News & Opinion
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News & Opinion
Emails, Aol and My Thinning Hair
It's come to my attention that a small percentage of users haven't been getting emails from Find Gamers. This affects notifications about messages from other users and password reset information. After doing some digging and subsequently pulling the hair out of my head in repeated frustration, I discovered that AOL is blocking those emails. Ironically enough they own several hosting companies where other user's email domains reside as well. So those emails aren't reaching users either.
Ironically Google Gmail is fine. Also all emails going to domains hosted by Google are getting through without a problem. For that matter pretty much everyone else is getting their email as well. Too bad Google doesn't have a hair restoration product to save me from AOL, they seem to have everything else at the moment.
Still - this is pretty frustrating for me since it keeps a couple dozen of you from getting email notifications from Find Gamers. I've contacted the AOL postmaster service but they blame somebody else. The somebody else blames guess who... somebody else and the circle of blame continues. I am trying a few tricks on my end and our hosting provider is looking into solutions too. However if nothing gets fixed soon I'll probably start sending the automated messages through a 3rd party email provider like Mail Chimp or something similar because ironically AOL doesn't block them.
So I'll try to keep everyone up to date on this issue and hopefully have an update for you next week. Keep an eye on this new entry for new information.
UPDATE (8/4/15)
It looks as though we're finally got AOL, MSN and Hotmail to accept emails. Holding onto my `woot` until I'm certain.
UPDATE (8/18/15)
99.999% of all emails are now reaching users. Some occasional password resets were not. A new fix is in place that should catch those and send them correctly. All of the bad emails end up in my inbox but remember that you can send feedback without being logged if you continue to have trouble.
Find Gamers Attacked But No Critical
Last week on 5-27 we were attacked by a group that identified themselves as Muslim Corporation Cyber, a pro-palestinian hacker group. What they have against gamers - who knows, maybe they don't like dice or something.
We were down for days waiting on our provider Hostgator to do a security analysis AND we're still waiting for them to get around to it.
- It doesn't appear the database was touched, however all site and security passwords were changed within hours of the breach.
- However as a safety precaution All User's Passwords have been scrambled.
- This means everybody including myself have to use the password recovery process to get back into their accounts.
- It works fine, I just used it to recover my own account.
- If you have problems, send feedback.
- If you have other questions, leave them as comments in this new article.
New 3d miniatures are on the horizon
David Lowry over at Club Fantasci has an interesting find on a new 3d miniatures company called Imagine 3D Miniatures. It's worth the look.
I wonder if in the next few years we'll see complaints from sculptors and miniatures companies like Reaper in the same way buggy manufacturers complained about automobiles. Either way this is the start of a change in miniatures that will revolutionize gaming for all forms of the tabletop experience.
You can read his write-up on the Imagine 3D Miniatures and a lot more here at Club Fantasci.
Sly Flourish on Finding Players
Our goal here is to help tabletop gamers find new friends and bringing them together to enjoy the fun of the tabletop gaming experience. It is a great stress reliever and good social experience for many folks, giving them a break from the real world. Occasionally we like to post parts of articles from other web sites who have some good advice for us. Mike Shea, also known as Sly Flourish wrote an article a couple of years ago that continues to be a good source of ideas. His short article on Finding Players using a variety of sources is solid and practical. I recommend not only reading his suggestions but giving them a try, the results might surprise you.
Of all the difficulties facing your D&D game, the greatest will always be finding and keeping a great group of players. Some groups have managed to stay together living through adventures for decades. Most of us, however, have to work actively to build and keep our groups going as long as we can. The demands of our time, our commitments to family and work, and where we live often gets in the way of us forming and maintaining a regular group.
As times change, so change the ways we can bring players to our table. Today we're going to look at a few ways you might find players and get them playing D&D at your table.
You can find the entire article here at the Sly Flourish website along with a lot of other good.
Upgrade Complete
The Find Gamers site has been completed. Some users might have minor issues with graphics until their browser cache has been cleared. I'm working on forcing that on my end, most browser caches should clear in about a minute.
If you have any problems with the upgrade, please let me know through Feedback.
A few things to be aware of:
- You now have a Sent box in Messaging. It'll allow you to remember what you've said in previous messages.
- There is a more robust editor that uses Markup for sending messages and for use in the description of Events, Groups and your Gamer Bio.
- Speaking of Gamer Bio, there are a lot of new features in it. Have you noticed the new Roleplaying Preferences?
- Online Gamers will want to set their time zone. It'll help you to know the time difference between yourself and other Online Gamers.
- Fonts too small? Don't like the menu on the side bar? Change it in Website Configuration in your Gamer Profile.
- Online Groups listings are finally working. Woot!
- You can see the Gamer Bio of anyone who has sent you a message. Click the down arrow next to reply and you'll see the option.
Other things to know:
- Facebook Login is disabled for the moment. Facebook has redesigned their API, so it's forcing a lot of changes behind the scenes. (Fixed)
- Activity Schedules for Events & Conventions are also disabled. It wasn't robust enough in the past, so I want to make it a lot better than before.
- A bug was reported that only seems to be affecting Inbox messaging. It only occurs in IE, so until the fix happens (hopefully today), try using Chrome or Firefox instead. (Fixed)