GarageGames.com Site Update: Jan. 23, 2009

Hello again to another website update. Each week, we're looking through the list of the issues you'd like to see addressed, and keep banging away on the site. This being the second week since the launch, we're really pleased how the community has gotten over the initial shock and is throwing lots of useful comments our way. Keep it up! I know the web team's presence is a little light on the forums, but we've got people like David Montgomery-Blake combing through all that information to present it to us in a digestible format. This allows us to spend our timing getting things done, rather than just talking about it.

We focused our efforts on some major issues this week, so let me outline them below.

Continuing with our zombie theme from last week, I'd like to present a classic horror flick. You'll see the tie-in a second...

The New Shopping Cart System

In order to keep pace with Internet security vulnerabilities, we beefed up our shopping cart to take advantage of improved fraud protection. This is good for our customers because it makes it much harder for people to fraudulently use your credit cards online. These measures are not much different than the precautions most major online retailers, like Amazon.com, take to protect their customers. We did see a few issues this week related to international purchases, but those should be resolved now. Of course, I can't give you specifics on what we changed or I'd open up our system to potential vulnerabilities. =P

Our payment processors check the information you submit against the information your bank has on file. If some of this information is incorrect, you will be brought back to the billing information screen and see an error message about the billing address or card security code being incorrect. Depending on how your bank handles authorizations, you may see failed attempts as pending charges on your bank statement. These authorizations will not result in actual charges to your account, however your bank may not clear them for several days, so please double check your information before submitting it. If you receive an error when attempting to purchase, but it does result in an actual charge to your account, please contact support@garagegames.com.

Shop Smart, folks...

E-mail Notifications

We have drastically re-worked our e-mail messaging system so all e-mails you receive from us should be much more readable. We have also changed our system settings to decrease the probability of our e-mail hitting your spam folder. However, we're still seeing some spam issues with Hotmail and Yahoo e-mail addresses, so make sure nothing's falling through the cracks if you use one of those services.

Stickies

We now have the ability to put sticky threads at the top of forum categories. We already have one sticky for the TGB public forums, and Deborah's taking requests. If you have other threads that you think are sticky-worthy, e-mail her at deborahm@garagegames.com with the thread URL and the reason you think it's important to be "stuck."

Other Odds 'n' Ends

Here's some stuff that I don't have a ton to write about, per se, but I'm sure will be appreciated:

• TDN Fix: If you were getting the name conflict error, you should be able to change your name and log into TDN now.
• Ignition System: We saw some problems with our ignition system, mostly for new product downloads. If your product is unable to register itself, please use the offline registration form.
• Watched Threads: As requested, you should now be able to see a list of all of your watched threads in the "forums tab," and not just the oldest ten.
• Watched Blog Notifications: You'll be happy to note that blogs can now be watched just like forum threads.

Whew! That's all for this week. We know there's a lot more to do, and we're prioritizing things as best as we can to get as much functionality to you as quickly as possible. Expect more from us as we continue to improve GarageGames.com and continue to e-mail support@garagegames.com if anything is wrong specifically with your account.

UPDATE 1/28/2009: We have just finished a small update to the site that fixes the page links for blogs and resources. For those of you having issues registering your software with your ignition keys, that should be cleared up. Also in this update is a new shopping cart summary that appears when you click add to cart. That's it for now, but we'll have a more substantial update next Wednesday, Feb. 4th.