Per Rotato Ad Astra

September 25, 2013 7:20 PM

A quick note to let folks know that MefightClub has emerged from a major renovation, with lots of Stuff Both New And Improved, so if you're a person who enjoys things game-related but not so much the more toxic aspects of gaming culture, and you haven't visited, or haven't visited in a while, now is a good time to come hang out with us and maybe game you up some games.

We're up to about 2800 members now, and going strong. We play and talk about video games mostly, but also have active groups of D&D folks and board gaming enthusiasts and much more. We also have thick lashings of rotato.

I'm still squashing some bugs with the new redesign (especially for OSX people), but it's darn near there, so please do drop in and say hello.

posted by stavrosthewonderchicken to MetaFilter-Related at 7:20 PM (43 comments total)

Nice looking!
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:24 PM on September 25, 2013

I also launched a redesign of our public-facing group blog, Full Glass Empty Clip, a little while back. It doesn't see nearly as much activity as the forum, but all Mefighters are welcome to post there when the spirit moves them.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:25 PM on September 25, 2013

Thanks, jessamyn!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:26 PM on September 25, 2013

I have been away for a very long time and I am relieved to know that rotato is still a thing.
posted by middleclasstool at 7:37 PM on September 25, 2013

Cool site!

I should point out a web issue I'm seeing with the latest Firefox version on my mac (10.6.8) where on the Categories page, only the first three letters of each category name are a click-able link. The rest of the category name is this oddly difficult-to-highlight text.

So for example. in the category name "OUR GAME SERVERS", only the word OUR is a clickable link.
posted by oceanjesse at 9:12 PM on September 25, 2013

Nice catch, oceanjesse. Thanks! Categories are little-used, and so that's a little-visited page, but I hadn't noticed that one. You can let me know about bugs in the new design here, though, preferably.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:37 PM on September 25, 2013

Wait, wait, wait—you guys talk about board games, too? I'm in.
posted by ocherdraco at 9:39 PM on September 25, 2013 [2 favorites]

Holy shit a mobile-friendly login page with a twiddly knob and slidy thing!

With some rough spots that still need sanding down, the site should work and look great on devices of all sizes. Android stock browser is still giving me some grief in a couple areas, but I'm working on it.

I'm in.

Glad to hear it. We even have some board game developers, including the dev behind the recent Attack the Darkness.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:43 PM on September 25, 2013

Wait, wait, wait—you guys talk about board games, too? I'm in.

you'll come for the games, but stay for everything else*


*which of course includes: meta discussions on existing games, hype on upcoming games, game dev tips and feedback, giving away (and receiving) games, notifying the gang when awesome game deals are happening on the internet.... and everything else**


**which of course includes a ton of things that aren't game related at all
posted by johnstein at 9:46 PM on September 25, 2013

johnstein: "**which of course includes a ton of things that aren't game related at all"

Liked a baked goods exchange! Yum.
posted by Grither at 3:46 AM on September 26, 2013

Today is the second to last day of my job that has prevented me from gaming for six years (needing to wake up at 5am is not great for evening gaming) so clearly I need to relog my Mefight account. Seems more productive than playing Minecraft at work.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 4:22 AM on September 26, 2013 [1 favorite]

robocop is bleeding: "Today is the second to last day of my job that has prevented me from gaming for six years (needing to wake up at 5am is not great for evening gaming) so clearly I need to relog my Mefight account. Seems more productive than playing Minecraft at work."

Hey, there are others of us early-uppers (545am here) who prefer their game time to be after work (4-6pm EST). Sometimes in the past it has overlapped with some of the UK folks gaming times, which is great.

Though at the moment I'm stuck in single player GTAV world.
posted by Grither at 4:28 AM on September 26, 2013

game time to be after work (4-6pm EST)

That's Toddler Time - a different, more freeform style of gaming that includes such minigames as "The Last of Piss IV: The Tinkling" "Where Is My Batman, No Not That One" and "Dance Dance Lets All Spaz Out For No Reason." Game time can start at 7 after he's gone to bed.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 4:32 AM on September 26, 2013 [8 favorites]

Aaand my spouse just looked over and said, "Wait, is that another MetaFilter page?"
"Um... kinda..."

