What other people think really shouldn’t matter, but sometimes it actually does. Especially when it comes to your work. That’s why we’ve created a new feature that allows you to add comments and ratings to any of your Flash movies. We’re all about getting better data so this is a way to get it straight from your audience.
Here’s an example of a stand alone rating bar. You could put this anywhere in your Flash movie to have your visitors rate your game, animation, or video. Or you could just create a rating bar to rate things like your blog entries, your website, a picture, or maybe even your MySpace profile. Be creative! (Download this widget)
And here’s an example of a simple comment form.
Both of these examples could have been combined into one SWF or used seperately like we’ve done here. Either way we’ve set it up so that all of the ratings and comments are for one MochiBot. You can view the results here.
There are two ways you can get started using this new feature. One is to just download one of the examples we’ve created and then copy and paste the example movie clip to your FLA. The second option is to create your own comments and rating interface and just tie it in with our API.
We’ve opened up a new forum just for this feature. Once you create a rating and comment interface then feel free to post your example in our forum or submit one for everyone else to use.
Have fun with this and please let us know what you think so that we can improve on this new feature. Thanks!
We just pushed a minor build today to make a few tweaks to the system. Some of the interface changes you’ll notice are as follow:
Uniques are back in the SWF Detail page. They’re in both the yellow Overview section and the SWF Detail graph (see below). The number of uniques in the graph will be displayed in blue and the number of views in red.
A lot of people asked us to check the MochiBot Ranking by default so we did it.
We’ve just pushed a new build over the weekend that adds a couple new features. One is the addition of SWF categories. This will help determine if the Flash movie you’re tracking is a game, animation, video, etc. We created these categories because the second feature we added was SWF Rankings and we needed to categorize the SWFs to properly rank them against each other. Having your SWF ranked is optional because the rank of your SWF will be available for the public to see in a weekly listing of top Flash movies. We won’t be releasing the listing of top Flash movies for a while because it’s going to take some time for people to get their SWFs properly categorized.
One of the reasons why we created the rankings is to help give developers a better idea of how their Flash movies perform in comparison to others around the web. Another reason is also to help our developers get some more recognition by driving traffic to their sites. Along with each ranked SWF will be a field for you to put the link where you want to send people to view your Flash movie. Our job is to make the most of the developers we work with so this is just another way we’re trying to do that.
Both of these new features can be found when you create a new MochiBot or when you edit one that you already created. The edit button for your MochiBot is now more conveniently placed on the SWF Detail page next to the title of your SWF.
In addition to the new features we also made a fix to the Dashboard graphing feature so now the checkboxes properly update the graph.
We just released a new build last night that dramatically increased the speed of the reports. The compromise that we had to make was to make all of the reports reflect the previous day’s traffic (in US Pacific Standard Time) instead of the past 24 hours. Now when you create a new MochiBot and test it the traffic results won’t be immediately available. This will result in some blind testing but we’ll work on a way to address this issue. We’re also working on bringing back the Past 24 Hours report so don’t worry them being forgotten.
We hope that these improvements make your MochiBot experience more enjoyable. We’re working hard to make MochiBot the best Flash tracking tool out there so leave us some feedback and let us know how we’re doing.
I’m happy to say that we finally have uniques back in the system. They were taken out a few months ago because it was taking way too long for the information to be calculated. This was due to the unexpected growth that we got early on. We’re processing several million hits a day from all the SWFs out there so the amount of data we had to sift through was just too great. But thanks to Bob’s genius we’ve managed to get uniques back into the system on the Traffic Report.
We also made a few cosmetic changes to the Dashboard and the SWF Detail page in order to make the interface a bit more efficient.
We’ve also fixed a bug that was in the MochiBot code which was causing an undeclared variable error message to appear in the development environment. If you have this problem then just go to the SWF Detail page to get the new MochiBot code for your SWF.
