Version 7.0 – ‘Thousandstar’ Sneak Peak

March 10th, 2010

Later in March we will be releasing Version 7.0 of Guild Launch. Which we call ‘Thousandstar’.  Thousandstar contains a host of much requested features, enhancements and additions. Today, I am going to highlight some of those features. We are planning to have this release ready on the 18th or 25th depending on how Beta and testing schedules roll out.

The major features for Thousandstar include:

Refinements to Registration and Guild Applications

We’ve simplified the guild creation, account creation and guild application process tremendously. The new forms feature more information, better feedback, improved usability and require less information to be entered. In Thousandstar your users will get registered faster and more easily and will be more confident in the process.

Achievements

Guild Launch is getting its very own achievement system. This is similar in many ways to Awards, but achievements are provided by the Guild Launch application for items such as registering, verifying your account, signing up for a raid, posting 10, 100, 1000 forum posts, etc. The goal of the achievement system is two fold. First, we hope to entertain users and reward them for using your site. Second, the tool serves as an educational tool about what is possible with the Guild Launch system.

Site Newsletter – Subscription Feature

Admins now have the ability to send a newsletter to their guild members. This newsletter cotains an Admin editable area and selectable content from your guild site. This includes an introduction from the sender, upcoming raids, past raids, new members and recent posts. We have also reserved a very small place for a listing of our blog entries to help users stay up to date with Guild Launch news.

Individual site members can choose not to receive the newsletter, but receiving site newsletters is enabled by default when a user joins a site.

Deleted Post Lockbox – Subscription Feature

In the Thousandstar release all posts deleted from forums will be placed in the Deleted Post Lockbox forum. This forum exists on every site and is visible, by default, to only Admins and Moderators of the forum. A post will stay in the Lockbox for 45 days before being deleted. Recovery of posts is available only to subscription sites. Ad-supported sites will have their posts retained, but will be unable to restore them without upgrading to a subscription.

Private Application Support

We have been asked for a very long time for a way to support posting applications to a forum in a private manner. We’ve now added this ability. With the new functionality an Admin can configure whether to allow private applications. When an applicant submits an app there is an option at the bottom, if it is enabled, to submit the app in private. If an application is submitted in private then the difference is this:

If the application is posted to a forum then a private app is only visible by the applicant and members of the site. All other forum permissions are in effect and will override the Private App settings. Additional forum permissions such as the entire forum being member only or private will override this, but when a user can see a post based on forum permissions there is an additional test for private apps to check whether they are the original poster or a member of the guild. If they are not then they can’t see it. If they are then they can.

In addition there are options to post all Applications in Private and to allow only recruiting admins and the applicant to see the post.

Forum Signature Size Control

Site Admins now have the ability to control the maximum height and width of forum signatures. Signatures larger than the allowed width and height will have a small scrollbar so that an interested user can see the rest of the signature. This also allows the user to know they have gone over the forum’s allowed size.

Admins also have the ability to disable sigs in the forum.

Users now have the ability to control the height, width and display of signatures per site. This means that users can choose to allow taller sigs on one site and not another. In addition, users can disable signatures on one site and enable them on another.

Application Notes

Notes can now be added to applications in the Admin area. This sounds simple, but for heavy recruiting guilds with multiple admins it will be quite useful.

TinyMCE Upgrades

The WYSIWYG editor has received an upgrade to a new version. In addition, it has been turned on by default in some areas where it was off by default previously.

Forum Subscriptions

Users can now subscribe to a forum and they will be sent an email whenever a new post is made in that forum. Subscribe/Unsusbscribe options are at the bottom of the topic list. This functionality is configured such that notifications of new posts are not reenabled until you visit the forum. So, in very popular forums you will not be inundated with notifications of new posts.

Notification Control & Refinement

Since we have added more communication types we needed to add a place for users to manage them. Currently you can control the following and whether to send notifications to your email:

- Private Message Notifications
- Site Newsletter

This functionality will expand as functionality grows.

Rapid Raid Attendance Reporting

The columns in the Advanced Attendance Report can now be named. We’ve also added site rank as a sortable column.

New Templates

An All Points Bulletin and a Starcraft II template are available.

EQ2 Raid Progression

Planar Shadows has been added.

