I'm looking for a few testers to help hunt down any bugs with the Realtime game alerting system that I'm working on.

The aim is to increase participation in realtime games by automatically notifying players when a new realtime game has been created. This will be done via a small popup message (growl) when you visit the site or load any page.

Please post in this thread if you are interested.

sure...when i get back from lunch.

back...lets do it.

I'm in

I would be happy to test as well, although I haven't been on a lot recently.

This is up and running now. You should see notifications whenever a realtime game is posted.

Any problems or suggestions let me know.

Do you need more testers?

Sure I added you in EN.

So this only alerts when a game is created?  Can it do the same for when it's your turn in a RT game?  Preferably without needing to load a page?

It could do... the problem I see with that is if you have multiple browser windows open you will get separate alerts in each one - I don't think there's a way around this and I think it would be quite annoying.

PS I'm reaching here with that last request just because I haven't been able to find anything wrong with the alerts!

(Also I assume there will be a preference to disable this (default of on would be good I think)?)

tom wrote:

It could do... the problem I see with that is if you have multiple browser windows open you will get separate alerts in each one - I don't think there's a way around this and I think it would be quite annoying.

Same thing occurred with the old chat system (oh how I miss the ), didn't seem too annoying.  Could the alert go away after a bit of time perhaps (or check to see if turn was completed, then could go away in the other tabs, and not duplicate)?

Fair point - there's just a few hurdles in terms of synchonizing the timers between the open tabs. There would be a check interval - e.g. once per minute, need to make sure that all the tabs check at the same time otherwise you could have alerts firing off in the different tabs at different times. It might be workable, it might not I need to play with it I think. Currently the alerts are set to automatically close after 10 secs. I think I might lower this to 5s.

You can turn off the alerts on your notifications page if you like.

tom wrote:

You can turn off the alerts on your notifications page if you like.

Notifications and Layout pages look bad :)  I think something happened to them (ie the radio buttons as options run together, and are buttons rather than the drop down(?) that used to be there).

Ah yes fixed thanks.

i know these are showing up when i refresh a page, but not sure they're showing up if i haven't refreshed (not sure if that's what you're wanting or not)..

No they don't do that yet. I'm working on an update which will do that.

This will also allow notifications when it's your turn.

These are pretty nice.  Could there be (at the risk of there being too many) a notification for all real-time games at logon.  That is see the growl that was sent 15 minutes ago when the real-time game was created even though you just logged on.

I think this might encourage real-time play.

You should see this behavior already - you will be notified about any open realtime games when you access any page - even if it was started an hour ago.

okay, then last night the only growl I saw was when a real-time game was started, the message appeared for about  2 minutes in the upper right and then went away.  The message displayed about 3 minutes after the game was created.  This has been the only growl I have seen even though there have been open tables when I check the game list.