PostMonster General
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Today we're rolling out a new version of the website. If everything is going right, you're using it right now. If not, we hope to have the new version up very soon. What's new? Lots of stuff, and not much, and very much faster.
Goblin Squad Store
If you missed out on either of the phenomenal Kickstarter campaigns that are helping propel our sister company Goblinworks' next-generation online fantasy game to the finish line, now's your chance to get in. Buy into the vision, help shape the game, and get access to exclusive products that are only available to Goblin Squad members. Check out the Goblin Squad store here.
Order Checkout Wizardry
Way back in the long ago, the paizo.com website was blue, it sold only two or three products, and it had a step-by-step wizard guiding you through checkout. Along the way we've complicated up our order checkout process real good what with the twenty thousand products and preorders and backorders and special orders and things that ship in a tube and things that can roll with other things in a tube and things that can ship in their own packaging and all the possible shipping methods and customs categories and restrictions and the bound printed matter and the per-service dimensional weight and dynamically repacking orders into multiple packages shipping via potentially upgraded delivery services and redeeming promo codes and gift certificates and selecting gift recipients and products that are both electronic and physical and shipping orders to multiple addresses and ongoing subscriptions and the ability to combine what's in your cart with a pending order or with an upcoming subscription shipment -- the sidecart! we probably should've patented that -- and holding subscription shipments to ship with various things and picking up at PaizoCon or Gen Con and, well, there's actually too much to list.
My point is, the checkout wizard was a really good idea and we've brought it back. I'm especially pleased with the final confirmation step -- read on for why.
Order Confirmation Emails
Paizo's order confirmation emails have always been plain text. Now they're going to be formatted. They'll match what we show you on the final step of order checkout, as well as the display in your order history. This may not sound like a big deal but if you've placed a complex order with us you know what I mean. The new display includes a lot of information previously only available to Paizo customer service like expected package weights, customs categories and shipping timeframes. Items on paizo.com orders can come from lots of places -- your shopping cart, subscriptions, Kickstarter pledges, and even other pending orders (and then there's the magic only customer service can do, like replacement shipments) -- so we're including more detailed information about where items originate. Products can also do lots of things to your account, like grant PaizoCon badges or add PDFs when the print portion of a print/PDF bundle ships, so we're including more details about that sort of thing as well. Basically we took the most common queries received by customer service and put that information at your fingertips so they can focus on the really "interesting" problems.
Well, not much visible beyond what I've described above. But this is the most significant revamp in Paizo's history, and we've done a LOT of revamps. Over the years our order processing system has grown in complexity as we've added features. Along the way the codebase has grown brittle and increasingly resistant to change without putting up a really effective and quite vicious fight. To get an idea, check out Auntie Lisa's Story Hour; each pivot Paizo takes requires new code, and those pivots come quickly. So there's about a decade of changes, some hasty and poorly conceived, some from the excellent-idea-at-the-time-if-we-were-in-that-business-anymore department, and a healthy mix of "we just messed up a few thousand orders, what do we have to do to fix this before anybody notices" in there.
Well, good fracking riddance, that's what I say. This codebase is cleaner, way easier to understand, and now comprises a foundation on which we can start building new things rapidly, instead of continually bailing water and trying to figure out why the thing we built a year ago just broke today. No promises. But I think things are about to get interesting around here.
Oh yeah, the site should be faster now. And we've made some big changes to our customer service tools that should help us fulfill your orders faster, too.
There are going to be bumps along the way. I'll update this thread as we find things that need fixing. By the way, none of the changes in this rollout are intended to fix any known bugs in play-by-post campaigns or add new features to the messageboards or anything like that, so if you've been waiting for a fix, I'm sorry and we'll try to get to it soon.
Right now, gift options are unavailable during order checkout, as is redeeming promotional codes or gift certificates. (You can still redeem gift certificates from the gift certificates page.) Some displays may be a bit wonky, we've switched stylesheets and are in the process of revamping that a bit more.
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Whoo!
are all the web staff currently wearing your required hacker goggles on your foreheads and listening to techno
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are all the web staff currently wearing your required hacker goggles on your foreheads and listening to techno
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if they are not hacking the gigawatt mainframe system grid hard enough this hack will fail!
then no one will be able to afford more goggles, techno or neon mesh tanktops
Gary, you cannot let this happen
(Oh and on a personal note, I've been neglecting the friends I've made here on our messageboards the past few months, and I apologize. I've been busy.)
