that was causing the screen to bounce to the top when you added a user as a friend using the roll-over menu in chat.
- Patched up a bug that was causing our interface to not always show awards that were earned right away and preventing some achievements from being awarded at all. Thanks for everyone who had patience with us on the "T" ticket from the ODST content. :)
- Fixed a long-standing bug that caused Opera to freak out when using mouse-over menus in chat when the user list was scrolled down.
- Fixed the bug that was created by Opera with their new release that caused the above-mentioned mouse-over menu bug fix that we made to break. This fix actually involved deleting the previous fix. Thanks Opera…
- OCD Bugfix: The achievements tab now shows the correct number of active users in chat instead of saying "Join 0 people in chat" all the time. Yay!
- OCD Bugfix #2: Yup, you get two OCD fixes this month! Your tickets are now displayed on your profile in the order that they are obtained instead of their order of creation. For most people this will mean that the 9 ticket will no longer be in the middle of the ODST tickets. The planets are back in alignment now, you can all sleep peacefully.
CR 2009.09.24
Developers:
- Fixed the upload help text to now correctly show the game size limit as 800 pixels wide, not 700.
Users:
- Moved all the game-specific threads that we could find from the main forums to their respective game forum. The winner was Kongai with about 650 threads, with Platform Racing 2 in second at 450 threads, and Sonny 2 pulling up third with about 200 threads.
- Ran a script to properly count all of the threads and posts in the game forums, so the counts should be accurate at this point.
- Fixed a bug that was causing issues with the rewards page either giving an error or having mixed up badges.
- Changed our credit card form to accept cards that expire more than 4 years from now.
- Fixed a bug that was preventing some stats in some games (including Frantic 2 and Storm The House 3) from submitting.
- Moderators can now post in non-featured game forums. Sorry 'bout that! :)
- Fixed a few more security issues.
- Patched up a bug that was causing game referrals and social share links to have the wrong name in them.
- Fixed the styling on the page links in collabs comments.
- Added protection to keep long strings of characters from overrunning the forum posts on game pages.
- Prevented an occasional issue that would show a negative number for a "best so far" in some scores.
- Fixed a small bug that was creating extra stat submissions in some cases. This will hopefully help our servers and speed up response time on stat submissions on the user end.
- Corrected the "How Do I Earn Points" link on the home page so it now goes where it should.
- OCD Fix: Updated the text on the Contact Us page so that it refers to a green plug instead of a green light.
CR 2009.09.15
Developers:- We've increased our maximum game width to 800 pixels! w00t!
Users:
- The major change to this release is the new inclusion of game-specific forums. We can now give some of the best and most popular games their own, dedicated forums. You can see a few of these featured on our main forums page, and they are all visible on our new game forums page. You'll see we've started out with twelve awesome games, including some popular multiplayer ones, some deep, strategic single player ones, and some of our favorite Kongregate-sponsored games too. We'll add some more in the future, but for now we're going to start with these and see how they go.
- These forums are also visible on the individual game pages. You'll be able to see the ten most recently updated threads in a tab with the comments at the bottom of the page, and there will be links to jump (in a new tab or window so you don't lose your game's progress!) directly to the forums or even a particular thread.
- Since we're anticipating an increase in forum activity, we've added a few tools to help us keep the forums the clean, beautiful bastions of freedom and good will that they have always been. On your end, if you see a post that is offensive in some way, please flag it using the new Flag Post button, and give us a specific reason why you think it should be removed. (Note though that fake or even joking flags will not be appreciated as they make more work for us, and may result in a silence or ban on your account instead)
- You'll now also see some posts that have be deleted by moderators. The forum mods now have the ability to just hide a post rather than trying to go in and edit out any offensiveness. This will help them be much more efficient and save the trouble of trying to bleep out someone's profanity-filled text. Also, please feel free to thank our forum mods - just like our chat mods they are volunteers who have devoted countless hours to help maintain the Kongregate community at the high level that it has become. :)
- Since we were redoing some forum features anyway, we took the time to reorganize our forums on the main forums page. Now they're in nice, logical categories, rather than fairly randomly scattered about.
- Embed tags are no longer available on the forums (and haven't been for about a week). Thanks to some schmuck embedding pop-up scripts in threads we can now no longer have embedded Youtube videos either. Sorry everyone, but security had to come first.
