Category Archives: News & Announcements

Behind the Curtain: What We’re Up To

Things have been a little slow lately in terms of feature releases, so I thought I’d pull the curtain back a little and give some insight into what we’re doing. We’re not just sitting here! Note: Some of the stuff below is fairly technical, but don’t be worried if you don’t understand it. You don’t need to understand any of this to actually use Obsidian Portal.

The Do’s & Dont’s of Character Naming

What’s In A Name?

Now and then Obsidian Portal gets email from folks who (with good reason) unfortunately aren’t very excited about being part of our imaginary worlds. While we know that we’re not causing anyone harm, there are a lot of people out there that have no idea what RPG’s are or how they work. By ‘a lot of people’ I basically mean 90% of everyone, ever. So I’m taking time out to write this post as a PSA to our community, and just to give some general advice.

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!

Live from DDXP 2012

Once the seminars begin we will be live blogging coverage via google docs! Each seminar will get it’s own seperate google doc and links are provided below, as well as videos of each seminar and our quick Expeditious Interviews! Enjoy!

Also, please keep in mind that the text transcripts will need some cleaning up as they are full of typos and contain areas where I just couldn’t keep up with the dialogue, and also please take it all in knowing it is not all 100% verbatim ( can only type so fast, also my brain can. I will provide links to video’s of each seminar that DO give the verbatim dialogue at a rate as fast as hotel Wi-Fi can give us.

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.

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.