There are now six all-breed show slots per day on Showdog.  This was triggered by the increasing amount of dogs required to earn a major but is being done to expand the show schedule as the site expands.

As of February, the average is 7.58 for bitches and 7.15 for dogs.  I'm going to try at maintain the average at or below 7.5 for bitches and 7.0 fog dogs.  This will be the trigger for adding more shows in the future.  Please note that we do not worry about one breed ending up with an extremely high requirement for majors due to increased activity in the breed.  That is part of the simulation.

This will likely make earning majors a bit harder during the month of February due to the diluted pool of entries creating smaller shows.  However, those smaller shows will result in lower point schedules for the month of March.

Trophyhorse

Offers now properly expire after 3 days.

We now pay out salaries to all kennels that have logged in during the past two weeks and any subscribing kennel even if they are no longer active.  While rare, this has become a major issue with some subscribers who took an extended break from the game.

A secondary impact of this change will be a slight reduction in the daily salary that everyone else gets due to the fact that some of the money is going into inactive kennels.  However, due to the fact that many of these abandoned kennels are low on funds, this has actually brought the daily salary up temporarily due to the impact this has on the average balance of all users considered.

(If you set your salary setting to 0 you still will not get a salary)

I'm pulling an all-nighter tonight for various reasons so there should be quite a few things added to the list over the night.

Trophyhorse

Fixed an issue with the date 2-29-06 becoming an option for future condition books.

Added form validation to the horse naming page.

I will be performing my civic duty as a juror for Bexar County on January 24th (my freaking birthday).  I've never done it before but the people I've asked have said it should take most of the day.  Obviously, it's kind of hard to ask for an extension or exemption if you don't have kids and have a work schedule that is about as flexible as anything in the world.

Things have been hectic lately and I haven't gotten to nearly as many e-mails as I should but this will delay any e-mail response that would have been done Tuesday.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

AU Structure Change on Showcattle

One of the biggest mistakes I have made on Showcattle was to give in to the calls for the removal of the balance limits.  We have had balance limits on all of our sites we developed since June 2003.  They are in place to prevent inflation which is a severe problem with simulations such as the sites we run. 

The balance limits on Showcattle were in place for a reason, that reason was stated numerous times, and when I finally gave in to the constant complaints that reason was shown to be valid.  If we’re not going to have balance limits, other measures are going to be taken to control inflation. 

We are changing the AU fee structure for Showcattle.com to better represent the size of the ranches being charged.  The new structure is based on the following formulas…
A :: (([Ranch AUs] - 100.0) * .0001) * [Ranch Balance]
B :: ([Ranch AUs] - 100.0) * 30.00

(You will be charged whichever is greater between A and B.)

Obviously, as with anything like this, there will be complaints about everything from the fact that this is being put into place at all.  Unfortunately, those people will just have to be upset with it. 

If this measure doesn’t do something to prevent inflation, something else will be done.  It’s not something we will ignore.

Free One-Year Subscription – $1,000,000 Game Dollars

If you would like to receive a certificate for a free on year subscription on Showcattle, just e-mail the administrative account.  The current fee is $1,000,000 simulation dollars.  This only applies to Showcattle.com.

Trophyhorse

The Internet Cup races have been setup properly as game bred restricted. Invalid entries have been removed and refunded.

We have updated the Top Horses pages to prevent timeout issues.  Until today, this page had the worst timeout issues of any of the four sites.

Showcats

The trophies for December have finally gone out.

Showdog

Fixed a data locking issue with the latest topics, offer to buy, and session sales pages.

Now that the Horse Pool (HP) has plenty of horses in it, we have begun entering them in races. Some details...

Today is the first day this has been in effect and it allowed over 30 races run that would have otherwise been called off. All races that had at least one human owned entry ran.

If you have any additional questions on this new aspect of the simulation, there is a thread located at the link below...

http://www.trophyhorse.com/login/philboard_read.aspx?id=5527

Trophyhorse

Fixed an issue caused by trying to bid on an already closed auction.