- You'll now see forum titles and thread titles in the URLs of forum posts. Note that these are optional, so http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1/topics/1 and http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1-kongregate/topics/1-first both go to the same place. All old links will work fine, but new ones will be more informative like this.
- Added a cool new feature that will keep links from breaking in threads that are moved. You may notice this as well if you type in the wrong URL by hand - we check the thread number, which is unique, and automatically correct the forum number if it was wrong.
- Fixed a bug that was causing some issues with comments and other statistics on Zening.
- Game comment pagination is now not done by page number but rather by using forward-backward buttons. This significantly reduces database load and is much snappier too!
- Patched up some miscellaneous security issues.
- Forum watching (i.e. "Watch This Topic") should now be working again.
- You'll see a new "Follow Us On Twitter" link at the bottom of the page. Now you can keep up with our insane musings as well as new badge releases and features, which will be announced there. Check it out!
CR 2009.09.02
Developers:
- The below-mentioned game search tool should alleviate the problems some developers were having with their games not showing up in searches on our site. w00t!
Users:
- We've added a game name suggester search tool that will make finding games much easier than search previously allowed. Simply type in part of the name of a game or the name of a developer and you'll see a list (sorted by user rating) of games that match. If you want more options, including forum posts and user profiles, you can just click the Search button to go into one of our normal searches we've always had.
- Speaking of which, you may now see a slight increase in speed of some of the normal searches. We've added some new caching techniques that will store the results of popular searches so we don't always have to hit Google each time someone does a search for "I hate Madagascar!".
- We've also replaced the strange-looking search spinner that appeared last week with the correctly-colored one, so it shouldn't look all stippled like it did previously.
- Fixed a bug that prevented muting people from chat.
- Made some changes to prevent Firefox caching from causing strange behavior when using the browser's back and forward buttons on game pages.
- Fixed a bug that was creating a giant cookie and causing some users to be unable to load game pages.
- Fixed a bug that was causing Chrome to sometimes be unable to connect to chat.
- Finally tracked down and squashed, with extreme prejudice, a hard-to-find bug that was falsely telling people that they were being silenced when they had done nothing wrong (and in many cases had never spoken in chat).
- OCD Bugfix: So, we tried to thank you guys a lot for leaving a comment. And by a lot, I mean on every comment on the page. But nooooooo! You don't want lots of thanks. So fine. Now it only thanks you for your own comment. I hope you're happy.
CR 2009.08.25
Developers:
- Fixed a bug that crept in from our upgrade to Rails 2.3 last time that was breaking screenshots in bug reports for games. They should be working fine now.
- Fixed a minor textual error. Even though we upped the game upload limit to 20MB a while ago, we forgot to change the text on the upload form to reflect that. Oops!
- Implemented a new solution for cache invalidation that should fix the bug where making changes to supplemental files would not be reflected for users who had previously played the game. (This change actually isn't going into effect until later this week)
Users:
- The biggest change with this release is that we are now caching a lot of the game page. All of the same functionality and features are present, but you should notice a much snappier load time for game pages, though it will still take a second to connect to chat.
- We've added a new tool that will allow us to react more quickly to offensive games that are uploaded. Please don't create threads about them - this only attracts more attention. Just flag them and move on to better games and we'll remove them and ban the uploader.
- Fixed some bugs that caused a couple of linking methods in textile on the forums to misbehave.
- We're no longer supporting the Facebook App as a way of logging into Kongregate, so if you had a Facebook App account and cannot log in, please contact us at support@kongregate.com and we'll hook you up with a full-fledged Kongregate account. And don't worry, you won't lose any of your progress or badges. :)
- Fixed a small bug that caused long comments to mess up the formatting on Collabs pages.
- No more muting of admins. Not many of you had done it (only about 300, including one mod who may or may not have the word "fuzz" in his name), but muting admins prevents us from communicating important info, and also caused a bug in the add-as-collaborator feature, so we've disabled it. I promise we won't spam you with our new un-mutable accounts. Except AlisonClaire. She just might be crazy enough to do it.
- Fixed a bug that messed up the pagination if you deleted one of your game comments.
- Fixed a bug that was causing one of our Axe ads to break chat connections (this was our fault by the way, not Axe's, so please don't blame them).
- Last week marked the end of the Collabs competitions - don't worry, Collabs is here to stay, but the weekly cash prizes have completed. Thank you everyone who entered the contest, and congrats to backburner for winning the gold in the Art contest with Whale Sub and to robotaki for taking the grand prize in the Sound category with Falling from Heaven! Also, a huge thank you to Scion for sponsoring the entire Collabs section and the contest!
