So, I generated a list of "unused" game day sites. Unused sites are those that either have not had a slot scheduled in the last six months or have never had a slot scheduled at all. There were a total of 86 unused sites out of 190 - just under half of them. Those unused sites have been deactivated. They're still in the system, and if you know the URL for one of these sites, you can still use it, but they don't show up in the main event listing anymore.

Eventually I'm going to get around to archiving those sites' data and taking them offline, but that's a job for another day. Now that I have the tools for reporting on and deactivating unused sites, though, expect me to clean house every month or two so that the main event listing remains useful.

After the jump there is a list of the deactivated sites. If your site is on this list and you would like it reactivated, please email me at help@warhorn.net.

I apologize for the outage and wish that it could have been remedied faster. Warhorn is hosted on a friend's server for almost free ($10/month), and I can't expect any better service from him than the 4-day turnaround time we experienced (I wasn't made aware of the outage until Monday, although apparently it began last Thursday). Until we're able to transition Warhorn to a professionally-managed service provider, the potential for outages like this is still relatively high. Luckily there's only been one incident like this since 2001, which gives me hope that another one is not soon forthcoming. We have worked up a preliminary plan for moving the service to a new host, and as that comes together over the next few weeks, I'll post more here.

I am extremely excited to announce that Warhorn has been acquired by Zeitgeist Games. You may know these folks as the producers and publishers of Dave Arneson's Blackmoor roleplaying products. As RPG'ers, they used Warhorn at various conventions. Eventually Dustin Clingman contacted me to see if ZG's developers could help to get some of the most frequently requested features added to the site, and things snowballed from there.

ZG will be taking over the physical administration of the site and mailing list. The transition will likely happen piecemeal over the next few months. At some point we'll begin to create new sites over there, and those which are in use now or in the past will either be migrated or archived. As we come up with a more solid transition plan we'll fill you in on the details.

Once the transition has begun, you will start to see new features in Warhorn. Things like being able to establish a single Warhorn user account from which you register for any event on the site. Personalization features, the ability to search for events based on criteria like location, games offered, and so on. There's a huge list of requested features, and ZG will be able to dedicate full-time development resources to them.

They also plan to really engage the community who use Warhorn, and especially all of you who organize events with it, in a way that I never really got around to. I'm not the best customer service guy. I'm more of a stereotypical Mr. Crankypants software guy. But these folks are professionals as well as gamers at heart, and I think you're going to see a lot more focus on community.

What does this mean for me personally? Well, as part of the deal I become a partner in Zeitgeist Games. I will continue to be involved with Warhorn, helping with the transition, creating a roadmap for its future development, writing code, and participating in the community. I won't be stepping away from Warhorn, but my role will definitely diminish as others who can focus more fully on it step in to shoulder much of the responsibility.

This is a huge day for Warhorn, and I hope you are all as excited as I am for what will happen in the next several months. Let me know in the comments what you think about all this.

This morning I received probably the dozenth email to a semi-public warhorn.net address asking a basic question about how to use the site. I realized that somehow I had neglected or been too lazy to actually put information on the front page telling you how to contact me directly with questions. I had pointed you at our discussion list, but of course that's not suitable for questions about passwords and donations. So I went and updated the "Questions?" section to tell you that you can send those sorts of questions to me at help@warhorn.net.

I also noticed that I hadn't updated the sponsors page in several months, so I took care of that as well. Let me know if you think you should be listed on that page but aren't.

Lastly, I finally addressed that extremely annoying bug where when only the name was being saved when you entered scenario info into your event site. You should now also be able to enter the author, blurb, campaign, game system and level range. Sorry that took so long to fix.

I can't make any promises about additional updates in the near future. Life is very full and exciting for me right now, and judging by the number of event sites that are requested every month, Warhorn seems to still be working well for you folks, so unless something major breaks, I will probably just let it alone. Let us know on the discussion list if you're having any problems; there are enough folks using Warhorn that you should be able to get your questions answered even if I don't respond quickly.

Good gaming!

campaigns: Heroes of Ribhus; Xen'drik Expeditions; Legends of Erde

game systems: Big Eyes, Small Mouth; World of Darkness; Shadowrun; Legends of the Five Rings; GURPS; FUDGE; LARP; Custom/Freeform

skins: Zeif (LG)

hope to fix some of the most critical outstanding bugs in the next several days.

I just pushed out a very simple update that changes the page to sort players and judges by APL. However, the page now displays the signup date for each attendee, and it tags each waitlisted name with a red question mark. The printable version of the page is similarly updated. Now you can more easily scan these pages for APL groupings and at the same time be sure you know which attendees are guaranteed seats and which are waitlisted.

