With the help of tyhana and xyphus, I have added four new games to the site lately: Wizards of Mickey, Fight Klub, Sailor Moon CCG, and Power Rangers CCG.

Wizards of Mickey at Trade Cards Online

Fight Klub at Trade Cards Online

Sailor Moon at Trade Cards Online

Power Rangers at Trade Cards Online

A user has requested an option for the ‘look for trades’ section that nobody had requested as yet, but that makes a lot of sense, so I have implemented it right away: it is the option to show only matches with users who have logged in to the site recently, in the last X days (from 5 to 90). This way you remove matches with not-so-active users who may not respond to your trade offers very promptly, and you can concentrate on the most active users.

It’s been fun creating the templates for the new Naruto card maker. Now Naruto dream cards can have their images automatically generated. All data and details are reflected on the card image, from symbols to rarity, from stats to lore text.

Examples of cards creates with the Naruto card maker

After request from YuGiOh and Naruto fans I have finally added the card numbers as search parameters in our Card Search engine. So now you can search for cards based on their card number for those games in which the number is unique in the whole game so it is meaningful to search for part of the number (it doesn’t make sense to search by number when every single set in the game has a card with the same number, for example 9). The games affected are: Yu-Gi-Oh!, Naruto, Vs. System, Middle Earth, Fullmetal Alchemist, and HorrorClix.

I have re-discovered gravatar.com and found out how easy it is to use it to assign an avatar to every user of my sites. I have chosen wavatars as the default avatars, as they are kind of funny, but expect most users will update them with their own images.

Examples of avatars

I have added the option to pay for a Premium membership by phone. The cost is higher, the availability depends on the country the user is in, and the phone number may be restricted from some phones, but it’s an option and we’ll see if it becomes a popular way to become Premium without a credit card or bank account…

Finally I found a spell checker that was easy to implement and have added it to the sites: to the forums, to the miniature reviews section, and to the discussions for the different sections. I have also set a maximum number of spelling errors that any content submitted to the site may contain, so if you try to post anything with more than 5% of wrong words, the system will give you an error and ask you to run the spell checker. I know it’s not the perfect solution as there are lots of words that are used in the games (in names of cards, for example) which do not appear in the dictionary (specially the Spanish dictionary, used for the Spanish web sites).

Online spell checker at Trade Cards Online

I have created a video tutorial on how to build a deck of cards/miniatures at Trade Cards Online / Miniature Trading. I have set it up as the help page for the deck editing form and I’ll wait for comments on whether people like it, if they think it is not very professional, or if they think on the contrary that it is useful, before I produce more video tutorials about other features of the sites.

I have created a top-level section to list all the tournaments that have taken place on the site. It shows all the tournaments for each game and showcases their winners. You can then access the complete list of participants and their final classification for any of them.

List of all online tournaments in the new Tournaments section

I have restricted the number of messages each user may send to others in a given time. This is to avoid mass spammers sending hundreds of messages before I can stop them. I have set up to a maximum of 5 messages in any given 5 minutes time span. I’ve noticed some users may send legitimate messages more often than that sometimes, but I’ll wait to see if they complain about the new limitation.
I have also blocked messages from being sent multiple times, as when you click twice on the ’send’ button. It was quite annoying to see the same message repeated twice or three times in your list of messages.