Have you ever heard someone's eyes roll? Scary.
posted by Etrigan at 4:41 AM on September 26, 2013 [6 favorites]

I just logged in for the first time in a long time, and the site looks great. Good work!

But I was also reminded why I never dug deep there--it seems like the primary (sole?) focus is on PC gaming. I'm more of a console person--is there a place to find others for games on the Xbox? I'd love to co-op when they roll out the GTAV online component...
posted by Admiral Haddock at 5:02 AM on September 26, 2013

Oooh, very nice. I (finally!) signed up, and will see you all there in the GW2 forums, most likely.
posted by jennaratrix at 5:18 AM on September 26, 2013

Admiral Haddock: "I'm more of a console person--is there a place to find others for games on the Xbox? I'd love to co-op when they roll out the GTAV online component..."

There's a GTA V thread right now with folks on PS3 and Xbox passing around usernames for the upcoming online release. Also, we're all in a crew on rockstars social club thing, which is cross platform, which is kinda neat.

Though the servers seem to be pretty shit right now, as it seems to work less than 50% of the times that I've tried to access it in-game.
posted by Grither at 5:54 AM on September 26, 2013

Indeed, it is very pretty.
posted by koucha at 6:12 AM on September 26, 2013

If I want to introduce myself on the introduce yourself page, do I do it via 'add comment' at the bottom? I don't want to accidentally start a new thread and then be so embarrassed I have to throw my computer into the river.
posted by mittens at 6:29 AM on September 26, 2013

That's what I did, mittens! It did not start a new thread.
posted by ocherdraco at 6:33 AM on September 26, 2013

Is there a Recent Activity equivalent, where I can check up on threads I've commented in?
posted by ocherdraco at 6:34 AM on September 26, 2013

Can I find folks who share my Crusader Kings II addiction?
posted by shothotbot at 6:46 AM on September 26, 2013

I can't even make it past the tutorial in Crusader Kings. I HAVE FAILED HISTORY.
posted by mittens at 6:52 AM on September 26, 2013

Hurrah! Always meant to have a look at this.
posted by ArmyOfKittens at 6:56 AM on September 26, 2013

That's Toddler Time - a different, more freeform style of gaming that includes such minigames as "The Last of Piss IV: The Tinkling" "Where Is My Batman, No Not That One" and "Dance Dance Lets All Spaz Out For No Reason." Game time can start at 7 after he's gone to bed.

God the tutorial on that game is basically non-existent, Level 1 is just straight into a boss fight with Cryor: The Beast Who Never Sleeps. The drop-in co-op is nice, although sometimes I wish they hadn't disabled the Pause function.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 7:16 AM on September 26, 2013 [2 favorites]

For all you roguelike fans, there is a Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup tournament coming up in a few weeks. MeFightClub usually fields some teams (last time we had five!). Either myself or someone else will start a recruitment thread on MFC in a week or so once the tournament is properly announced. All skill levels welcome!
posted by ODiV at 7:42 AM on September 26, 2013

For all you roguelike fans,

Yikes, DCSS as part of a team effort with evidently friendly and smart people. I think that would be the end of me!
posted by sleevener at 8:20 AM on September 26, 2013

Beautiful design. Great friends.
posted by ColdChef at 8:24 AM on September 26, 2013

Not sure if this is the right place to report bugs, but the annoying aspect for me about MefightClub for me has always been that links to posts there never seem to work properly. This has been a problem for at least a year. I can reproduce it on multiple browsers:

1. Log in, find a link to a post or comment (example: http://mefightclub.com/discussion/872/33/what-are-you-playing/#Item_65)
2. Copy the link to a browser that you're not logged in on and try to launch it
3. Page comes back with either "302 Moved" error, or "Redirect loop" error, on every browser I've tried (just tried Chrome and an old version of FireFox).

What made it more annoying was a that there was also a bug that made it so that I never stayed logged in for more than an hour or so, so any time I wanted to check in on a thread I would always have to go to the frontpage to sign in, then go back to the thread I wanted to refresh. Not sure if that bug still exists.
posted by burnmp3s at 8:28 AM on September 26, 2013

Yeah, the redesign came out really great. I've already settled in to it feeling like home, like, of course this is what MFC looks like.

