More Sponsorship Streamlining
We've done a lot over the last 8 months in terms of upgrading and streamlining our sponsorships, and coming up with new products for sponsors. A couple of new systems you may have noticed:
Redirect Frame: Basically, this is a little turnkey system that lets us put a frame at the top of a window, and load a different page in the bottom. Not a spectacular technology in its own right, except that we integrate it with a jillion other little systems and patterns in the Gaia Framework, such as Simple Grant (so we can now grant gold/items when we send users to a sponsor's site). We can easily reskin it quickly so we can use it when sending users to 3rd-party surveys - to help address issues where users get a notice and then freak out because they're taken off of Gaia to a survey of some kind.
Profile Redirects: Currently in development, this will let us take any NPC, and redirect the profile to a page relevant to that NPC. This means that when users click on a sponsored NPC, for example, they won't get taken to an out of date page, a hidden page, or an empty profile -- we'll redirect it to the appropriate sponsored profile. Just a little less confusion that way. It could also mean that if we create Event NPCs, you can get taken to the event page when you try to view their profile. In an ideal world, we'd create a full profile for every NPC we make -- but knowing that this won't be the case with our current resources, this is a good stopgap solution to making it less lame.
Simple Grant Security Improvements: We've made a number of security improvements to our core Simple Grant system. There were a couple of big exploits that a few users decided to take advantage of to be able to get items over and over and over and over again. I took no small amount of joy in turning their user IDs over to our Admins for banning.
Quiz System Improvements: We've upgraded the Quiz System some so that we can do better reporting on surveys, allowing us to finally get results from "write-in" questions (where you actually type in your answer rather than just choosing from a multiple-choice question). Many of you will see this in some Skittles surveys we're running throughout the year to gauge the effectiveness of the campaign.
Scavenger Hunt Prototype: We've been experimenting with "Scavenger Hunts" as a way of spreading a sponsored campaign without having to announce the campaign over and over, in an ongoing attempt to cut down the number of sponsored announcements we do. We used a primitive version of this system for both Harry Potter sponsorship where you hunted down Golden Snitches, and the Sims 3 sponsorship where you hunted down plumbobs. A more secure version of this system will be forthcoming as we do more campaigns.
Sponsored Sig: Lots of users have noticed that we have a lot of sponsored signatures that have been released and floating around (Autos sig, Scion License, Skittles Crazy Cores Badge, Sims 3 Badge, etc.) and they're taking up a lot of space. I built the Sponsored Sig system earlier this year as a way of streamlining and compounding these custom signatures, but unfortunately, the project was hamstrung in the interest of time, and older sigs (Scion License, Autos, Aquarium) were never ported over to the new system. We're going to begin pruning most of these signatures, per users' requests, and eventually extending the system further so that we can improve the user experience. For example, future sigs should line up horizontally, NOT vertically. We should also be able to limit the # of active sigs a user has on at one time. There should also be a central area in the Signature section of your account preferences where you can manage these.
There are a lot more improvements upcoming. Some of them designed to do more interesting / less-intrusive things with sponsorships, some of them designed to make the process faster and more error-free. The benefit to users of all this is that the site can make more money if it takes less time to build sponsorships, that we can avoid announcing every single sponsorship that comes out, and - as we come up with more creative experiences and rewards - we don't have to give out a ton of gold and items all the time to get users to participate in a sponsorship.
Anyhoot, that was all a very serious post, so I'll leave you with this. See you next week!
Community Member
Thanks for making everything better constantly :3