Showdog

Fixed link from dog search to kennel information pages.

Fixed a link from the show prize addition page that you get when you try to add a prize lower than another user.

Showcats

Fixed an issue with breed forum links to extra pages when a post in the relevant thread has been deleted.

Fixed the HTML encoding issue on the picture and notes pages.

Showcats

Fixed an issue with breed forum links to extra pages when a post in the relevant thread has been deleted.

Fixed an issue caused by an update to the dog search page on Friday.

Added form validation to the new ration creation.

Showdog

Fixed the HTML encoding issue on the call name page.

Fixed a problem with the not logged in redirect for the stud approvals page.

Trophyhorse

Fixed the redirect when users attempt to bid on an auction that has already closed.

Fixed a data locking issue on the mare selection page.

Showcats

Fixed an issue with starter cat selection when a user is not logged in.

Fixed an issue caused by trying to assign a previously deleted ration to a cat.

Fixed some issues caused by earlier updates to the family account administration page.

Fixed an error that was caused by trying to view a non-existent forum.

Showcattle

Fixed link to account info page from the password changed page.

Fixed an HTML encoding issue with the slogan editing and featured sale description pages.

Fixed links to extra pages of forum threads when there have been deleted posts.

Trophyhorse

Fixed an issue caused by using HTML code in edited posts and new posts.

Fixed an issue that came up when trying to view the stable information page of administrative stables.

Fixed an issue that came up when bidding on your own horses.

Showdog

Fixed an issue caused by using HTML code in new posts.

Fixed an error that was caused by trying to view a non-existent forum.

Fixed a data locking issue with the forum search.

Fixed link to site rules from the page banned users get when they try to login.

Fixed an HTML encoding issue with the slogan editing page.

Showdog.com

Fixed problem with forum posts that contain certain HMTL elements.

Showdog

Cleaned the inbox out.

Fixed a bug that caused an error when a comma was included in the amount of an offer to buy.

During the past two months, we have grown by just over 15% in terms of active users.  To start January, we have 40% more active users than we had at the start of October.  This was due in part to the launch of Showcats but primarily due to our larger advertising budget over that time period. 

Now that we have grown this much in that time period, I am changing the focus from site growth to site improvement which should be good news for everyone reading this blog.  This will likely mean that we will see a reduction in active users over the next month.

As you can see from posts over just the past week, we've done a lot to improve the reliability of the sites.  Most of these issues hadn't ever been reported because they're minor.  The issues that had been reported before now and weren't fixed, weren't fixed until now because we never had enough information to nail down exactly what happened.  Now that we have the resources to do that, we've made a dramatic impact on those little errors that seem to come out of nowhere and annoy the heck out of you.

This is just the start of our focus for this month.  As soon as I can get everything but the most rare and minor errors fixed, we're going to start adding extensive improvements to each of the sites.

I fixed quite a few issues earlier today but forgot to list them.  I'm going to be up quite late tonight updating some more minor issues.

So far tonight...

Showcattle

Fixed a security flaw created by the new herd sorting page that would have allowed users to breed cattle in other ranches.

Trophyhorse

Fixed an issue with the horse search when using words ignored by the SQL Server indexing program.  I also changed references to dogs to horses and fixed the link to stable information.

Fixed an issue with the password updating function.

Showdog

Fixed a link to the help center page on prestige impacts from the page where you can see everything that impacts your prestige.

I'm not going to do too much today in terms of managing the site.  However, I'm stuck at my in-laws and have noting else to do so I'm going to go through some more of the error logging issues that have come up.

All Sites

Fixed an error page that came up when trying to look up the password for a non-existent account.

Showcattle

Fixed an issue that arose when trying to view ranch info pages or certain pages in featured sale setups from an invalid link.

Fixed the forum search.

Trophyhorse

Fixed issue with the My Results page and the race results page for entries that have not yet run.

Resolved issue caused by attempting to view bids of an already completed auction.

Showdog

Fixed a issue caused by data locking in the handler selection process.