I've also made performance improvements to some of the administrative pages. I think I have picked the last of the low-hanging performance fruit, and any further gains in that area will be dependent on getting new hardware and buckling down on some serious re-architecture. Next couple of months probably.

Other updates made today:

• The daily schedule now shows the number of tables, judges and players signed up and the full/waitlisted/judges needed/open seats for each game.
• The only time we don't show the signup link for a game on the daily schedule is when the event organizer has turned off waitlisting and the game is full on both players and judges. Previously if the game was full on players, you couldn't sign up as a judge directly from the schedule.
• The little popup window where you sign up for an individual game from the daily schedule loads a lot faster now.
• If you are logged into an event site and your registration is deleted, the next time you visit the event site, you will be logged out and redirected to the event site's home page. Previously you would have gotten an error page whenever you tried to access the site until restarting your browser.
• Some old URLs from past versions of the site that no longer work are now redirected to the modern pages. Those URLs that don't have modern equivalents return a "gone" response to your browser, which lets you know to delete those bookmarks (and search engines to remove those URLs from their indexes).

-- Brian (who is still recuperating from his Friday night birthday party)

I get feature requests pretty frequently, and I have compiled a long list of things that I want to add, but the things I find most interesting might not necessarily be the ones that the community would find the most useful. So you guys tell me what you want. If a number of you ask for the same thing, it will move up my list.

Leave comments on this entry. One rule: don't ask for player info to be added to the daily schedule. We've discussed that one to death, and it's coming real soon now.

Stephan, you were probably victimized by the antispam/antivirus software that occasionally runs on warhorn's server host. It really crushes the box now and then.

Sucks, but until I can afford to buy a dedicated machine for Warhorn (which is not out of the realm of possibility, given the donations I've been receiving) and the time to set it up and get everything migrated, we're sort of stuck with it.

If anybody out there is a capable unix systems administrator and wants to volunteer their time to help me do this, y'all would probably see a lot better performance, and more frequent updates too :)

To tide you over til then, I did make a few small updates:

• Rolled back to the old Nyrond skin now that the Imperium has apparently been crushed
• Updated the tagline on the front page of the site to remove "RPGA", as Warhorn is not affiliated with any game publisher or organized play association
• Tweaked the schedule grid page so that the scenario names are no longer linked, making them readable in all skins, and added a link to open the complete scenario list in a new tab or window
• Added slot dates and times to the schedule grid page
• Added an "About Warhorn.net" page (look for the link at the bottom of the sidebar on the front page)

I'll be taking tomorrow off to watch the Super Bowl and celebrate my birthday (32 for those who are counting), but I'll be back in the salt mines next week.

And for what it's worth, one of the open issues is adding player and judge info to the daily schedules. You have all convinced me that the holistic view of attendance is what's so special about Warhorn.

As well, I'll be looking into ways to make it easier for people to casually browse events (and their attendees) without officially registering for each of them while retaining our new focus on privacy. Clearly it's important for people to be able to "shop for cons" :)

Thanks for all your feedback, both public and private. I don't work on Warhorn for riches or for my ego - I do it so that you guys can have a great tool for facilitating your hobby. If it's not working for you, please always let me know.

Additionally, I've added some text to the day schedule page to make it more obvious that you click the name of a scenario to get to that game's schedule page, and I've removed redundant navigation links from below the grids on the day and game schedule pages.

Let me know if there are any issues with these changes. More fixes are coming over the next few days.

• On a game's schedule page, players are being sorted in alphabetical order rather than in the order in which they signed up. This causes people to incorrectly be labeled as being on the waitlist. There is no workaround, but the data in the database is correct, so nobody should drop and re-signup. (FIXED)
• If you have two slots scheduled for the same day that start at the same time, only one of the slots will be displayed in the game schedule. The workaround is to move all games from the hidden slot to the slot that is shown in the schedule and then delete the hidden slot.
• The links in notification email messages generated by the system point to the old schedule interface which no longer exists. (FIXED)
• With some skins, the colors on the grid schedule view are unreadable (e.g. Gamestorm 8)
• Looks like some people have bookmarked old schedule URLs that no longer worked. We need to do something better than giving a generic error page.
• Adding your 100th slot causes some database corruption. Not fully sure what the problem is or how to work around it yet. Hopefully few people are in the position of having to add their 100th slot ;)

Here is a version of the dialogue that I've had with a lot of people over the last day.