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I’m using the News tag and the Updates tag for official website posts, but to increase visibility, I’m also starting a thread for both as well. Sometimes my posts here will simply be links to the official website posts.
In today’s case, there’s not much to say or write, so I’m just going to share the news to the forum directly. Today (2/7/2019) I messaged Zev Shlasinger (formerly of Z-Man Games, creators of Merchants and Marauders), who now is part of their board game department.
I just changed the home page to be “regular” instead of full width. This is mostly so the top menu shows up the same on the home page as it does on nearly all other pages. Added an Affiliate Disclosure to the Privacy Policy page, as I’d prefer to have all the “official legal junk” in one place. XD Since there was a bit of extra room on the third line of the menu, I also added the recent and rapidly growing Fleets category to the menu to fill it out.
Any feedback on how the site looks/functions (I still need to check/improve the speed more often, it’s just technical and sometimes difficult/time-consuming to figure out) is appreciated, just realize that improvements will probably be incremental and slow compared to some of the major stuff from last year. (which was inevitable given how new/bare/slow the site was at various times in its first ~8 months)
On Saturday I asked Wizkids and NECA on Facebook “What would it take to bring back Pirates Constructible Strategy Game?”
They responded this morning with the same message they sent me in March 2017 when I inquired about whether or not they had the license/rights to Pirates CSG.
Hi Ben,
At this time I do not have nay information about the Pirates CSG/Pirate of the Spanish Main.
Thank you,
The WK Team
During the recent podcast, Mike Selinker shared with me the patent for the Chop Shop Challenge game he mentioned (which I can’t find online so far). It says “Application status is Abandoned”.
Then of course there’s the two patents from Jordan Weisman of Wizkids, which I’ve researched and looked at before. Both of those still appear to be in the hands of WK/NECA, though they may expire in 2021/2022.
Huzzah!! I finally made another change to the site, one I had been wanting to do for a while. On most of the sidebars (including the home page) you can now see a “Best Posts” widget/menu with 10 featured posts! 😀 (I like the uniqueness/relevancy of the forum sidebar, and don’t really want to add more to it in case it might slow things down)
Apparently my site now has 113 pages and 465 posts, with additional url’s for tags, categories, and whatnot. Understandably the navigation can get a little tricky! I’m quite happy with the top menu but wanted to display some additional best content without adding to it. (Game Ideas was heavily considered, and still might someday replace something in the main menu)
I plan to occasionally update the Best Posts area and change things out once in a while. Right now I like what is on there, and the order (Beginner’s Guide right at the top, followed by action items like Game Ideas and the surveys). The Mike Selinker podcast has not gotten much feedback for what it is, so hopefully more people will see it now. Couldn’t help but add some battle reports there as well, some of which I’ll switch out with time.
Feel free if you have suggestions for what should be in the Best Posts area!
Huzzah! I currently seem to be ranking #2 in google for “Pirates CSG” behind only Miniature Trading! 😀
Huzzah! I currently seem to be ranking #2 in google for “Pirates CSG” behind only Miniature Trading! 😀
Nice, break out the special reserve rum, for parties and other extravagant affairs!
Edit: I’m having a problem with the Custom Ships thread, it keeps logging me out when I click on it. Could be a problem on my end, but heads up.
I’m having a problem with the Custom Ships thread, it keeps logging me out when I click on it. Could be a problem on my end, but heads up.
Are you accessing the thread from the main forum, from the notification in the top right corner, or from an email notification link?
I was just able to post there after going to the latest post from the main forum, but that might just be because I’m the admin.
Are you accessing the thread from the main forum, from the notification in the top right corner, or from an email notification link?
I was just able to post there after going to the latest post from the main forum, but that might just be because I’m the admin.
I’ll get an e-mail when a new post is made, at the bottom is a post link URL, which I click on to go here to the forum and read it. I got one today, followed the URL on the bottom, and it took me to the thread, but I wasn’t logged in, and the most recent post was the 90 point ten mast.
I suspect this has something to do on my end with cookies and stuff.
I suspect this has something to do on my end with cookies and stuff.
It might be, I had to clear some histories yesterday to get logged into the forum page properly. However, there were a few issues with the site 2 days ago, so there’s a chance it’s a leftover problem from that. That said, it’s strange that you can post here not there. Try clearing your history or cookies/etc from a recent time and maybe try posting after going to the thread straight from the forum (while already logged in).
Weirdness continues. When I’m on the main forum page, I’m shown as not logged in. However, once I click on a thread and go in, I’m suddenly logged in. I haven’t checked the Customs thread yet though. I’m fairly sue that the oddity is on my end, though I’m not sue what to do about it, since I’ve already removed some cookies and stuff.
Weirdness continues. When I’m on the main forum page, I’m shown as not logged in. However, once I click on a thread and go in, I’m suddenly logged in. I haven’t checked the Customs thread yet though. I’m fairly sue that the oddity is on my end, though I’m not sue what to do about it, since I’ve already removed some cookies and stuff.