As always, let us know what you think of the changes that have been made. mail@mochibot.com
Yes, it’s another build. There are some bug fixes in this build, but more importantly we wanted to see how well our new Shared Stats feature would work. A lot of users have been asking us for a way to share their MochiBot stats with other people without having to give out any account information so we put the Shared Stats feature together to satisfy this need. Here are some details about this build:
Shared Stats - You can now create unique access URLs to share with different people. Each URL will have a log of its own to tell you how many times it was used, when it was last accessed, and by what IP address. It’s a great feature to share with clients or to just brag about how popular your Flash is. We still need to polish the feature a bit, but we wanted to get your feedback first to make sure we’re on the right track. Here are some screenshots of what you’ll see:
Create a new access URL from the SWF Detail page:
Shared stats log:
Please let us know what you think about the new Shared Stats feature via email, blog, or forum.
We just pushed out a build today to address some bugs and add a couple minor features. They are as follow:
Email preferences - We added a new section to the Account Settings page to manage the emails that you get from us. We’ve only sent out about one or two emails to everyone in the past four months, but I sometimes hate receiving unsolicited emails so we added this feature to avoid irritating anyone. It’s all about the karma.
Traffic report bug fix - There was a problem with the totals not adding up in the Traffic Report if you stayed on the page and kept hitting the refresh button. I doubt that many of you do this, but it was nice for the one guy who found it to report the bug. Please continue to report bugs if you run into them. Especially for those of you who do crazy things with the site.
That’s a pretty short list, but there were other changes that we made behind the scenes that will improve the performance of the site.
Our next build will have a few more cool features that you all have been asking for. The email preferences page that we added to this build will accommodate a way for you to subscribe to daily, weekly, and monthly emails with your stats delivered right to your doorstep. We’ll also release a way to share your SWF stats with other people (i.e., clients, friends, people you want to brag to, etc.) so that you don’t have to give out your account info.
That’s it for now. I hope you guys are building some cool things to track!
We’re back from a busy (and fun) week in Anaheim at the Macromedia MAX conference. We managed to squeeze in some work this past week so here’s a list of the changes you’ll be seeing on the site:
Top Hosts Report - This new report will show you a history of how your SWFs have spread to their most active hosts.
Formatted numbers - This may not seem like a big deal, but we’re happy to have it in the site now.
Total Hosts - The SWF Detail page now shows the total number of hosts your SWF has spread across.
Cosmetic changes - We’re always working to clean up the interface so this is pretty much becoming a standard item in each build.
The adoption of the Flash 8 player has been picking up steam and one of the biggest effects on Flash developers has been related to the Flash 8 player security model. The issue we’ve seen most often has been the warning message that is presented to users when playing a SWF locally with MochiBot in it. In order to address this issue we’ve released a new version of the MochiBot code along with some improvements to the core SWF. The new MochiBot code will prevent MochiBot from tracking local views when the networking privelege is not enabled. If you want to enable networking priveleges in your Flash content you must either publish with Flash 8 or use the Local Content Updater that Macromedia provides.
Now on to the new and improved features that you’ll see:
MochiBot Code version 5 - The new MochiBot code has been improved for better Flash 8 compatibility and performance. All of the SWFs with prior versions of the MochiBot code will still continue to work as usual.
Multiple MochiBots in one SWF - You can now use multiple MochiBots in one SWF to track different events or different SWFs being loaded into a container.
Total views - The SWF Detail page now shows you the total number of views your SWF has received.
Animated MochiBot logo - We added a download of the animated MochiBot logo to the Create MochiBot and MochiBot Code pages.
New graph legend - We got rid of the graph legend on the Dashboard and replaced it with color coded SWF names when you select a SWF to be displayed in the graph
As always let us know what you think about MochiBot. What do you love about it? What do you hate about it? What features would you like to see in our upcoming builds? What would you change about MochiBot?
We made a minor build today to address some issues with MochiBot not working with Flash 5 SWFs. MochiBot will now work for SWFs published in Flash 5 so for those of you who were waiting for this fix please try it out and let us know how it works out.
A special thanks goes out to Jack Smack for helping us to test this out.
(Download this widget)