Forum Avatar Changes

The allowable size for forum avatars has been increased slightly. In addition, the Avatar on the user profile has been replaced by that which is shown in the forums. The reason for this is that due to resizing, animations and manipulations of the graphics users were having to often compromise between the forum avatar or the profile avatar looking as they wanted the avatar to look. So, we are now using the same image in both places. The result is less compromise and better predictability of how the image will look.

Enjoy!
Stephen

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Version 6.9.6 – Release Notes

February 11th, 2010
Please read the first item under enhancements even if you read nothing else.

This morning we have released Version 6.9.6.  This is a maintenance release for the 6.9 branch and contains important fixes and additions. The release notes are below.

Raid Progression

  1. EQ2 Planar Shadows
  2. LoTRO Halls of Crafting
  3. AOC Tier 3 Raid (will be released later today, needed to fix a graphic)

Enhancements

  1. If your Rapid Raid DKP pool is configured to require a character to be on the Raid Roster then characters that are not on the Raid Roster for a raid pool will no longer show as available for signup in the pool. This only applies if your pool is set to require Raid Roster listings to be active in the pool. Otherwise the functionality is the same as it was before.
    NOTE: This change may throw some of you for a loop if you have been accidentally using the Raid Roster feature and not knowing it. However, this is the correct behavior of the functionality. To disable the Raid Roster requirement edit the pool settings on the Rapid Raid page in the admin area. To add characters to the Raid Roster for a pool go to the Raid Roster page in Rapid Raid.
  2. A bulk “Mark Read” option is now available in the PM area.
  3. The default forum icons used in many templates have had some color added to them so that new posts are more visible.

Bug Fixes

  1. Certain characters in the name of a character were causing display issues.
  2. Apostrophes in character names were displaying improperly in a few places.
  3. Award Points now correctly total when an award has been deleted.
  4. A view all awards link has been added to the user profile. This is not a perfect implementation but it works. The purpose is that the link provides a way for users to view more than 5 awards so they can equip the one they prefer.
  5. Tab colors have been fixed in the Call of Duty template.
  6. JavaScript errors in the Admin area have been resolved
  7. Boss values on the Event list for Rapid Raid now correctly allow decimal values (1.5, 1.2, etc.)

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Version 6.9.5 – Release Notes

January 28th, 2010

Today we have released Version 6.9.5. This is our second release for January and is a maintenance release for the 6.9 branch. This release contains a few bug fixes and a few feature enhancements.

In other news, we are preparing Version 7.0 for release soon. This release will be, without a doubt, our largest release to date. We are looking for 5 to 10 Beta guilds to test the new functionality. If you are interested please send an email to support@guildlaunch.com and make sure you give us your guild site URL.

Version 6.9.5 Release Notes

New Templates

  1. A full Star Trek online template is now available with forum icons and more!

Feature Enhancements

  1. Linkbox Improvements
    You can now reorder the links in the linkbox. You can also set the links to open in a new window or in an iFrame embed on your site.
  2. Star Trek Online Currency
    The Star Trek Online currency has been updated to Energy Credits

Bug Fixes

  1. Certain game tools that no longer are available have been removed in WoW and Warhammer.
  2. The Class update screen had some issues with styling where the text would become undreadable. We’ve implemented a partial fix that will keep the text readable. We will have a more robust fix in a later release.
  3. Spacing for the Character management links was too tight and causing misclicks. We’ve spaced the links out more.
  4. The Stylized red template had a graphic in the lower right that was conflicting with the template being easily customized. We’ve removed that graphic.
  5. An error leading to issues with custom pages displaying when no page id was provided has been fixed.
  6. The ability to add a character to a guild in an unclaimed status has been re-added to the Guild membership page for characters.
  7. An issue causing a character to not have a Primary guild after being kicked from their current primary guild has been fixed. This should fix a few instances of “disappearing” characters.

We hope you enjoy this new release. We’ve got more planned for 2 weeks from now and fistfulls of awesomeness in our 7.0 release. Be on the look out for more info.

-Stephen

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10 Ways to Build a Better Guild

January 27th, 2010

Creating a successful guild takes planning and forethought. I have been leading successful guilds for a long time and I have comprised a list of 10 items I have learned from my guilds and from other guild leaders I have met.

  1. Have a theme!
    Having a theme builds comraderie and provides a rallying point. A very specific theme isn’t necessary, but a concept of your guilds overall purpose is useful. Defining that you are a Role Playing Guild, PVP Guild, Raiding Guild, or a Leveling guild will help you get like minded members. Which leads us to number 2!
  2. Recruit Like Minded Players
    If you are a older serious guild recruit older serious members. If you want loose casual players stay away from the serious folks. Take care not be overly exclusionary though. Getting a good mix of like minded folk will help everyone get more out of their gaming experience.