Please let me know if it continues or affects your participation/enjoyment here. I had a somewhat similar issue a few days ago when the hosting company had to change a few things to get the site back online. Glad to see you post in CS again.
If you want I can report your issue to the hosting support system, but it is weird that it seems to only be affecting your account. (that we know of)
Just updated the Sets page with no MT links. Also deleted the Elementor plugin, which was only being used on that page and the homepage. Edited the pages successfully so they appear nearly the same (homepage especially) even without the plugin. (may not be much of a speed increase, but I’m trying to decrease the “bloat” of the site a bit this month)
Weirdness continues. When I’m on the main forum page, I’m shown as not logged in. However, once I click on a thread and go in, I’m suddenly logged in. I haven’t checked the Customs thread yet though. I’m fairly sue that the oddity is on my end, though I’m not sue what to do about it, since I’ve already removed some cookies and stuff.
Please let me know if it continues or affects your participation/enjoyment here. I had a somewhat similar issue a few days ago when the hosting company had to change a few things to get the site back online. Glad to see you post in CS again.
If you want I can report your issue to the hosting support system, but it is weird that it seems to only be affecting your account. (that we know of)
Page refreshes don’t seem to happen automatically, or at least not every time. If you click back to a page you were on a few minutes earlier (like the main list of threads in the forum) it’ll often still look like it did when you were there the first time, even if you’ve logged in and posted something. More than once I’ve logged in after a day or two and it didn’t show any new posts that happened in between.
It’s easy enough to fix by hitting “refresh” or F5, but it feels a lot like the old days of the internet when browsers purposely did “tricks” like that to save bandwidth by not reloading things that didn’t necessarily need to be reloaded. It might just be a relic of WordPress that can’t be easily adjusted.
Page refreshes don’t seem to happen automatically, or at least not every time. If you click back to a page you were on a few minutes earlier (like the main list of threads in the forum) it’ll often still look like it did when you were there the first time, even if you’ve logged in and posted something. More than once I’ve logged in after a day or two and it didn’t show any new posts that happened in between.
It’s easy enough to fix by hitting “refresh” or F5, but it feels a lot like the old days of the internet when browsers purposely did “tricks” like that to save bandwidth by not reloading things that didn’t necessarily need to be reloaded. It might just be a relic of WordPress that can’t be easily adjusted.
I think Xerecs was having a different issue, especially since it wasn’t happening all the time. However, I have adjusted browser caching settings so that certain things won’t update all the time. This provided massive speed gains for the site, and if I switch it back, it might get really slow. I plan to work on the speed and performance of the site a bit in the next month or two, but some sacrifices seem to be necessary for optimal performance.
In a long-overdue experiment, I have added an eBay RSS feed to the Forum sidebar at the bottom. Apparently there isn’t a way to make the images for the listings display there, but that would probably just slow the pages down anyway. I checked the speed of the forum page after the change and it didn’t show any slowdown. I will probably simplify it again soon since the Buy and Watch List buttons don’t link out to eBay.
This is not an endorsement of the deals that show up. Just another way to hopefully monetize the site. (assuming the affiliate links work properly)
I am hoping to only ever have ads on PwB that are hyper-relevant – meaning mostly Pirates CSG stuff. The only other ads I might try at some point would be to similar interests, such as PotC movies/music and naval history books.
Playing around with the top menu a bit. It was time for Blog to get demoted, but that made the bottom row about half empty, so I added the Information category down there. Might add one more thing soon to fill it out. I’m at 113 pages and 521 posts, so lots of content to attempt to prioritize!
Edit: Just updated the Information and Stats page. Removed most links to Miniature Trading + updated some other links. Also added the rules and a note about the MT saved post. Plus some other minor changes. Feedback welcome as always.
Big win today. Managed to increase the speed of the home page and main forum page – Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool now shows a perfect 100 score on desktop for both. Mobile is only at 74, but lately it’s been in the 27-34 range, so still a big improvement. So for now I might kinda rest on that since it can get technical, confusing, and time-consuming, but I hope to optimize the speed of the site more in the future. (now it’s kind of a “ain’t broke, don’t fix it” thing, as some of my efforts to improve the site in the past backfired and I had to revert back.) I’m not sure that the page speeds will be better on all pages, but those 2 are the main ones that get a lot of traffic, and are of course the most important ones in general. Sometime I’ll probably test out speeds on other pages as well. If certain things don’t load immediately (especially avatars), just be aware that the deferred stuff is making the rest of the stuff faster as far as I know.