- OCD Bugfix: So, for the past month or so, the most recent unearned badge has been invisible on the badges page. I'm not sure how this was so important, considering it showed up everywhere else, but the OCDness prevailed and lead to numerous forum posts and emails. Rest-assured - all badges are now shown. Now go check the stove and make sure it isn't on.
CR 2009.08.04
Developers:
- Changed our upload page so that Opera won't freak out on it any more.
- Upload form now specifies that we don't allow 3rd-party payment or level-save systems in games on our site. If you want to learn more about our own payment or level-save systems, check out our forums or use the Development Support option on the Contact Us page.
Users:
- For those who this means something to, we upgraded to Rails 2.3. This led to some strange bugs (including a textile-formatting issue this morning with embedded links, but we think we've gotten that one fixed up), but overall should allow us to keep up with the newest Rails implementation and benefit from the various new features and performance improvements.
- Fixed a bug that was causing problems when attempting to embed some of the games on our Games For Your Site page.
- Added some security features to help prevent some exploits with our system.
- Modified the shout you get if an art Collabs is deleted to emphasize that photos are not accepted (since that's what most deletion confusion has been over).
- Removed the contest information from the Collabs section and replaced with a "Top Rated" section. We should be announcing winners before too long. Good luck to our weekly first-place entries!
- Tweaked a formatting issue with the shared content ratings sometimes overlapping.
- Made a few changes to sharing custom levels through Facebook and other sites.
- Tweaked our shared content interface to try to encourage more people to rate content. Also, those that are under judgment won't show up in the top-rated lists.
- Added a box so we can feature the top shared content in a game down near the game comments.
- Fixed a bug that would occasionally show registered users a tab asking them to sign up for an account. Also fixed an IE7 formatting error when the Sign Up tab appeared for guests.
- Fixed a small formatting issue in our Sign Up lightbox in IE7 and Opera.
- Patched a bug that showed a (non-working) chat box to guests when they switched tabs.
- On top of all those, a lot of work has gone into some major performance enhancements. Some of these won't be noticeable yet, but they laid the groundwork for what hopefully will be a major performance boost in our next release. Some of this performance will only be visible to us (in that our servers will stop crying so much, making it easier to keep growing) while other enhancements will hopefully lead to a better, faster experience for you guys too!
- The only major change for performance that you'll see with this release is the new navigation tool for your rewards history. We've done away with the concept of numbered pages (because it was killing our database to calculate those) and instead offer the ability to page through one at a time or jump to a specific date with the handy little calendar feature. It means much more efficiency on our end and a quicker, easier way to go back and check our your first impossible badge on your end. :) We will eventually be adding this type of navigation to game comments as well, and potentially a few other places if the need arises.
CR 2009.07.21
Users:
- Users can now delete their levels using the Delete Level button when viewing the level. You can see it on the menu to the right:
http://kong.dreamhosters.com/grabs/ad116d4dfcdd9aeca68733f292d23c62.png
- If you rate a level and it is later deleted, you'll now see "deleted Level" in your points history instead of just a large empty space. Prior to this fix the points history occasionally crashed from this too.
- Fixed a bug that allowed users to whisper to other people after they got silenced.
- Fixed another silence bug that caused users not to see the silenced message when they got silenced.
CR 2009.07.14
Developers:
- We're cutting support to the "High Scores" API and have removed links to those tutorials. We still use the Statistics API that most people have been using, and we still support the API for both AS2 and AS3. I believe old games will continue working with the High Scores, but we will no longer provide support for those APIs. NOTE: This only affects developers using APIs - gamers will not see any difference. Also, we're not removing APIs, we're just no longer offering help or instructions for one of them so we can encourage developers to use the other one. Sorry for any confusion.
- We fixed a bug that lead to your revenue share being calculated two different ways and not agreeing on revenue reports. It should now be consistent. For those who are curious, both were correct at some level, but yielded different answers. One was a calculation of average revenue share on a day-by-day basis (so 3 days at 25% and 3 days at 35% would be 30%), while the other was an actual share based on money earned, so if you earned more gameplays on the 35% days, you might see 32% overall. We now only use the second, revenue-based method.
Users:
- Fixed a bug in IE8 that caused badge page links not to work properly.