Also, for new Mefightclub members wanting some game chatter but not searching for a specific game or anything, there are three generalist threads that I check for new updates (and the prominent NEW X widget in the redesign makes this so easy!) whenever I drop by the site.

New Games Coming Up: folks talking about interesting games in development, being kickstarted, being put out as a demo/alpha/early-access thing, etc. This thread and Rock Paper Shotgun are how I keep up with gaming, mostly; lots of stuff I might otherwise be inclined to discuss on Metafilter itself fits here better for cases where there's not so much a Thing On The Web to build a post around yet.

What Are You Playing?: folks talking about whatever they're fiddling with at the moment. Like the New Games thread, it's a great place for suggestions about games you might not have known about or known you'd actually enjoy, plus people get into all sorts of interesting short-form criticism about what does and doesn't work in the games they've been spending time on. Can be a good way to get a few impressions of a recently released game that no one felt like starting a dedicated thread for. (And now and then, a flurry of comments on the same game leads someone to say, hey, we should make a new thread for this!)

Digital Distribution Deals: people mentioning generally short-lived discounts, sales, promotional oddness, Steam extravaganzas, bundles (humble and otherwise), and so on. Great to check in on every day or two if you're specifically looking for a bargain on some game to come along or don't mind being prompted to a little impulse shopping. (Technically the second of these threads since the first one got super long, and I'm sure there'll be a third eventually. Mefightclub threads don't close unless someone closes them, which is usually only because the beast of a thread has outgrown all human comprehension and must be contained to prevent its Sothothian hunger from destroying all possible worlds, etc.)

They're all long-lived threads. I linked to the start of them because linking to an arbitrary recent point is weird; you might just jump to the most recent page and see what folks are currently chattering about if you don't specifically want to go surfing through 2000 comments of archives right now.

But there's all kinds of cool older stuff mentioned in them if you're ever feeling the need for some generic gaming inspiration (though of course in the Deals thread most of that will be long-expired discounts).

And if you're ever wanting a "looking for good games Of Kind X" for whatever X is your thing, it's totally alright to start a thread talking about that, though do a quick search like a responsible mefite because in some cases there may already be one.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:47 AM on September 26, 2013 [2 favorites]

This reminds me, I need to get back to the Aporkalypse. I'm not sure why I stopped playing on it and I miss it!
posted by brundlefly at 11:27 AM on September 26, 2013

Ocherdraco - you can see all your comments by going to your profile page. There are a few links on the right hand side and you can use that same feature to stalk other people on the website from their profile pages.*

*Not that I do that or anything.
posted by tkappleton at 1:01 PM on September 26, 2013

Thanks!
posted by ocherdraco at 2:08 PM on September 26, 2013

Just woke up over here in Asia. Thanks for the kind words on the redesign, all. It has been the biggest project I've done to date as a hobbyist, both in terms of lines of code and time spent, and I'm happy (and gratified that Mefighters in general seem happy) with the results. Still a lot of small-to-medium bugs and weird stuff that needs ironing out, but I'm hard at work trying to track down and fix 'em.

Copy the link to a browser that you're not logged in on and try to launch it

There's your problem right there. ;-) When you log in to MFC, you get a login cookie and a session cookie. If you use a different browser and you're not logged in there, it's going to want to log you in first. We made a conscious decision that our little speed bump for participation (the equivalent of Metafilter's 5-dollas) would be that an account was needed not only to participate, but to read the site. It means we're smaller than we might otherwise be, but we get basically zero driveby Gamebros and stuff. We also block all search bots, again, to keep things nice and privateish and cosy.

There is, though, a longstanding bug that I have never been able to fix, where if you do not log in for a long time (longer than the login cookie, which I think is 30 days at the moment), then try to go directly to a thread/comment, a redirect loop sometimes happens. I hate that a lot, but it's so far been beyond my meagre skills to fix, and the easy solution user-side is just to visit more than once a month. Heh.

