The Nethernet Community News

Greetings, PMOGeons,

PMOG will be undergoing some deep tissue massages in the early morning hours (US time) of 28 Jul – 30 Jul 2008.  These interruptions will last anywhere between 2 and 4 hours.

This downtime will help to ensure PMOG continues to improve its stability.  Prior to the past week, PMOG had been running strong, and we hope to return to that model performance.

If you live in the UK or Europe this will more likely affect you, and for that we apologize.

Thanks again for giving us the opportunity to improve upon playing the web.

Any extended outages will be noted on this blog.

Yours,
Joe Wagner
PMOG Player Support Liaison
(@burdenday)

Update: As of 14:30 PDT, 26 Jul 2008, all systems are nominal.  Thanks again for your continued patience with us!

Hello, Passive-ists,

I apologize first and foremost for the lack of updates.  As of 26 Jul 2008, 12:00 PDT, we are experiencing more unscheduled downtime.

There was a database failure earlier this morning, and we’ve been working on migration ever since.  The process continually gets close to completing, only to again fail.  We are doing everything possible to get PMOG back up and running for your playing pleasure this weekend.  However, it may take this afternoon for the server to complete this process.

We acknowledge our uptime has been a little less than ideal lately, and strive to provide a more stable gaming environment for you in the future.  Know that many of our staff are putting in countless hours of overtime, daily, to make PMOG great.

Thank you again for your patience, and for playing PMOG.

Yours,
Joe Wagner
PMOG Player Support Liaison
(@burdenday)

Update #2: As of 17:30 PDT, 25 Jul 2008, everything appears to be back up and running; there may be some periods of sluggishness as things resync, and catch up.  If you encounter any serious issues, please e-mail help at pmog dot com.

Update: There appears to be more work to be done; at this time, we are extending the ETA on the servers coming back up to 18:00 PDT.

As of 15:00 PDT, 25 Jul 2008, we are currently undergoing some unscheduled maintanance to our servers.

We hope to be back up and running soon, and anticipate this downtime lasting no more than one hour.

We will keep you updated here and apologize for the lack of notice.

We just released PMOG version .419 and it’s awesome. Soon, PMOG .5 will be released, and you will only be able to play PMOG on Firefox 3 (or Flock 2).

For PMOG .5, we move crates and mines and portals and missions into XUL overlays.  XUL overlays? Basically, PMOG events will be more of a part of the browser window, where we can make more rich interaction.  Currently PMOG events are a part of a page you’re looking at.  For example here is a PMOG portal on top of the US Postal Service Web page:

Good luck on that insurance claim on your package - thank you Mrbubbles!

That PMOG portal is a part of the HTML of that web page. We pasted in a bit of PMOG at the end of the file that makes the Postal Service web page appear. All the links and datapoints and allies and rivals of PMOG are little HTML packages injected into the pages you’ve been browsing with our extension.

So HTML injections were an exciting way to bring you plenty of PMOG through Firefox for the first part of this year. For the rest of this year, we’re looking forward to some hottt new tech.

Firefox 3 was just released in June 2008. It manages memory better. It loads pages faster. And it has expanded tools for extension developers to make cool stuff in the browser. Maybe even cooler than canvascape though that is still pretty cool.

Taking advantage of the eXULent display powers of Firefox 3 (or FF3 here) requires a PMOG rewrite. We can devise an extension that supports both FF2 and FF3 players at once, where the same types of PMOG events happen. But for the size of a company we are, and the scale of the things we are eager to build, we can’t write two PMOGs at once. There can be only one.

Marc Adams

The best thing: this shift from FF2 to FF3 will actually help us build fun faster. I asked Marc Adams, our Senior Developer why he was excited to ditch support for Firefox 2, he replied: “FF3 allows us to prototype new ideas quickly both visually and from a data perspective. What required extensive coding in FF2 is reduced significantly in FF3.”

Here at PMOG we live a lot of our lives online; we’re honored that you folks invite us to play with you throughout the day. We expect this upcoming .5 release will give you more reliable, more flexible, more p mog.  So if you haven’t already, see if you can give FF3 a try. Hopefully it will works for your playful life online.

With version .419 of the PMOG toolbar comes many minor bug fixes, a lot of polishing and one major new feature — a built in mission menu!

New Features:

- The new built in mission menu gives you both access to “Mission Central” the main PMOG mission page, and your own personal mission queue, giving quick and easy access to your queued missions.  Find yourself with a few extra minutes during the day?  Take break from passivity to take one of those missions you’ve been meaning to get around to.

- “Manage Profiles” has been renamed to “Reset Profile” and can be found under the P > Preferences menu.  This function can now also be used whether or not you’re logged in.  If you’re having trouble logging in, use this function as your first line of offense.

Bug Fixes:

- The “auto-login” feature of the toolbar has been fixed.  Now, no matter how you type your username, you should automatically be logged into the toolbar every time you launch Firefox or Flock, or open a new window, so long as you have agreed to letting the PMOG toolbar remember your password.

- “Special” characters in passwords (such as !@#$) are once again recognized.

- Seers have finally been shown the respect they deserve, and have been added to the Associations menu under Help > Codex Pmogeus.

- The mine animation has been shortened; it will be especially short on Firefox 2.