    Age is another factor to take into consideration when recruiting. There is often a notable difference between play styles between older players and younger ones. There are always the exceptions to the rule, so be careful you aren’t being closed minded.

    The best way to find like minded players is to talk to them instead of lumping them into old/young, serious/casual. Talk to a person. If you get along with them well then the more superficial differences can be a good thing.

  3. Communicate Your Expectations
    Creating a code of conduct or guild rules is a great way for member to know what’s ok and what’s not. Let people know what is expected of them and let them know where to find that information. Not only will it avoid drama it will reduce the confusion over issues that may arrive. Post this information on your guild website.
  4. Promote Good People
    Pick officers that keep their word, have patience and show personality traits that you consider valuable. Those exact traits are going to be up to you and your guild’s style, but having a concept of what they are in your head will help you actually recognize them. You don’t want a player who is out of touch with the guild philosophy (and there will always be some who are regardless of how well you recruit) recruiting your guild members and you don’t want a hot head leading your casual guilds raids, but you might want an absolute drill seargeant leading the raids for your progression guild. Choosing people that other guild member’s respect is a good place to start.
  5. Create a Website.
    A great way to do this is to create a guild website using our service here at Guild Launch. Out of the box guild hosting is probably the best way to build your guild in the shortest amount of time. We have common features you are looking for and have been designed with gamers in mind. Once you have your site put up your rules, your expectations, your recruiting polices, etc.
  6. Loot Rules
    Make it clear how your guild members should divide treasure. Nothing will breed drama like unhappy members that feel they have had loot ninja’ed from them by a guild member.
  7. Stay on a Schedule.
    Have scheduled events that everyone can count on. Everybody’s schedule is different and some need to plan their play time close than others. Posting your guilds raid times on your guild website can also help you recruit other gamers that are on the same schedule as the rest of the Guild
  8. Have a Good Application Process
    Having strong recruiting policies in place is key. This will help you recruit the right type of members for your guild theme. A guild application can help with this process. Figure out a few questions you can ask your prospective members. Their answer will help you screen out undesirable people and focus your membership into your guild goals. This also helps you guild members point people in the right direction instead of taking up time screening a member through chat.
  9. Create a Guild Bank
    Encourage your guild to save and share useful items or material that someone else in the guild may need. You can create an additional character typically called a “Mule” that’s sole purpose is to store items for the guild. I would strongly recommend that you as the guild leader keep the bank under control your self. It prevents the disastrous outcome  of members running away with your guild loot.
  10. Ventrilo or Teamspeak
    Get members talking to each other. I help in a number of ways., first and foremost it will help you coordinate your attack and make your teams much more efficient. It will also help you’re your member get to know each other.

Hopefully these tactics for building a better guild will help you on your path to greatness. Let us know your feedback at support@guildlaunch.com.

-Stephen

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5 Ways to Handle Guild Drama

January 21st, 2010

Every guild has their fair share of drama. There is something about the combination of text based chat and high energy gaming that brings out the drama queen in us all at some point. I’ve been helping to manage guilds for over 5 years now and I’ve learned techniques for managing drama. So here they are in no particular order:

  1. Drama Happens
    No matter what you do, drama will happen. Take it in stride and move forward. Getting hung up on drama breeds more drama. Just admit that drama is human nature and you will get over it faster.
  2. Clear Rules Decrease Drama
    You don’t have to treat all of your guild mates like kids, but if you are going to have rules, (and you should have some rules), you absolutely need to communicate them effectively. Spell out the rules clearly and enforce them appropriately. Post your guild rules on your guild website. However, it is also important to realize that creating rules for the sake of creating rules is sure to create drama. People have an innate understanding of fairness and they will pick up on rules that were created just to screw people over. 
  3. Give People a Place to Vent
    Sometimes all it takes to reduce drama is giving people some place to blow off some steam. In my guild we have a forum on our website called “Drama Here” with a funny tagline like “Need to create drama? Do it here!” The point is that people know this is the drama forum. The people posting know it’s the drama forum, and the people reading know it’s the drama forum, so they both take it just a little less seriously.Simply giving people a place to vent frustration where they know they are essentially holding up a sign saying “I’m A Drama Queen” can go a long way towards reducing the drama factor of an exchange.  It makes the conversation just a touch tongue in cheek and makes everyone less reactive. It also lets something be said without as much judgement.
  4. Create A Communication Channel
    Ask an officer or guild leader to be the go-to person for issues between guild members. Unlike venting this person will probably need to field more substantial issues. I suggest you rotate the person who does this since it’s not the most glamorous.
  5. We’re All Human
    Drama happens sometimes because people don’t consider that the other person is in the same situation as them. They are playing a game. They are reading the same text on the screen as you. They may be just as clueless about your personality and your style of communication as you are about theirs. He or she is a human playing a game just like you.
  6. When in doubt, use an emoticon!
    I ask people to end every sentence that has the potential to create drama with a smiley face. You would be very surprised how that simple emoticon changes the tone of a sentence.

