Since the accounts update going live last weekend we've received some great feedback from you guys, and based on that we have made a few changes to how the new accounts work with your guild site.

Changing Users Passwords
An issue several users raised to us about the account changes was their lack of being able to edit their members login details. After hearing your feedback we realize this was a mistake to remove, so we have re-enabled this feature.

If you have member admin priviledges on your site, when you edit a member who belongs to your site you have the option to also edit their login details (providing they only belong to your guild):




If you have invited a member to your site, but they have not created an account yet, you now also have the option to change their invitation details (which can be useful if the member typo'd their email, or for some reason are unable to receive emails from us at that address and wish to use a different email):



This works very similarly to how it did prior to the account change, with the same caveat that you may only modify users login details who belong to your guild and your guild only.

Remember Me
The remember me feature of the login works using cookies to keep you logged in when you return to your guild site. This should only be used on your own personal computers, as using this in computer cafes or labs can compromise your account if you forget to logout (as another user may then visit your guild site from that computer and still be logged in as you).

We enhanced the remember me to be more secure, using a token for remembering, however this unfortunately had two issues which caused it to sometimes not work. Both of these issues have now been corrected, if you notice the remember me failing to remember you still please report the issue to our help & support site

Cheers,

This weekend we are making several changes to how accounts work with MMO Guildsites.

8TASP ID
The first change is your MMO Guildsites account is now referred to as your 8TASP ID. This is to support future MMO Gaming webapps we plan to launch that will complement MMO Guildsites. If you continue using only MMO Guildsites you should notice no change other then what its referred to as.

Passwords & Resets
Password resets are now improved to email you a link when you do a reset, and clicking that link then takes you to your guild where you can choose a new password, upon which you will then be logged in.

In addition, passwords now have a minimum length of 6 characters. If your password was previously less than 6 characters you should be prompted to do a password reset, and can then choose a new password; if your password was already 6 characters or more no action is needed.

Inviting Members
To invite members to your guild you no longer need to create an account for them, instead you simply enter their email and they will be emailed a link they can follow to then create an account with your guild. This can be done from the members section of your site if you have the members admin permission.

In addition, if you invite an existing member who was flagged as inactive or deleted, they will then become active. This works much like guildapps, where if you approve an app for an existing member they become active, and is designed to help in situations where a member left the guild and came back later, unaware they already had an account and tried to apply again or ask for an invite.

Unlocking Accounts
For your security, your account gets locked after a certain amount of failed login attempts. Unlocking your account happens automatically if you wait out the period, but we now also email you a link you can follow if your account gets locked you can click on to unlock it.

Modifying your Account
When making some changes to your account, you must confirm your password for extra security. This only applies when changing your 8TASP ID settings (email, password, time zone and date of birth), changes to other data such as your profile or member info does not require your password.

That's all for this update, if you notice any issues with the new account system please let us know by sending an email to staff@mmoguildsites.com or by making a post on our support site at http://getsatisfaction.com/mmoguildsites

It's been a busy few weeks for us, but today we have a new update going live adding new features and enhancements =)

Performance Updates
We view speed as a feature and have always aimed to keep MMO Guildsites running as fast as possible. Over the past few weeks we've made a lot of changes to improve performance even further, including migrating to new hardware (intel's new westmere platform), switching web servers from Apache to the faster Nginx, further tuning our database, and enhancing all potentially slow running actions (such as processing images) to run in the background and not block requests.

After all these changes we feel now would be a good time to ask how you guys feel the site is performing? Everything looks good in our logs, with requests being sent out at great speeds, however real user experience can vary a fair amount, especially for our customers further away in europe or australia; so share your experiences with us, how has the site been running for you?

Groups Update
The groups section has received quite a few enhancements, including in-place editing and the audit logs (and will now show up in "What's New"). Additionally, we have a new feature for the Groups, a Wall:



Seeing how groups are used, and that for the most part they represent smaller teams within a guild (such as raiding or arena teams), we felt the discussions may be overkill in most cases, and a shout-style wall would be more appropriate, so you can get some quick discussion with others in your team going. The wall also includes notifications for new discussions and members who join, making it easier to see what's new.

If you're using groups, let us know how you feel about the new wall feature; is it helpful, missing features, or are there any enhancements you'd like to see for it?

User Timezones
One of our more requested features, User Timezones, is now live. If you go to "My Account", and then the "Account" tab, you can set a timezone for yourself. This will override timezones set on sites, allowing users to see times for events and other content in their own timezone.

Improved Ventrilo, Teamspeak and RSS Blocks
The Ventrilo and Teamspeak blocks previously worked by reading the info you enter and being cached. A script then ran every 20 minutes updating the cache for all the voice blocks. This method meant that information from the voice blocks were often 20+ minutes out of date, and as we have more active sites, the amount of blocks to be updated grows and the script takes longer to complete, making the info even further out of date.

These have been changed now, so that when you view your site, it checks if a cache exists for the voice blocks, and if not an ajax request is made to fetch the status, which then gets cached for 5 minutes. This means the voice blocks should now show much more recent information and be a little more useful =) The RSS blocks were updated to also use this new method as well.

In addition, for TeamSpeak, the "Unknowns" that would appear in the status blocks are now hidden, as these appeared to mostly be scripts checking status and not users.


That's all for this update, we hope you're enjoying your summer =)

As some of you may have noticed, we have had a banner on our home page for the Looking For Group Expo (LFGX) for a few weeks now. What is LFGX? It's a three-day exhibition for massively multiplayer online games, virtual worlds and everything related to MMOs.

We ourselves are gamers and love gaming, and an expo specifically for MMO fans is an event we wanted to help get the word out for. Thanks to the nice folks running the event, they have given us 25 free passes to hand out as well!