What made it more annoying was a that there was also a bug that made it so that I never stayed logged in for more than an hour or so

This one I don't think I've ever had reported (although there was a bit of login weirdness I fixed a couple or three years back, if I recall), so it might be something that's on your end in terms of browser security/adblocking (although there are no ads per se at MFC). If it's an ongoing issue that's bothering you in trying to use the site, please do add some info about it here, or start a new thread at MFC, and I'll do my best to try and track down the problem, if it's server-side.

If I want to introduce myself on the introduce yourself page, do I do it via 'add comment' at the bottom?

Yup, you got it. MFC is a forum, basically, which means that unlike Metafilter, new comments in threads (the introduce yourself thread is up to like 4100 comments at this point) will bump that thread to the top of the front page. At the moment, three threads (ie discussions) are 'sticky', so they always stay at the top of the front page, if and until I unsticky them.

There are some tools to help you customize what you see -- the buttons on the right side of threads on the front page let you bookmark threads (you can see all your bookmarked threads, with the green indicator, by hitting the button at the top of the thread listing (if you're on a screen higher than 1000px wide), or alternately, you can set a forum preference on your account page to keep bookmarked threads at the top of the list) or 'cloak' them, which hides them from view if you really just can't handle the idea of seeing them. There's a similar view of all your cloaked threads, again from the top button bar.

In that button bar are filters to show threads that only have new comments for you, or only threads you've started, or only threads you've whispered (ie the equivalent of personal messages, between you and another person, which appear as threads on the site, but visible only to you and the other person), or a button that takes you to a search to bring back all whispered comments where you are a participant (comments in normal threads can also be whispered secretly to another person).

And, of course, as tkappleton mentioned, in the sidebar on your account page, you can find some custom searches (which you can replicate by hand on the search page, or futz with) that will take you to listings of your own activity.

It seems a but daunting in text, but one of the goals of this redesign was to surface some of that functionality and make it more easily grokkable using color coding and stuff.

Just mess around (and have a look in your forum preferences on your account page (on the sidebar) to get everything set up the way you like, and if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask, there or here.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:26 PM on September 26, 2013

show threads that only have new comments for you

Which, in the case of a new user is all the threads, right? Not just threads that you have commented in that have new comments since yours.
posted by ocherdraco at 4:33 PM on September 26, 2013

Yes indeed, that is correct. The orange 'new' indicator will disappear after you've clicked into a thread until someone else makes a new comment.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:41 PM on September 26, 2013

I'm more of a console person--is there a place to find others for games on the Xbox?

We do tend to focus mostly on PC gaming (PC, Mac, Linux), but a large number of people are console owners as well or even strictly console gamers, and there are quite a few threads about consoles in general and console-exclusive games. I'm not a console person myself, but we are definitely not anti-anything as a group when it comes to gaming (other than sexism and homophobia and stuff), so you are totally welcome to start new or bump old discussions about console gaming.

A quick way to find old threads about stuff is to hit the livesearch box on the sidebar on the front page, and just start typing. It'll take a sec, but it will start bringing back users/threads/comments that match the substring you're typing, and you can click in to the thread in question to see if it needs a bump. There's also a console category that you can peruse to see if there're any threads there you'd like to resurrect, or if not, like I said, go ahead and start a new one. (Categories aren't much used, as the forum is flat by design, but they can help you narrow things down when you're looking for something.)
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:08 PM on September 26, 2013

Ocherdraco - you can see all your comments by going to your profile page.

That's not exactly like recent activity here at MeFi, but it's given me an idea on how to maybe implement something like it, so: stay tuned!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:39 AM on September 27, 2013

Cool!
posted by ocherdraco at 3:48 AM on September 27, 2013

MFC is full of good.
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:43 AM on September 28, 2013

The DCSS tournament has been announced and here is the MeFightClub thread. Come play with us!
posted by ODiV at 7:26 AM on September 30, 2013

It's the nicest little gaming community I've ever participated in. Seriously, if you like games but prefer interacting with other people in a mature and friendly way, go check it out.
posted by longdaysjourney at 9:44 PM on September 30, 2013

I've just added a recent-activity equivalent to MFC. Info is in the currently-stickied announcement thread over there. Thanks for the suggestion, ocherdraco!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:57 PM on October 10, 2013 [1 favorite]