The most important thing to remember is that we are all just gamers trying to have fun. Drama happens, but in the end drama is what you make of it. If you let it roll off you and keep smiling then you’ll do just fine… and you will not be contributing to the drama escalation.

Enjoy!
Stephen

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Version 6.9.4 – Release Notes

January 14th, 2010

This morning we have released Version 6.9.4. This is a maintenance release for the 6.9 branch and contains important features, bug fixes and enhancements. The release notes follow:

New Templates

  1. WoW Cataclysm Template
  2. Global Agenda Template

New Widgets

  1. A Teamspeak 3 Status Widget has been added
  2. A GSC Voice Server widget has been added

Other Additions

  1. Various tools have been added to the game tools area for Warhammer, Lotro, Everquest and World of Warcraft.
  2. Audits for Member removal in the Guild Admin area now include links to the profile of the user whom was removed.
  3. Runes of Magic class icons have been added

Fixes

  1. A minor application display issue has been fixed.
  2. The LoTRO Server status widget has been fixed for changes made to the page by Turbine
  3. An issue which would lead to events being orphaned and not able to be deleted in Rapid Raid has been fixed
  4. An issue causing a character to not show on a user’s account after they were removed from a guild has been resolved
  5. The Death Knight icon has been updated to the current version replacing the beta one that had been used
  6. An issue effecting resubscpriptions for 6 month and 12 month subscriptions has been resolved
  7. Warhammer server status has been fixed
  8. Table BBCode rendering in News posts has been fixed
  9. A color issue in Aion Item Hovers in certain Aion templates has been fixed
  10. An issue effecting a very small number of password resets causing the page to fail has been fixed
  11. The Lytebox now works on pages with the Calendar Widget in Google Chrome
  12. An issue causing RSS feeds to display question mark characters has been fixed

We are aware that certaion Aion Legions are not importing properly. We had a fix for it in this release. However, late in testing we found out the fix was only partial and actually caused an issue with some Legions that are currently working. So, we’ve gone back to the drawing board and hope to have a full fix in 6.9.5.

Enjoy!
Stephen

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Version 6.9.3 “Weekly” Release 2

December 17th, 2009

Well, it took us 2 weeks to get our second “Weekly” release out, but here we are with some solid updates.   The new release process is allowing us to more efficiently work on larger features in parallel with these weekly releases so we’ll be dropping a larger release with awesome functionality in January.  We’ll have more weekly releases in early January.

Here are the Release Notes for 6.9.3:

Feature Enhancements

  1. There is now an Admin option for Rapid Raid to allow you to disable the ‘Tentative’ signup option. For those of you who have trouble with working this into your workflow this should solve that issue.
  2. The Site Owner (Primary Admin) now shows at the top of the Roles page. Previously with Roles the Primary Admin was sort of left out. Now the page properly describes their Admin status.
  3. We now have Aion item hovers coming from AionDatabase.com. The primary advantage of this new functionality and BBCode is that you only need the Item Name and do not need a link from another site. The following BBCode is available for this functionality: [aiondbitem]Item Name[/aiondbitem]

Addon Updates

  1. The Raid Tracker mod has been updated with better detection for Gunship Battle and Saurfang. The update is on the GLMods site.

