World of Card Games

Sorry to report that the site was down for a while today. Apparently some people were having trouble connecting, while others were not. I haven't been able to figure this one out yet. I'll keep looking into it!

World of Card Games has been down for a couple of hours now. All I know is the following message which I got from my host: "The uplink fiber has been cut, they are working on splicing it back together now, I'm sorry but we do not have an ETA."

I'm sorry, not anything I can do about this! I'll post here when the site is back up.

I deployed some changes to the server this morning, so the site was down for a short period of time.

The changes are relatively minor. Probably the most noticeable thing is a new 'game info' link at your card table. When you click on it, it displays the total number of players at the site who are also playing your card game. For example, if you're sitting at a Hearts table, it will display the total number of players on the website playing Hearts - this is shown circled in green in the image below.


A couple of players have pointed out to me that in Euchre, the robots will sometimes discard a trump card needlessly. For example, if you'd already won a trick by playing the Jack of the trump suit, your robot partner might discard a low card of the trump suit, even when it had non-trump cards it could discard. This has been fixed.

The changes made today were small. I'm also working on larger changes which require more time to make. But I try to fix small bugs as they come up, if possible, and deploy them when ready.

I've had a number of e-mails from players with feature requests. Everyone has their idea of what would be helpful, and sometimes there are conflicting ideas.

My highest priority when considering a change is whether it will adhere to the spirit of the site: keep the site looking beautiful with a clean design, while making it easy for all types of players to enjoy card games.

If you have a suggestion for a change, you can always email me at marya@worldofcardgames.com. In addition, feel free to leave comments on this blog with suggestions. Comments are moderated, so you won't see them appear right away. Sometimes, items end up in the spam filter, or I don't have time to check email, and there may be a delay in replying. But I do read them all, and will reply sooner or later.

Finally: I generally give higher priority to bug fixes, rather than adding features. Right now I have a heap of bug fix work in front of me; please be patient when requesting a new feature, as it may take me some time to get to it.

Several people reported to me over the past few days that the cards were disappearing for players, so they couldn't play their hand, and the computer played for them. Frustrating!

I was only able to reproduce this problem when the browser had been refreshed. When I did that, it happened a lot!

Once I could reproduce it, it wasn't too difficult to figure out the problem, and apply a fix to the site. That happened this morning (around 6:45 EDT), which is why the server went down for a brief period.

Let's hope this bug is gone for good!

Yesterday I got several reports that World of Card Games was hanging with the message "Initializing User...". I saw it myself a few times in the morning, but I was able to work around the issue by refreshing my browser.

Later in the day, the problem became more severe. Eventually I couldn't log in at all. And apparently no one else could!

So in the evening I rebooted the server. My apologies for the inconvenience! I'm investigating the issue to see what caused it. Since I didn't actually fix this bug yet, I expect it may recur. But hopefully I can figure it out and fix it before it does.

Thanks to everyone who reported this happening!

I've been working on a few new features for World of Card Games over the last two weeks. This morning, I deployed the changes to the server. You should see them live today.

First, the fun feature - there are eight new avatars! I've had a few emails from people who would like to have some different avatars - in particular female ones - and it seemed like a good idea to me, too. You can see a couple of examples to the left and right of this blog post. To see the other new ones, go to World of Card Games and click on the Avatar link in the upper left corner. In addition to the avatars shown here, we now have a Businesswoman, a Scientist, a Doctor, a Runner, a Tennis Player, and a Weightlifter.

I've also added a profanity filter. This is something that's been requested a lot, which a bummer. But it's to be expected; the internet is the wild wild west, after all. The filter is turned on by default. If you prefer your chats uncensored, you can easily turn it off by unchecking the "Profanity Filter" option under Settings. Oh yeah, you can find your Settings in the upper right-hand corner of the page - just click on your username to open this panel.

Last but not least, a user pointed out to me that there was a bug in the scoring of Euchre. Yikes! A big "Thank You!" goes out to the player who reported this. Previously, when "going alone," if a player won three or four tricks, they'd be given two points. In fact they should only have been awarded one point. These are the rules according to the Pagat page on Euchre (true for both British and North American rules).

I've got more changes in store for the site; these ones are just dipping my toe in the water, so to speak. As usual, feedback is welcome!