- A number of users reported being false-silenced when doing nothing wrong. First off, we'd like to apologize to anyone who had this happen. We think we've made a change that will prevent this in the future, but if it happens to you after this fix (basically, you log in and find yourself silenced for no reason at all) please report it to support@kongregate.com. Note: this is not when you disagree with a mod's reason for silence, this is a rare case where you weren't silenced by anyone, but still couldn't talk in chat.
- Fixed a small bug that occasionally put the game over top of various light boxes (like login, leave a tip, etc.) that were supposed to be on top of the game.
- We made a slight change to how your browser loads chat icons - it's now one big sprite, which should help with performance and reliability.
- Fixed a bug that caused the "Next Recommended Badge" alert to occasionally show you badges you had already earned. Note that recommendations for badges in other games may still include badges you've earned, but it shouldn't happen any more for badges in the same game.
- The profanity filter is now enforced for match chat in multiplayer games.
- You can now opt-out of emails from us using a new opt-out link in automated emails. This doesn't include emails you can select with the Notifications options on your Account page, but would include other ones like when a friend sends you an invite or recommends a game.
- Made a slight change to one of our ads that was causing Kaspersky users to be unable to play games on our site (changed bumper_ad_shown -> bumper_shown if anyone's wondering - thank you Ventero!).
- Fixed a formatting issue with card albums and achievement lists in IE6. By the way, Youtube has announced that they are dropping support of IE6 soon. For anyone with IE6 who can upgrade, we'd strongly recommend doing so, because we can only continue supporting it for so long. And heck, if you can't use it to watch stupid people doing stupid things on Youtube, what's the point of having the browser?
- We are beginning testing a new HTTP-binding protocol (BOSH if people are curious, though don't ask me more than that, I don't know all the tech-y details) that will allow some people who are having connection problems with blocked ports get in easier. If you see a Yellow plug (as opposed to Red or Green), that means you're in BOSH. Things will be a little slower, but at least you can get in, chat, and get badges. :) We don't want to know how many of you are going to use this to connect at work now. La-la-la, we're not listening!
CR 2009.06.30
Some of these are changes that have been patched to the main site in the last few weeks while others are changes that were updated last night with the new release, but all of it is new since our last release on June 3.
Users:
- "All contest winners" in the Collabs sort by date instead of by rating
- Collabs media pages now show the date submitted
- Fixed a few minor formatting issues in IE6
- Aviary is now tightly integrated into Collabs, allowing artists to create raster and vector graphics using this cool online tool and immediately upload them to the Collabs page.
- Added a tutorial on using some of the basic features in Aviary
- Fixed a bug causing our Contact Us page to get borked in IE8
- Redesigned many of our prefab emails to look prettier and include updated information
- Fixed a bug that occasionally would show our Signup Tab to registered users
- OCD Fix: We got a report that we had an alert telling you that you had "Succesfully removed a friend". Teh speling haz nao ben fixd.
CR 2009.05.20
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.
- 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 our "No MSG" sticker from our label. :-(
CR 2009.05.06
Developers:
- Fixed a minor bug that would mess up the formatting if you put an especially long word (or URL) in your game description. You still may see some strange wrapping, so please check before publishing, but it's better than it was before.
Users:
- Public release of Zening! W00t!
- Private message "reply" link now works on first click and puts cursor at end of line in Safari 4.
- Fixed a few minor bugs with IE8.
- Removed the bug where you could click on whitespace in the user list and get to the user Undefined. Funny story - the real user with that username apparently made a bunch of new friends this week!
- Added a new bug report command to the chatroom. /bug can now be used to easily create a bug report for a game without ever leaving the chat window. Just type /bug followed by your report text, and the report will be sent and a special alert with some useful debugging information will be created. Please note - these bug reports go to the game developers, not to us, so don't use them for badge requests and such. If you just type /bug without anything after it, it will give a brief description of how to use it.
- Improved load time of chat room, including removing the scroll bar on the side when joining a room.
- Squashed a bug that was making some users invisible in the user list. (Shout out to The Village for helping me to do testing and turning it into a group effort! Thanks!)
- Private messages are now formatted correctly again (with the 'To: ' prefix and blue colorization).
- Fixed a problem where including a newline character in a private message would broadcast the message to the room (whoops!).
- Made various optimizations to improve performance of the game and chat room.
- Fixed a bug that caused \ to turn into \\ in chat (which also prevented various unicode characters from working). We \u2665 our programmers!
