Author Archives: Micah

New Feature: Wind back the clock on your campaign

Have you ever had a player edit a page and you’re not sure what they changed? Or, you moved one little thing around and suddenly all your pretty formatting is gone. Unfortunately, you just cannot remember what you changed! So, you spend hours trying to get back to the pristine page you had before you clicked the save button. If only there were a way to wind back the clock to before!

Server downtime for data migration

Our host is moving our servers to a new datacenter, and this means we will have some down time during the migration. It could be as fast as one hour, but conservatively we’re guessing it will be on the order of a a few hours and could be more if we encounter any difficulties.

We’re tentatively scheduling our move for Sunday, January 29 at 06:00EST. We may move the date if circumstances change, but we will try to give some advance warning of when it’s coming.

How PIPA/SOPA threaten your tabletop game

You may have noticed that many websites are shut down and blacked out today. We considered doing something similar but decided against it, since we didn’t want to penalize anyone who needed access to their campaigns in order to do last minute prep for their game. But, rather than sidestep the issue, we wanted to add our voice to the choir calling for action against the PIPA/SOPA bills in the U.S. Congress. Here’s a video that explains it much better than I can, but if you’re interested in how it affects Obsidian Portal directly, read on.

Some random thoughts about email notification

We’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about email notifications and why people do/don’t receive emails in certain situations. The email settings are a little confusing, so I thought I would try to clear things up a bit and ask for feedback at the same time.

The overall goal

What we’re trying to accomplish with the email notifications is pretty straightforward: If someone is making a change to their Obsidian Portal campaign, we assume they want others to know about it. One way is to make some edits, then open up their email and say, “Hey, I made some changes to X, Y, and Z. Go check them out!” Or, we can have the system do it for them. That’s our goal here, to make it simple and straightforward to notify the other members in your campaign that something has changed.

Campaign Map Updates – New Markers and More

The campaign maps have been needing a bit of an overhaul for a while, and I finally got a chance to make a few of the changes I’ve been wanting to do. Over the weekend, I whipped up a couple great additions to the maps, and I think you’ll like them.

General Purpose Markers

Up to now, the only markers you could add to your wiki were for wiki pages. The idea was that you would make a location in your wiki, then link to it from your map. However, as many of you have told us, that’s a little too restrictive. So, we’ve backed off that restriction and made the markers much more general purpose. You can put whatever wiki text you want in there and it will wiki-link to other pages, characters, items, you-name-it. Imagine each marker as a mini wiki page and you get the idea.

Forum Updates: Subforums and Stickies

Over the past week we’ve quietly launched two new forum features: Subforums and Stickies. You can probably guess what they do, but here’s a quick rundown anyway