Today is MMO Guildsites 2nd birthday!

It has been two great years, and we truly appreciate all of the support we have received from you guys in that time! Just like our first birthday we have some great prizes to hand out to you guys, but first a quick recap of the past year.

Our 2nd year has been a blast! We have continued to improve many of our features, including revamps and enhancements to our Theme Editor, Permissions System, DKP section and our Admin Panel to name a few. Some of our features such as our Theme Editor have really grown to the next level and we're quite proud of them. We actually have over 200 public themes created with our Theme Editor now, many of them created by you guys, and many of them are amazing options =)

Along with a lot of polish we have been hard at work adding new features as well. This year saw many new additions including a Videos section that hooks into Youtube, Groups, Progressions, an Awards section to reward members, and recently Guild Alliances allowing cross-site features between guilds; as well as many game specific features such as character profiles for Warhammer and item tooltips for Lord of the Rings Online, and many more small additions.

It really was an amazing 2nd year for us, and like a fine wine (or an MMO!), we continue to improve with age =) Now... onto the prizes!

As we mentioned last month we have purchased 3 Mini Laptops and 5 Amazon Gift Cards to hand out as prizes; these prizes were all randomly drawn and any site owner with an active site was eligible.

1x Blue Acer Aspire One Mini Notebook
Linpus Linux Lite OS
Intel Atom 1.60 GHz Processor
512MB DDR2 Memory
8.9" WSVGA 1024x600 high-brightness Acer CrystalBrite TFT LCD
120GB Hard Drive
High-definition audio
Integrated Acer Crystal Eye webcam
10/100 Mbps Fast Ethernet LAN
Acer InviLink 802.11b/g Wi-Fi Network Card
Laptop Color: Sapphire blue


Winner of the Blue Acer Aspire One: Riders of the Riddermark

1x White Acer Aspire One Mini Notebook
Linpus Linux Lite OS
Intel Atom 1.60 GHz Processor
512MB DDR2 Memory
8.9" WSVGA 1024x600 high-brightness Acer CrystalBrite TFT LCD
8GB NAND flash storage
High-definition audio
Integrated Acer Crystal Eye webcam
10/100 Mbps Fast Ethernet LAN
Acer InviLink 802.11b/g Wi-Fi Network Card
Laptop Color: Seashell White


Winner of the White Acer Aspire One: Highly Offensive

1x Green Asus EEE PC 2G Surf Mini Notebook
Linux Operating System
Intel Mobile CPU
512MB DDR Memory
7" WVGA 800x480 Widescreen LED Backlight LCD
2GB Solid-State Disk
High-definition audio
10/100 Mbps Ethernet LAN
802.11b/g Wi-Fi Network Card
Laptop Color: Lush Green


Winner of the Green Asus EEE PC: [Dark Sentinels] of WAR

5x $40 Amazon Gift Certificates
$40 Gift Certificate - Redeemable for millions of items at http://www.amazon.com


Winner #1 of $40 Amazon Gift Card: The Hard Biscuits
Winner #2 of $40 Amazon Gift Card: Security Guild
Winner #3 of $40 Amazon Gift Card: Apollo
Winner #4 of $40 Amazon Gift Card: Pent Up God
Winner #5 of $40 Amazon Gift Card: LEGENDARY

Congratulations to all the winners! (if you won you will be receiving an email from us)

Those were all the prizes we have to hand out this year, we would have loved to have more, but if you never won keep an eye out next year as we hope to do this again for our 3rd year!

We would again like to thank everyone for choosing us as your guild hosting provider, and allowing us to continue to run this site for 2 years now! The feedback, suggestions and promotional support we receive from you guys is amazing, and we greatly appreciate it! =)

Just in time for Blizzard's Wrath of the Lich King expansion we have several new WoW themes to add to the site!

