Sorry for the unresponsive site as of late, but we’re still recovering from the database crash last week. We’ve been growing a lot in both users and traffic so we’re making a few changes to the system to accommodate this growth. In the past week we’ve been faced with several tough decisions on how to best serve our existing members. Ultimately system performance and reliability is the key to our success so we decided to remove “unique viewers” data from the reports since they consume the greatest amount of resources in data processing. Our decision stemmed from a recent survey of our members which indicated that “uniques” data was not as important as having a fast site and quick reports.
For those of you who do consume the “uniques” data we intend on bringing the data back in the future as a premium service. We eventually have to charge for something in the future so this will be our first step in implementing a premium membership. No milestones have been set as to when the premium membership will launch, but we’ll start making plans once these fixes are complete.
The new changes to the system will be finished by the end of the weekAugust 4 soon :-|. We’ll make an announcement once everything is tested and back in order. With the removal of “uniques” data the system will perform much more reliably and quickly. We’re working hard to provide the community with a quality service so we hope this compromise improves your experience with MochiBot.
We take all your feedback into consideration as we grow so please keep all those emails coming. Please send your emails to feedback@mochibot.com.
The site and reports are running slow right now because we experienced an unfortunate database crash yesterday. Luckily we’re running two databases and have lots of backups so we’re busy today putting things back together. It’s going to take another day or two to get the new database up and running so please be patient while the site is a bit slow.
MochiBot will continue to track all of your stats and traffic during this time, but it’s just going to take a couple days to process the data while we work on the system.
The guys at varSTUDIOS just released new game at Crazy Monkey Games. Neon puts a new twist on the classic Asteroids game by adding a multitude of enemies and some cool powerups. The game is very well designed and uses some of the new Flash 8 features quite nicely.
Neon was just release several days ago and is already climbing our charts.
Some of you might notice a drop in your traffic at around 1pm yesterday. We made some changes to the core yesterday and it didn’t capture the traffic for several SWFs. Sorry to those those who were affected. We’ve rolled back the changes and things are back to normal again. The fix wasn’t put into place until 11am PST today so the stats that you see tomorrow will have a portion of its data missing for the first half of the day.
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’ll be making some minor tweaks to the system this week so the processing of all stats will be a bit delayed. Stats will take longer than usual to process while we’re working on the system.
Paul Robertson just released Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006, an amazing animation with the style of an action packed side scrollling platform game. The twelve minute animation feels like a game that you can actually play, but unfortunately you have to just sit there with thumbs twitching. 73Mb file.
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.
During my time at GDC last month I got a chance to play Guitar Hero at one of the exhibitor booths. Every day since then I struggled with myself not to go out and buy the game. Unfortunately I broke down a couple weeks ago and bought the damn thing. Needless to say I’m now addicted to the game and can’t wait to get home every day to rock the F*#! out.
Then today I was looking for some entertainment during lunch and stumbled upon a little treat of a site called Guitar Shred Show. It’s a superbly built Flash site that pits you as Mr. Fastfinger, the guitar Zen master. The site surprisingly fills the internal rocker in me with just a little bit of keyboard mashing. Now when I’m away from my plastic axe I can just rock out with Mr. Flashfinger.
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.
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