Tha chat rooms are back!

After some thought and consideration, I have reopened the chat rooms, but this time, to prevent all the problems that they caused me in the past, I’m limiting their access to Premium members. This way I expect to avoid kids getting into the chat rooms just to bother others.
I haven’t created a menu option just for the chat rooms because they may not end up being very popular, in which case they can remain as links in other sections without standing in the way.

chat rooms at Trade Cards Online

Look who’s voting!

I had received multiple complaints about people voting unfairly on the site in order to get their own Card Reviews or Decks to get the first position. Even though only registered users with confirmed email addresses can vote, and only once, I have finally decided it makes sense to make the votes public and visible so that everybody knows who has voted for what, when and which value. Now you can list the votes details and sort them by date, user name or value:

Detailed list of votes received by a Card Review

More tables to play online

I had been receiving a lot of requests to increase the number of available tables in the gaming rooms. As the server can only handle a given number of concurrent games, I have decided to increase the number of tables but to limit their use so that Premium members (who pay for the servers and actually maintain the site economically) have preference. Now, when all the ‘normal’ tables are occupied, Premium members will still be able to challenge other players (either Premium or not) to a game.
This way everyone has more chances to be able to play, alleviating the reported problem, and at the same time they are encouraged to become Premium.
Let’s see how this works out…

Small card/miniature image displayed next to cursor

I have added a small feature that can be nice and handy for lists of cards. When you place your cursor over the name of a card, a small image of the card (when available) appears next to your cursor. This way you can identify the card better without having to click on it to open its own page. This new behavior is available in every list of cards: cards in a set, results of a card search, haves and wants of any user, etc.
Of course, the same works for miniatures at Miniature Trading and CambiaMiniaturas.com

A small image of the card being displayed next to the cursor

CCG-style business cards

I have implemented a little fun application that allows users to design and print a “business card” with their data in the form of a collectible card. The user customizes the card by choosing their favorite game, the type of card and providing an optional image, and the system builds and displays the card image.

The card displays the following information about the user:

• Their user name,
• the URL of their public web page,
• the number of references they currently have
• the number of years they have been registered on the site
• the exact date they registered
• any image they want to upload and include in the card

Here are a couple of examples:

Magic-style business card at TCO

Naruto-style business card

Pokemon-style business card

The Trade Cards Online Tournaments have started!

The Online Tournaments are here!

All games played online on our virtual gaming rooms can be part of a monthly tournament where points are granted automatically based on games played, games results and who your opponents are. Check the simple rules here.

Scores and ranking of the Online Yu-Gi-Oh! Tournament

New games: Blue Dragon RPCG and Dragonball CCG

I have added two new games, Blue Dragon Role Playing Card Game and Dragonball CCG. All the features are available immediately for both games: trading, buying and selling, keeping track of your collection, trader binders and collector binders, card reviews, dream cards, deck building, forums, and even online play!
This has been possible thanks to user chibionineko, who gathered all the data for the existing cards and sent also the card scans. He has also volunteered to be our Herald for those new games.

 

Blue Dragon Role Playing Game at Trade Cards Online

Dragonball Collectible Card Game at Trade Cards Online

New online games: World of Warcraft and Digimon Digi-battle

I have added two new online games so now people can play World of Warcraft online and Digimon Digi-battle online. This means there will also be monthly online tournaments for these two games.

 

A game of WoW being played online at Trade Cards Online

Improved performance

I’ll be trying to update this blog more often so that you are aware of all the work I put on the sites.

I have recently rented yet another server (and that makes it six of them!) and this one is much more powerful. It is allowing the site run much more smoothly and is also helping out the gaming server which was also overloaded.

I have also published our Official Trading Guidelines so as to make sure nobody gets cheated when trading through the site.

Earlier this year I have also improved the trade search engine that lets you now filter the matches with other people’s collections by multiple parameters, like a specific game or a single country or a minimum number of matches. This makes a Premium membership even more valuable and hopefully will encourage more people to buy one so that I can afford the new servers and continue serving this community.

We also generated the binder views for collections and for ‘haves’, which let you virtually have your trade binders online so that others can browse them, and also your collection binders for you to explore and organize any time you want.

Card and Miniature Collection Inventory Management

The collection inventory management is finally available.

It took quite longer than expected, mainly because I had to reorganize the code and did a bit of optimization and clean-up. For this reason small bugs may have been introduced so it would be nice if you all could play around a bit and try every portion of the site to report any problems you may find, no matter how small or unimportant.

It seems people are already adding items to their collections on the site, so hopefully it will become a useful and appreciated feature. And I also plan to improve it with checklists, binder-views, deck-availability checks, etc. (check the TO-DO section)