CR 2009.04.22 ("New Chat")
New Chat is here! And with it, so is an entirely new Game Page design. So, what can you expect from the new Game Page experience?
Tabbed Browsing. We now use tabs to organize our information and separate out the various components of gaming on Kongregate into more logical and useful units. You will have three tabs (Chat, Game, Achievements) present, and a fourth empty tab that will pop-up with notifications when appropriate. The Achievements tab will only appear for games that have the Kongregate API enabled.
Chat Tab. Well, let's start with the one everyone's really buzzing about. The chat tab looks a lot like the old chat program at a glance, though if you look closely you'll see a number of new features. Perhaps the biggest change is the new Chat Actions drop down, which we'll discuss below. Additionally, you'll some new aesthetics, like a higher-contrast mouse-over menu for the user list, and the stars that indicated friends have been replaced by a cute little person icon to the right of the name. Beyond that, chat is now html-based, meaning we can support UTF-8 encoding for Eastern character sets, all characters will work (i.e. no more alt codes needed!), and scrolling and copying multiple lines of chat now works! But perhaps most exciting for many users is the new "send whisper" link in the mouse-over menu in the user list. Even better, when you get a private message you now have a "reply" link that you can click on to immediately fill in the reply information instead of typing out usernames by hand each time. Plus, if you try to send a whisper to someone who's offline (or misspell their name), you'll get an error message letting you know it wasn't delivered. W00t!
Chat Actions. We've integrated many common chat actions into one menu to make navigating our chat features easier. Included in this menu are "Change chat rooms", "See friends online", "View room details", and "Add to favorites". Chat room changing is now no longer done in a big light-box, but instead is integrated directly into the chat program. Additionally, rooms are much more cleanly sorted now, and you even have the ability to keep a list of Favorite Rooms! The "See friends online" tool allows you to easily scan through your friends and join them in other rooms, directly from chat. Finally, you can view the room details and description from this menu, allowing you to find out more about the room you're hanging out in.
Game Tab. The Game Tab will look familiar, though in a new location; it features the information that used to be displayed below the game. You know, giving you instructions to a game that you can't see because it's way up above? Well, now they're right here, next to the game, any time you need them. You can rate the game, add as a favorite, report bugs, even leave a tip, directly from this tab. Additionally, all of the sections are collapsible, so you can easily customize this view to only show you what you want to see. Developers: you can now name up to three additional collaborators on a game, and they will all show up here!
Achievements Tab. This tab, which will only appear on games with high scores or badges, will give you the low-down on all of the points and goodies you can earn from the game you're planing. This info is neatly pulled up from being uselessly below the game to directly next to the game and easily visible. Now, you can flip through the various badges, find out the requirements, see how many points you can still earn with the game, and even see cool information like how many users have achieved each badge so you can see just how awesome you are for actually getting that Streamline impossible badge. You can also view the high scores on a game from within this tab. As a special bonus, if you've submitted a high score earlier that would have qualified you for a newly-created badge, we will now automatically give you the badge without you having to get that score again!
Alert Tab. You will occasionally see a fourth tab pop up to give you quick important updates. This can include alerts that let you know that you got a badge, that you've disconnected, etc. This tab can be closed by clicking on the "x" when you're done with it.
Integrated Quick Links. You'll notice that the various quick links (rating games, add to favorites, tip jar, social network sharing, etc.) have been pulled down and integrated into our chat box design.
Connection Icon. We now have a new connection icon that looks like a (usually green) plug. This replaces the little green/yellow/red circle that you used to see above chat. Additionally, your username is now easily visible here so you can always know which username you're logged in as.
Mini Profile. When you click on someone's name in the chat room, you'll be taken to their "mini-profile". Our graphic designer has done a great job of re-designing this page to be much cleaner, prettier, and more efficient. Additionally, you can now view the five most recent badges awarded to a user.
Game Comments. We've made some minor aesthetic changes here, moving the game comments over the the left side and significantly widening them to make them easier to read.
In addition to the new game page, we have a couple of other updates that we've included...
Developers:
- As mentioned above, you can now add up to 3 collaborators to your game in the game setup page. Each collaborator will have to confirm before they show up, which can be done from the Game Tab when logged in as the collaborator.
Users:
- Added a couple of weeks ago, you can now add comments to username, avatar, and profile reports.