Anyone interested in attending LFGX and wants a free pass, simply post a comment here. On May 21st we'll hand out the passes. (if there are more than 25 users wanting passes we'll do a raffle).

Looking For Group Expo is on June 25-27th at the Minneapolis Convention Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

One of our most requested features is now live, email notifications! =)

Email notifications are now enabled for private messages. Members now have notification preferences in their My Account settings, allowing them to choose if they want to receive emails for new private messages (defaults to true).



This feature should help to make it easier to get important information out to your members, as private messaging them on the site will now also notify them via email.

* note that email notifications are only sent out to members whom are active (not deleted), have verified their account (which you are prompted to do when you first login) and have the email notifications preference set to true.

For World of Warcraft guilds which use www.webdkp.com, rather then our built-in DKP system, a page for this is available on your site =)

If you go to your-site.mmoguildsites.com/wow/webdkp, you should see your webDKP data shown. If it is not shown, ensure that your guild's name and server are set correctly in the Settings tab of your Site Admin.



Tip: if you use webDKP you can go to the Navigation tab of your Site Admin and add a new link, call it "webDKP" and point it to /wow/webdkp, and then it should be easy to navigate to for your members

For this week's update we're launching a bit of an experiment, and trying out Get Satisfaction as a potential provider for our help and support.

What is Get Satisfaction?
Get Satisfaction describes itself as "Community-powered support" and is in use by a growing number of popular websites. It acts as an information hub where you can post questions, submit ideas or report problems.



One of the main benefits of Get Satisfaction is often asked questions such as say, how to setup a domain name or reset a password, are public, and answers provided by us (or other users) can help those having trouble find a solution faster. In addition, the site is very social and allows us to gather more information about ideas users want to see implemented, or troubles they may be having.

Help Integration
To make this new help information more accessible there is a new help block you can add to your site from the Layout tab of your Site Admin. The help block allows users to do a search, such as "how do I reset my password", and it will search our Get Satisfaction page for matching questions and display them within the block. The help block could be very helpful for your new users, especially once our help gets filled up with more questions and answers.



In addition to the help block you can add to your guild site, we've integrated the help into the www.mmoguildsites.com website as well, so for example while setting up your domain name in the Site Admin you could quickly search for help on domains right from that page.



Share Your Opinion
Again, this is a bit of an experiment to see if this type of help and support would be useful. If you have a moment try it out and let us know what you think! =)

http://getsatisfaction.com/mmoguildsites

Today's update adds a few goodies for Allods Online and Star Trek Online guilds, as well as some extras =)

Allods Online Themes

Theme Details: Oaloe Dark, Oaloe Light

Allods Online Item Tooltips
Item Tooltips for Allods Online are now integrated throughout the site, and will show information in the bank and dkp sections. You can also create an item tooltip anywhere with the [item] bbcode tag, such as [item]Hammer of Uplifting Dreams[/item], or by linking to content on http://allodsdatabase.com.



Login Block
There is now a login block you can add to your site. Adding the login block removes the user status bar, which along with the main menu block that removes the main menu bar, allows you to further customize your site's layout by moving top information to the side columns.



Star Trek Online Server Status
For Star Trek Online guilds, there is now a server status block you can add to your site which will show the status of the game's server.

Code Cleanup: CSS & Game Resources
We rewrote a lot of our css and scripts which fetch external game resources as part of this update. This resolved a few small bugs which had existed, such as webkit browsers (chrome, safari) hiding 1px of our side column, and should make features such as the item tooltips and server status blocks work a little nicer. If you notice any issues after these changes please let us know.

Today's update adds two new blocks to the site, along with a few tweaks =)

Twitter Block
If your guild has it's own twitter account, there is now a twitter block you can add to your site to display your tweets; just supply your twitter username. You can add this block from the layout tab of your site admin.



TeamSpeak 3 Block
As TeamSpeak 3 works differently and supports quite a few different features from TS2, we've added a new TeamSpeak 3 block. You can add this block from the layout tab of your site admin.



Voice Blocks to Free Plan
The Ventrilo, TeamSpeak 2 and TeamSpeak 3 blocks are now part of our Free plan =)

Accepting Guildapps Tweak
Currently, when you accept a guildapp it checks if there already exists a member on your site with the same email, and if so it does nothing (since they already have an account on your site); this was causing some confusion though as members would apply, forgetting they already had an account with the site that was flagged as inactive or deleted. So to try and avoid this, when you accept a guildapp now if there already exists a member on your site with that email, it will flag them as active.

Improved Members Admin Search
To make it easier to find existing members who may be inactive or deleted we've updated the live search on the members page to include a few new features. Users with the Members Admin permission can now search for members by email and account name, and can also search status by Active, Inactive or Deleted.



Allods Online Item Tooltips
Some initial integration with http://allodsdatabase.com is now live, allowing you to create tooltips by linking to content on http://allodsdatabase.com. More detailed integration with bbcode, bank and raid items is coming with the next update, along with a few Allods Online themes =)

One of our goals for twenty-ten is to be more social, and to kick that off we've launched a facebook fan page for MMO Guildsites this weekend. The fan page provides us a more interactive way to socialize with you all than this blog, and we'll also be using it to post some interesting content such as tips and tricks with our features and showcases for guild sites.

With Valentine's Day just around the corner and our new fan page ready, what better time for a contest? =)

Valentine's Facebook Contest
For this contest simply become a fan of MMO Guildsites on Facebook to have your chance to win a $50 gift card from Amazon. Contest ends February 14th.

this contest is open to anyone with an MMO Guildsites account (not just site owners as with most of our contests), so feel free to pass the message on to your guild members if you feel they would be interested =)

Update: the contest has now ended, congrats to our winner Esther Matut! =)