Other Changes & Fixes

  1. Sorting by Rank on the Member roster page now works properly.
  2. There is now a Santa Hat on our Logo
  3. A user’s edit for an image they uploaded will now be properly saved
  4. When a user imports into an existing raid the page will now retain the raid info when moving to the eqDKP compatible import.
  5. All MP3s in the file library will now show on the homepage music dropdown instead of just the most recently uploaded
  6. Lotro Itemstats have been fixed to work with changes that Turbine made to the Lorebook
  7. The Ward of Elements is now available for EQ2 Raid Progression

Enjoy!
Stephen & The Guild Launch Team

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Posted in Development, Games, New Stuff, Release Notes | 6 Comments »

Warcraft Patch 3.3 Addon Updates

December 7th, 2009

We’ve finished our updates for our 13 World of Warcraft addons which include DKPmon and all its flavors of DKP, the Guild Launch Raid Tracker, the Guild Launch Profiler and the Guild Launch Rapid Raid snapshot DKP mod. These mods should now work with the WoW 3.3 patch.

More details are on our support forum and on our GL Mods site.

If after 3.3 launches you encounter any issues please post on our support site or send us an email at support@guildlaunch.com.

-Stephen

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New Weekly Updates: v6.9.2 Mirkwood & More

December 4th, 2009

When Guild Launch first went live 3 years ago we had a new release available every 2 weeks. This pattern held true for about 2 and a half years. Over time our features have gotten larger, our user base has gotten larger and our desire to deliver even more awesomeness per major release has grown.

Due to this our major release schedule has grown to more like 5 weeks with a smaller release between. This was partly due to how we handled scheduling, code release and our change management internally. Over the last few weeks we’ve tweaked our internal processes to allow a bit more flexibility in our releases and to allow us to more efficiently work on large feature changes seperately from others. So, we can now get back to a more regular release of smaller changes and allow the larger feature releases to take the time they need to get polished and properly kick ass.

So, starting this week we are going to be releasing minor releases weekly. These weekly releases will not include major features. They also may not be exactly weekly, depending on Holidays and timing of our major releases, but they will weekly for all intents and purposes. These smaller releases will only include Templates, Bug Fixes, Small Enhancements and items like Raid Progression and Game Tools Updates. These releases will all be minor point releases and the next one is 6.9.2 and the one after is 6.9.3, etc. When we have a feature release we will name it 6.10 or if it is large enough 7.0 the weekly release after that would be 6.10.1, 6.10.2, 6.10.3 or 7.0.1, 7.0.2, 7.0.3 respectively. This way our numbering looks more like typical software release schedule numbering and the meaning of the numbers is more in line with typical release schedules.

Version 6.9.2 Changes and Additions

Templates

  1. A new LoTRO Siege of Mirkwood Template is now available

Raid Progression

  1.  A fix has been made so that the Everquest raid progression which was added in the 6.9 release will actually show.
  2. World of Warcraft 3.3 Raid Progression info has been added for Icecrown Citadel. This includes 10 man, 25 man and their heroic versions.

Other Changes and Fixes

  1. Aion Imports for some guilds that were previously reporting not being able to find the guild on AionOnline.com should now work. Previously the guild search was not finding the guild due to paging in the search. We now use a narrower search that should find all guilds properly.
  2. Item ID based item hovers are now properly working on the Item list, Character DKP page and Rapid Raid Widget
  3. A link to the Search page for the Aion guild on the AionOnline.com site is now at the bottom of the Roster page.
  4. The current game and server for the guild will now be prepopulated on the charater info section of a guild application (if you have the feature enabled)
  5. A bug has been fixed for some servers with dashes in their names and the character info gathering for guild applications
  6. A bug has been fixed for some servers with apostrophes in their names and the character info gathering for guild applications
  7. A buyer must now be selected when entering a rapid raid item. Previously if no buyer were selected the item would seem to disappear, but would still be attributed to the user.

Enjoy!
Stephen

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Posted in 6.9, Development, Games, Lord of the Rings Online, New Stuff, Patch 3.3, Release Notes, Siege of Mirkwood, World of Warcraft | No Comments »

Lord of the Rings Online Siege of Mirkwood

December 1st, 2009

Today, Dec. 1st, Turbine has launched Lord of the Rings Online: Siege of Mirkwood. I wanted to update everyone on our status for new features related to Siege of Mirkwood. Here it goes:

New Template

Later this week we will be releasing a new template for LoTRO styled after graphical elements of Siege of Mirkwood.

Raid Progression

Next week we will be releasing Raid Progression info for Siege of Mirkwood.

Further Into the Future

We have other updates for LoTRO upcoming as well in the new year including updates to roster imports and more!

Enjoy!
Stephen

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