- We've added a nag box to encourage users still on Internet Explorer 6 to upgrade. IE6 came out in 2001, and IE7 has been out since 2006. Let it go - it's time to move on. Or to get Firefox. Your choice.
- Our latest_games.rss feed now includes the game title and genre.
- We were nominated for a Webby! Vote for us from the link on the homepage! :-D
- OCD Fix: If there's only one statistic for a high scores list for a game, that stat is shown as a bold header rather than being the only choice in a dropdown list.
CR 2009.02.23
Users:
- The user "Kongregate" that is used to deliver various system and admin messages can no longer be whispered or shouted to. No one was checking those shouts and we don't want your messages to be lost.
- We have a host of new features on the admin side for dealing with abuse reports, avatar reports, username reports, suspicious scores, etc. that were all tweaked and refined in this release.
- There were a number of minor bug-fixes for admin tools that were implemented, including occasionally sending out double-whisper warnings in some situations.
- Extensive work has been done on the new chat. I'm not promising that it will be out next release, but I can say that it's shaping up nicely and has some cool new features.
- We've modified our email validation to now accept "+" as a valid character.
- There is now an XML feed available for our newly-sponsored games, which can be found in the "Games for your site" link at the bottom of our page.
- Fixed a bug where users were getting a 400 error when they visited too many forum posts in one session. Special thanks for Jabor for his detailed diagnosis that made it easy to identify and fix the problem.
- OCD Bugfix: A user noted that we were using cols=40 for the text-entry field when leaving shouts/whispers on the profile pages, and this was producing inconsistent results (with varying column widths) in different browsers, so we've changed it to width=95% to provide more consistent performance and a larger typing field. How's that for OCD?
CR 2009.02.01
Users:
- This past development cycle saw more loot challenges. Both the Pineapple Express and Warhammer contests were released during this development cycle, and we hope to keep bringing you contests like this in the future.
- The largest user-facing update is the addition of user reporting. Now, instead of selecting "Abusive User" from the Contact Us page, you can go directly to the user's profile and file a report from there. Simply click on "Report Abuse" near the "Add As Friend" and "Mute" links, select the appropriate category, and fill in details if needed. This type of reporting will help us deal with reports much faster and more efficiently than the previous email method, especially as the site continues to grow.
- To report mods, the system is a little different. You don't pick a category; instead, mod reports are filed as "Mod Abuse" reports, and we will carefully go through all of those (as we always have). You also have the option to "Thank a Mod" if you think they're doing a great job and want to let them know that you appreciate them. :)
- We implemented some optimizations to how we handle game titles in searches.
- Our developers fixed a bug where invalid screenshots were being accepted by our missing achievement page.
- We added some back-end performance improvements to how we track favorited games.
- There is now a "Quote post" button that will allow you to easily quote posts in our forums.
- Finally, the obligatory OCD bugfix: we changed our copyright to 2009 instead of 2008. :)
CR 2009.01.06
Developers:
- Some adjustments to revenue reports to make things more clear, including a "last updated" date and fixed a bug on tip revenue earning reports.
- Fixed bug that was sometimes preventing DCR games from being uploaded.
- Game instructions text box now supports textile.
Users:
- A new set of tools to help admins with community management.
- All permanently banned accounts, both past and present, are automatically now made Private.
- Badge request form now informs users if they are not missing any badges.
- Eased email address validation to allow more unusual email addresses (most specifically, -'s are now permitted).
- Games still under judgement should no longer show up occasionally as Recommended Games.
- User's avatar on the profile page should now link to Edit Profile.
- A small UI adjustment that adds an arrow to the navigation menu to make it clearer to understand when you're in a sub-menu.
- Admin (K) and Moderator (M) emblems now appear in profile page and in shouts and whispers to avoid confusion from mod/admin impersonators.
- Long shouts should no longer sometimes cover the "delete" button on the profile page.
- You can no longer generate an error by trying to create a thread without a body.
- Fixed bug where a user could sometimes get sent to the wrong page if they are viewing their points history and then click on their "Level" in the mini profile box at the top of the screen.
- Locked topics no longer have a "Reply to Topic" link.
- Deleted comments now show as "This comment has been removed by an admin." rather than just deleting.
- Excessively-flagged game comments will automatically be replaced with "This comment has been flagged for review."
- For the truly OCD user: when you only have one point left to get to the next level, it now reads "1 point left to level" instead of "1 points left to level".
- Various back-end performance fixes.
- Various textual adjustments and corrections.
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