Lirad (Blue and Green Versions)

Theme Details: Lirad Blue, Lirad Green

Poder (Blue and Green Versions)

Theme Details: Poder Blue, Poder Green

Darc (Yellow and Red Versions)

Theme Details: Darc Yellow, Darc Red

We have had many great WoW themes created by our members, so be sure to browse through the WoW related tags on the themes page. And also remember these can be used as base themes, any of the public themes can be loaded into the Theme Editor and fully customized!

With Lord of the Rings Online's new expansion due this month, we wanted to release some official LOTRO themes to provide more options for spicing up your site!

Eme (Red and Brown Versions)

Theme Details: Eme Red, Eme Brown

Litro (Blue and Grey Versions)

Theme Details: Litro Blue, Litro Grey

Aferia (Brown and Blue Versions)

Theme Details: Aferian Brown, Aferia Blue

Also remember we provide you with a full theme editor you can use to create your own themes and edit any of the existing public ones. The public themes section is a great place to find a base theme which you can then tweak, customize and personalize for your guild; just click the "Load" button next to any theme and it will allow you to fully customize it, and after you're done you can then apply it to your guild site =)

Warhammer is due out next week! To ensure your site remains more stylish then high elves attending a celebration in Ulthuan, we're releasing several warhammer themes today!

Clost (Red and Blue Versions)

Theme Details: Clost Red, Clost Blue

Rugd (White and Beige Versions)

Theme Details: Rugd White, Rugd Beige

Knouh (Blue and Purple Versions)

Theme Details: Knouh Blue, Knouh Purple


There have also been several great warhammer themes created by several of our members also, Kiz has made several with very nice warhammer banners =) Be sure to check theme all out by clicking on the warhammer tag in the themes section.

Also remember we provide you with a full theme editor you can use to create your own themes and edit any of the existing public ones. The public themes section is a great place to find a base theme which you can then tweak, customize and personalize for your guild; just click the "Load" button next to any theme and it will allow you to fully customize it, and after you're done you can then apply it to your guild site =)

Today we are launching MMO Fansites; it is a completely separate site from MMO Guildsites, but we thought it may interest some of you.

MMO Fansites is a place for players of MMORPGs to create and participate in fansites for their favorite games. It is quite similar to MMO Guildsites, but acts more as a blogging platform with extra features and a focus on the game rather then the guild. We actually decided to launch this service as a few members on here were using MMO Guildsites as a fansite for their game =)

If it interests you, head over to www.mmofansites.com and take a peak.

Also a quick note for warhammer fans, we are planning to launch a special warhammer feature for you to play around with next weekend, providing the NDA has dropped ;) Check back here next weekend!

Age of Conan is due out in a few short weeks, and in anticipation we have put live a few new themes. These themes are targeted towards an AoC guildsite, but can be modified with our Theme Editor and used for any game.

Haaz (Blue and Red Versions)

Theme Details: Haaz Blue, Haaz Red

Mire (Blue and Red Versions)

Theme Details: Mire Blue, Mire Red

Vareon (Blue and Brown Versions)

Theme Details: Vareon Blue, Vareon Brown

We hope you enjoy them, and plan to release more themes targeted towards other games in the near future =)

Thanks to Foolproof of Exile on Draka, the addon DKPmon can now also be used with MMO Guildsites =)

DKPmon is a popular addon for managing your DKP in-game, and supports export features through additional addons. Support for MMO Guildsites has been added to the DKPmon_XML addon.

Thanks Foolproof =)

One of our members, Phaye of Collision Force, has created an Addon for WoW to show your DKP in-game and has made it available for anyone to use =)

The addon allows you to quickly load up your DKP from your guild site, and then view and search it in-game, so when items drop you don't have to alt-tab to check your members DKP.

The addon has some nice features, allowing you to:

Search for members to find their DKP
Show a members DKP for each char, and a total for their account.
SHIFT+LEFT CLICK to link a single line to the chat output, similar to linking loot.
RIGHT CLICK any search result and have an export window pop up, allowing you to broadcast the data to a channel you choose.