I’ve also been adding the eBay RSS feed to pretty much all of the sidebars. Sometimes that may depend on how hot eBay is; right now there are a bunch of quality auctions up, so I don’t feel shy about advertising the good deals to be had. (of course they might not end up selling for cheap with sniping haha)
HUZZAH!!!! I am now ranking #1 in google search for “Pirates CSG”!! This has been a goal of mine for a while now, and I was hoping to get there by the end of the summer or fall. I’m ahead of Wikipedia, BGG, eBay, everything (obviously if MT was still afloat it might be impossible to dislodge). Just checked in Incognito mode too to make sure it wasn’t just my logged in browser being biased. 🙂 I’ve been publishing content and getting visitors consistently for a while now; I think the speed improvement mentioned above is what might be putting the site over the top just this past week. (might not be ranking #1 for that term in all locations since apparently it can vary by geographic location)
Now the challenge is to rank #1 for all the other game names… yikes. XD (Pirates of the Spanish Main, Pirates Constructible Strategy Game (spelled out), Pirates of the Cursed Seas… and on and on)
Few quick things:
- I apologize for any mistakes in the Master Spreadsheet. I have noticed a minor error about once a month, and I know it’s annoying. I wanted to get it out as quickly as possible last year, so some of the stuff copied from the original Wizkids spreadsheets or from MT may be missing things. As always, let me know if you find something that needs fixing. I plan to keep the .xlsx version on the homepage updated, but the shared google sheet will always be the most up to date.
- With MT sunk for good, a ton of links across my site are broken. The Rankings section is hit especially hard. I don’t have the time to update all of that and make it right or improve those pages yet. I’m also extremely sick of updating broken links and broken pictures (photobucket, then postimages) and cannot spend my life doing that on a constant basis.
Thanks for visiting my site!
Just disabled new user registration due to spamming attacks. When I have time later today I plan to implement some anti-spam stuff that will hopefully resolve the problem. Sorry if you’re trying to join the site in the next ~8 hours.
Edit: Opened registration back up. Still need to investigate the best way to stop spammers, preferably without a plugin.
I’m really glad a lot of the community and regulars are already registered here, because the spam has gotten bad the past day or two. Registration is closed again; I hope to try something new tomorrow or Sunday that may help, but I don’t want to leave the current registration open when I know I can’t be on the site.
Thanks for being here; I love seeing the community active!
I’m really glad a lot of the community and regulars are already registered here, because the spam has gotten bad the past day or two.
Spam bot attack of 2019? 😀
On a serious note, yikes. I hope you’re able to get things under control and handled.
Just messaged NECA, Wizkids, and Justin Ziran (President of Wizkids Games) on Facebook about the recent podcasts with 4 of the people who worked on the game. Also asked if the styrene format is still too cost prohibitive to produce.
Sorry if you have trouble posting links. No idea what the problem with that is but I’ll be looking into it. Apologies for the leaky vessel….
Just implemented a captcha on the registration page. Hopefully it will stop the spam accounts.
Made a question thread at the bbpress support forum inquiring about the link problem. No idea why people other than me have trouble posting links (posting as a bare URL rather than linked text may help), the site seems glitchy for no good reason sometimes. I’m not very good with the technical stuff but I will certainly keep trying to fix it.
Super glad the forum is active; thank you for your postings and patience!
OOPS!! Looks like I’m to blame for the linking problem. The issues are LINKED!! XD It seems that in my haste to clean up and prevent the spam, I changed a setting that added “comments” containing 1 or more links to a “moderation queue”. However, that seems to have affected the forum as well, rather than just the site comments you can submit on posts and pages (which are separate from the forum of course). I have modified that setting back to 0 and I just successfully made a test post with a link using my non-admin account that I use for testing purposes (a justifiable “sock puppet” 🙂 )
Hopefully it will work now….
Edit: Just found the moderation queue for forum posts, so I’m trying to restore posts that didn’t show up so people’s time wasn’t completely wasted.
PS: Time stamps may seem off depending on your time zone due to US Daylight Savings Time. I think I’ll just keep it on UTC-5 for New York.
So THAT’S what was up with Customs Organized. I tried like three times to make my post there, but it kept not showing up. I was wondering what was going on.
Apologies for the errors in the Master Spreadsheet. I just uploaded a new .xlsx file to the homepage with the following corrections: Duex-Deux, The Red Skull instead of The Cursed, Alquimista speed from L to S+L, added Fort Brompton’s cannons, changed CC #123 from “Specialist” to Cannoneer.
The shared spreadsheet is always corrected first so that has the most up to date corrections. If you see any mistakes, please let me know. (even tiny stuff like an extra space between words)
Once again I must apologize for all the mistakes in the Master Spreadsheet. Most of them should be fixed now.
Corrections: Divers point cost from 2 to 1, RV #138 from Oarsmen to Oarsman, deleted “showing” from BC Serpiente’s ability text, fixed Admiral Yi’s ability text, SCS 030 cost changed from 6 to 2, added cost of 2 to SCS 085, changed DJC Fantasma ability from Captain to Reverse Captain, gave cost to DJC #062, changed abilities of La Catedral del Mar and Dark Fox to Fear from the written-out keyword text, Santos Romanos masts from 3 to 2, fixed Monte Cristo’s masts and point cost, fixed ability of L’Eroica, added cannons for Baochuan, fixed mispelling of HMS Auckland and San Theodora, changed Grendel’s mast cound from 3 to 2, fixed cost of USS Cheyenne, fixed Squalo’s point cost and segment count, fixed Teach’s segment count, deleted Ochobrazo from RotF sheet, fixed misspellings of Bombardier, added Explorer ability to F&S Scepter.
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