I know it's been since May 2006, but, you're still here, ya?

One thing that we're doing lately that I like is adding this chunk of text to the top of our crontab files. It's great beause I always get mixed up on which column is which (why is day of week after the month?):

# +---------------- minute (0 - 59) or */10 for every 10 minutes
# | +------------- hour (0 - 23)
# | | +---------- day of month (1 - 31)
# | | | +------- month (1 - 12)
# | | | | +---- day of week (0 - 7) (Sunday=0 or 7)
# | | | | |
# * * * * * command to be executed

It's handy to have the documentation right where you need it. Also, I'm a fan of any and all ascii art.

I'd promise to post more, but everytime I see that happen on a board, it's a sign that the person will never write again. So no promises, but I'll try. If you have coding questions (PHP, MySQL, JS, CSS, Linux, etc), hit up our union forum, or pm them to me, or comment on a post. I'm busy, but like I said, I'll try.

That's right! It's true! Now you (and your friends) can tag games. Surf on over to any GameSpace and check out the new toolbar under the game boxshot and description. Once you're well on your taggin' way, check out the "Tags" tab in your profile to see your tag katamari-in-progress. Use it to find tags you've already applied. And, hey, in case you missed it: tag stuff and win emblems. Stay tuned for more...

Edt for testing

..are up! What will those crazy guys at GameSpot think up next?

As you may have read elsewhere, we are planning to extend tagging to other types of content in the near future: games, images, unions, reviews, features, the works. Hopefully finding news stories is easier than ever. Look forward to finding games with the same relative ease: want to find all the warcraft games quick? Check the warcraft tag. Want to find all the PS2 action adventure games in a hurry? You get the point...

And also, user videos. You've all seen them. They're everywhere. The video blogs being posted are pretty cool, as is the GameSpot tour by Adam underscore B. (We need to make a weekly GS Development show.)

As always, check out our board. I hear even the more mysterious among developer folk are known to post there.

We finally finished a large round of forum upgrades last night. As you've probably noticed over the last couple of weeks that the forum performance has improved significantly. Now, with last night's upgrade, we have implemented a db clustering system that provides failover management and guaranteed consistency of data between servers. This means that there are several database servers providing data when reading forums instead of just one. This also means that if for some reason one of those servers crashes, like the outage from 04/02/2006, the system will route the requests to the other servers and users will never notice the difference.

Change log:
1) db structure changes to limit the number of queries that use frequently locked tables
2) db structure changes to use innodb for some tables instead of only MyISAM
3) query changes to access data in less complex method
4) caching of additional board information in non-critical procedures
5) implement clustering system; provides failover management and workload distribution
6) misc minor code changes to utilize these new features.

FYI, I'm AFK for a bit due to some pretty heavy stuff going on (my blog has minor details). Hopefully I'll be back dealing the more visible portions of my job by the 2nd week of April. Meanwhile the tech support assistance and my participation in this union is going to be very limited.

The new What's Hot Daily Updates page may look flashy, but many of you have said that it's not useful unless you can filter the results. Information overload, too much unwanted data to sort through. Not anymore! Coming later today (or possibly early tomorrow) is a filtering system for the What's Hot Daily Updates page which will allow you to narrow down the updates by platform and update type. The old Daily Updates page will still remain as is. Enjoy!

UPDATE: This has gone live.

Check out the announcement about Union Status emblems.
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=24391298

Unions will soon have a status associated with them.
Read More...

 Union forums will now show Leader and Officer tags rather than admin & moderator tags. 

Now when you resign from a Union it will ask you to confirm the resignation.  You have 2 minutes to confirm or you'll have to click the resign option again.  This is to stop the abuse of the urls that would auto-resign a union leader, officer, or member without their knowledge until its too late.

You can now track a Union from the Union's home page.  This will list the Union under the "My Unions" tab of your profile.  While right now there is not a lot of benefit coming from this, it does allow you to supplement the max 30 Union membership restriction.  There will be more features in the future that will take advantage of the tracked unions.

You can now report unions to the moderation system if they have attributes (e.g. banner) that violate GameSpot's TOS.  You can report the Union banner, avatar, name, long description, and short description.  The Union's setup is considered the responsibility of the Union leader so any items that have been determined to be against the GameSpot TOS will go against the Union leader.  We will later be adding more enhancements to this to ensure that a Union leader doesn't get banned/suspended without a new leader taking their place.

Its a sneak peak so you'll have to click inside to see...

I know you all are going to be happy about this one.  Check out the new My Unions tab in your profile.  There'll be an official announcement on the forum's frontdoor after lunch..  FYI, some people may need to update their profile banner since there are now more tabs.

FYI, you can now report abuse from the game boards.  I launched this code about 5 minutes ago...

I think I've got this working again.  Looks like it was accidentally using cached data rather than the current data when it was updating the status.    We'll see tomorrow or Monday if it really works.

Since I'm up so late to run the TV.com conversion, I'm also fixing contacts tonight so you may see some shifts in that.  Basically, if you're watching someone who is watching you, but you're not friends, that will be fixed.  It will also fix if you are friends but neither are watching each other.  Sounds confusing, but it works.  And of course I've made a backup just in case... hehe

I don't know how many of you noticed this or not, but you can now send PMs from GameSpot to users who are browsing MP3.com & TV.com (well, TV.com soon).  As you probably already know, your account works on all three sites.  Now the PMs can be read from any.  This way you won't miss out on something someone wants to tell you!  While there are probably going to be some bugs to work out on this (I just know someone is going to say "MP3 says I have 2 new messages and GameSpot says I have 4 ... can't gamespot figure this stuff out..."), I think this is a pretty cool new feature.  At the moment it only works sending between MP3 & GameSpot.  You can read messages sent from TV.com but any message sent back will only be able to be read by that user on GameSpot or MP3.  TV.com will be getting the site update necessary in about a week or so.  (Keep an eye out for that change.  It'll be awesome.)

Miss the days when GameSpot would e-mail you every night, letting you know which of your tracked games were updated the day before? Fear not! The tracked update e-mails will be making their re-appearance this week. You can set whether you'd like to receive them or not by visiting the 'Email' tab of the Preferences pop-up. Happy gamespotting!

A sneak peak at a new (yet old) forum feature.