Tworl-a-blog!

Please see title. No, seriously, I made it faster.
-jay

So I basically just changed the way “accepting” a tworl invitation works… Before, once you clicked the “Start Tworl Chat!” button, the tworl chat was automatically added to your tworl chat history. Well, much like the BCS, this was a pretty obviously flawed system that was somehow never fixed–you could easily click the “Start Tworl Chat!” button and never actually send the chat initiation message in instant messenger. Thus the receiver (i.e. tworlee) would never get the message from the sender (i.e. the tworler), but the chat would still appear in both of their histories. Stupid system, eh?

Anyway, so now in order for the Tworl attempt to actually be recognized in your history and in your counter, both parties need to “accept” the Tworl invitiation. And by “accept”, all I really mean is view the chat information page. The chat information page now also tells you who of the two of you have accepted and haven’t. So now, you don’t get credit for the chat in your history until both people have actually participated. Unfortunately though, as a result of this change, all of the Tworls that have taken place up until now are erased from your history (we had no way of telling the “real” ones from the ones that shouldn’t be there). Don’t worry, it wont happen again. We implemented a playoff system.

-chad

Unfortunately my first post is about fixing bugs.

I made the following fixes should be in (I hope):

• The mySql timeout has been fixed
• The search shouldn’t connect to the same person multiple times
• The search now excludes those aim screennames which are idle

I appreciate people’s patience and hope my next post is on a happier note
-jay

A couple of the people that sent us feedback complained about the idea of having to enter their AIM password in the create account page. We understand their concerns and actually anticipated them, which is the reason there’s explanations all over the create account page explaning why we need to ask for the password (and in the privacy policy too).

Anyway, the bottom line is really this: we value your privacy and we do not do anything with the password except check it with AIM to verify that you own the AIM screenname that you enter on the create account page. We don’t store the password anywhere, and we don’t do anything else with it. For the people that highlighted some concern over spam/spim… in a somewhat ironic twist of fate, the very reason we decided to ask for the password was to prevent spam by preventing people from providing screennames which they don’t own.

We apologize if the AIM password thing discourages anyone from signing up. We value your privacy, and checking this password really helps us to make sure that we don’t include anyone on Tworl that doesn’t legitimately want to be. We’re working on implementing an alternative method of doing this verifcation, but in the mean time, please be patient.

-chad

So we had a couple hundred people more than we expeced sign up and it caused something to go terribly wrong on the search page. We got it under control and it should be working now. Apologies if you were one of the people that tried to run the tworl search and it gave you a mysql timeout error. man i need some coffee… i’m so tired i’m starting to feel drunk.

-chad

Whoo hooo! Okay, so jay and i finally got a reasonable version of Tworl ready for a limited public beta testing. Hopefully it’s not too much like my apartment, which is full of bugs. I’ll add a counter to the create account page within the next few days to show how many beta accounts are left before we close it off. In the mean time, please sign up if you’re interested in trying out the site!

As a random side note, we also got these tworl CANdoms to give out. Obviously I’m a biased opinion here, but these things are frekin hilarious. We’ll send them out as a sort of thank you to the first 250 people that sign up for a beta testing account… or maybe it should be a “sorry for the bugs, please still use our site because we’re in the process of fixing them” present. Oh well, either way i guess. practice safe sipping !

-chad