Here is a few screenshots of the addon:



The addon is up at World of War here: http://wowui.worldofwar.net/?p=mod&m=6387. Instructions are included in the download's readme file.

Thanks Phaye =)

For the past two months we have been hard at work on the theming update. It is the largest update we have done so far, including enhancements to the theme editor, the themes list and visual changes to nearly every page and block on the site. =)

Work is nearly finished on this update now though, the new theme editor itself is complete, and we are just working on updating some of the views to take advantage of it still. We expect to be able to push this live in about another 2 weeks, so in the meantime we wanted to give you another preview of some of the changes coming with the update.

In the first part of the preview, we talked a bit about the new theme editor tool, so here we wanted to show how some of the views for the site will be changed to take advantage of the new options in the theme editor.

To start with here is a few before and after shots of some blocks, using the enmity site and its theme as an example.

Calendar Blocks:
Tables now have two highlights available to them in the theme editor; in the calendar the highlights are used to show "today" and "other month" cells in different colors. Table headers also have their own color options now, and the tables may be colored differently in the side blocks and in the main column.



Server Status Block:
The server status block has received some polish, and uses the "other text" highlight to show the server type and population



Shoutbox Block:
The shoutbox block makes use of the "other text" highlight for the time and "Shout as:" label, which is a subtle change; we hope all the subtle changes add up to a much more polished look and feel for the site




Members List Page:
Along with the blocks we have a before and after for one of our pages, the members list, to give you an idea of how some of the pages are being updated:


*click for full-size image


*click for full-size image

The new members list shows quite a few small UI improvements we have made, members are grouped up by rank in the members list, the top links (Accounts Characters Map) are displayed more like tabs, and the "Other Text" highlight color is in use for labels for some of the members information.


Themes List Page:
And finally, we have a before and after of the new themes list page for www.mmoguildsites.com:


*click for full-size image


*click for full-size image

The themes list page is receiving quite a bit of polish and some new features. The UI has been cleaned up, with searching being moved to the side block, sorting made easier through links and un-necessary content removed. We have also added Tags for themes, which makes finding themes easier and helps you to describe your created themes so others can find them. The top section of www.mmoguildsites.com is receiving a small make-over also, with an improved look and some more information about yourself when you are logged in.

That's about all the information we have to share for this preview, we are working hard and hoping to have this live in about two weeks =) This theming update has slowed down updates to the site recently, but once this is live we will be back to our more frequent updates and new features =)

Update: As we have managed to work around this issue, Hotmail is no longer blocked. =)

Recently, email from our server was not being delivered to most hotmail addresses; this causes quite a few problems since passwords are generated and emailed out to users, and applicants are notified via email when they are accepted into a guild.

We spent many, many hours over the past few weeks attempting to resolve this issue, changing our mail server, searching the web, contacting Microsoft..eventually it came down to this one unhelpful email we received from Microsoft:

From: Microsoft Customer Support
"We have identified that messages from your IP are being filtered based on the recommendations of the SmartScreen filter. SmartScreen is the spam filtering technology developed and operated by Microsoft. SmartScreen is built around the technology of machine learning. SmartScreen's filters are trained to recognize what is spam and what isn't spam. In short, we filter incoming emails that look like spam. I am not able to go into any specific details about what these filters specifically entail, as this would render them useless."

This means that, for whatever reason, their SmartScreen filter thinks that the email we send out is spam and they outright block it. Despite us only using our mail server to send out the email to our users about password resets and accounts, they will not undo this for us; they are content to leave us blocked.

So, we have no more outs other then to block hotmail as an option for email to use with our service. Attempting to create an account or apply for a guild with a hotmail email will now show the error:

"hotmail not allowed, see here"

with it linking to this blog post to explain why we must block it.

We apologize to all of the guilds who were frustrated by this issue in the past few weeks. If anyone has any questions or comments about this feel free to send us an email at staff@mmoguildsites.com or leave a comment here.