Web Release Version 1.0.2

Additionally, today we are pushing out a new Web Release.  For the most part, the changes present in this release will be invisible to most players, but address a number of stability issues, bug fixes and backend upgrades.  In the future, we hope for new Web Releases to represent new features/functions for you to play passively with.

However, here are a number of important bug fixes in 1.0.2:

- Badges should again be awarded after tonight; this fix should address all known badge issues.

- Tool usage is again being enforced as a prerequisite for leveling.  Please see this thread posted earlier in the month, or this Codex Appendix for more information.

- After posting to the forums, you will be taken to your newly created post instead of ending up at the beginning of the thread.

About a week ago, mrbubbles started a legendary thread — The Unlikely PMOG Badges Contest. With a sponsored total prize of 12,000 DP thanks to the1joebob, PMOG players have been spending their days creating some amazing and amazingly funny badges that are unlikely to end up in the Codex any time soon.

Some entries include kleefeld’s The Hacker Badge mocked by by czarchron:

For those users who are able to hack into the system from the outside and expose the inner workings of PMOG.  Ironically, upon receiving the Hacker Badge, a user is then promptly banned from the system.

and karmakaze’s Fail Whale badge:

Fail Whale: Won by refreshing the Twitter Is Down notice page eight or more times in one hour…

You can join in on the fun, too! The contest details are laid out in full in the above thread, but you have until 4 Aug 2008 to enter your design and possible win a truck load of datapoints.

If you come across a PMOG-related occurance like the Unlikely Badge Contest, email it to community at pmog dot com to have it considered for the next Community Highlight!

(Cross-posted from here.)

Well met, Passive-ist,

I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce you to a new group, which will exist as of 16 Jul 2008, outside the realms of Order and Chaos whose members will be making the early lives of Shoats much easier.

These are the Stewards.

Stewards are players who volunteer their time, patience and sanity to assist new players getting acquainted with PMOG, and also help to ensure the Community Standards and Expectations are being upheld. They are entrusted with some abilities above and beyond the normal PMOG citizen, including the ability to close threads, or remove inappropriate comments from missions.

For example, if a Steward comes across an especially helpful post in the forum, they can pin it. Conversely, if they come across an especially unhelpful, hate-filled post in the forum, they can lock it until a Trustee can further address the issue.

Stewards not admins, and should not be viewed as such. Complaints, general help requests, feedback for the developers, reports of abuse, and so forth should still be directed to the normal avenues of communication. Instead, Stewards should be seen as community representatives who have demonstrated a knowledge, dedication and willingness to further better our community.

You will be able to identify someone as a Steward by the designation that will appear on their profile or beneath their name on messages they post on the forums.

For the time being, becoming a Steward is a closed invitation-only process carefully considered by GameLayers. The Stewards report directly to Joe (@burdenday) Wagner, PMOG’s Player Support Liaison. Any/all future concerns regarding a specific Steward should be addressed to @burdenday and will be kept in confidence.

Please join me in welcoming the “first five” Stewards:

pixielo
lehall
chetyre
salmontickler
emberdione

Please use this thread to express your comments, concerns, congratulations or questions. Or, if you’d prefer, you can PMail me directly, or e-mail feedback at pmog dot com.

Welcome, Stewards!

Yours,
Joe
@burdenday

Bring Passivity to a whole new level with version .418 of the PMOG Toolbar!  As always, you can refer to our versions page to track the changes from each toolbar version to the next, but here are some highlights:

New Features:

Ignored Sites — You can now have PMOG ignore any site you choose.  To get started, just click the P > Preferences > Ignored Sites

New/Updated Icons

–  The “P” menu has again received some love and features a few new icons.  Check ‘em out!

Bug Fixes:

Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 Issues — If you experienced issues with PMOG after upgrading to Firefox 3, version .418 has a number of bug fixes that should help.

Quality Threshold Preferences –  The Portal and Mission quality thresholds are both working again.  To check your preferences, just click P > Preferences > In Game Preferences

Fail-safe Classic Theme — If you’re using Linux, you previous PMOG classic skin might not have rendered.  Now there is a fail-safe brown background embedded behind the wood grain that should help your eyes.

Upgrade now! This version is recommended for all users, as it contains bug fixes related to the release of Firefox 3.

Lastly, if you have the time, please send a warm thanks to Mark Daggett, our extension developer, who put a lot of hard work into this latest release.  Thanks, Mark!

Curious about how others are playing PMOG?

Sikkdays, a member of the Bacon Army, Benefactor and blogger, writes each week about the sites he has been exposed to thanks to PMOG. Sikkdays authors PMOG Link Monday on his personal blog Sikkdays.com, which also highlights some of his excellent web design work.

PMOG Link Monday is currently in its fifth weekly iteration, and is an excellent example of how PMOG can help make the Internet seem like a big place again. Just from reading this post, you can learn about what he’s learned about by playing PMOG — a very meta experience!

This leads to the ultimate question: How do you play PMOG?

Please leave a comment about what you’re doing to expand the boundaries of the Passive World, or if you happen to come across someone else widening the scope of PMOG.

Each week, we’ll try to highlight some aspect of the PMOG Community, so stay tuned!

(Don’t forget you can always subscribe via RSS to news.pmog.com!)