Who are you again? ;)
The messageboards look new and strange!
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Needs spaces between games on the Campaigns tab. Everything's mooshed together, in Chrome at least.
Also spoiler tabs are defaulting to open, at least on profiles, even though they say "Show." You have to click them twice to close them, and then they're open again when you go back to the page.
(The preceding sentence is in ooc tags.)
Not sure how many of these things you're already aware of; feel free to disregard if I'm telling you stuff you already know. :)
Everything looks different (Yay, Chaos!) but seems working under Opera 12.16 for Win. Just checked out and downloading purchases OK. One minor hiccup during checkout when the payment option(s) didn't pop up the first time, and one "cannot add" error when I Fav'ed a post just now (but the fav was still there after a page refresh, so maybe an erroneous error?).
It's weird and icky.
Change bad! I don't like change!
More constructively, is all the posts being so close together a bug or a feature? It looks kinda weird to have the previous post pressed right up against the user name of the next poster.
OOC text has actually been removed from everywhere. Older posts have also lost it. The "Smaller" text has equally been removed.
This has been smalled
Italics works though
What about strike through
Looks like bigger, smaller, and ooc are the winners. Or losers. Whichever.
And the spoilers are also defaulting to open on the gameplay thread as well.
Yeah, we've got a fix we're rolling out right now for some of these formatting problems. Probably be up sometime in the next hour.
To add to Joana's post with another formatting error you're probably aware of and will probably get fixed anyway (so just in case), the [smaller] tags don't seem to work at the moment.
This has been smalled
Italics works though
What about strike throughLooks like bigger, smaller, and ooc are the winners. Or losers. Whichever.
The first two appear to be omissions from CSS. There's a class applied to the <span> in each case, but no corresponding CSS definition of that class.
Gary, my eyes fell out when I was refreshing the forums. The forums are commanding me to get cross with my azaleas and yell at my shadow, Gary, what should I do?
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Gary, my eyes fell out when I was refreshing the forums. The forums are commanding me to get cross with my azaleas and yell at my shadow, Gary, what should I do?
Add peonies.
I tried to, but my eyebrows fell off when I got to the checkout.
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You should be seeing the fixes for the messageboard formatting shortly (including spoilers). I've isolated the problem that some have been experiencing with the favorites prompt and that should be corrected soon.
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I can't seem to favorite any posts. I've tried a few different posts, threads and forums and I keep getting an error message:
"Sorry, there was a problem adding your favorite."
EDIT: Except that it turns out favoriting is working - I'm just getting an error message.
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I can't seem to favorite any posts. I've tried a few different posts, threads and forums and I keep getting an error message:
"Sorry, there was a problem adding your favorite."
EDIT: Except that it turns out favoriting is working - I'm just getting an error message.
Yup, same here, plus a similar error message trying to remove a favorite. Both work, but both trigger an erroneous error message.
Yeah, I'm getting that as well.
Also heavy lag spikes. When the forum is fast, it's faster than it was. But most of the time it's just slow. I'm guessing that's due to active maintenance >_>
Come to think of it, this kinda explain the lack of updates to the PRD/avatars.
The new check out wizard is a nice addition.
I just placed 2 orders to take advantage of the GM day sale. The second order processed, but there has been no email confirmation.
The first order didn't process and is showing pending. That and my store credit seems to be a bit wonky now.
I have emailed C/S, but wanted to make the issue known here as well.
OOC text has actually been removed from everywhere. Older posts have also lost it. The "Smaller" text has equally been removed.
This has been smalled
Italics works though
What about strike throughLooks like bigger, smaller, and ooc are the winners. Or losers. Whichever.
And the spoilers are also defaulting to open on the gameplay thread as well.
Safari on ios still displays enbiggened text smaller than regular text. Also page loads on ios safari are slower.
I dont know if you want feedback as such, but the "my subscription" page seems a little odd (whether newly odd or always been odd, I'm not sure).
Next to my Gamemastery cards subscription I see "To cancel a subscription please contact..." etcetera which is presumably supposed to be at the top of the page rather than halfway down.
The Obsessive-Compulsive in me is rocking back and forth over some things being "volumes", others "copies" and others "books" but I think that's my problem, not yours..
Clicking the favorite button displays a dialog that tells me there is an error adding the favorite. However, it appears that the post still receives the favorite.
Edit: I'm not sure if you are looking for this kind of info here, but it seemed apropos because it just started today. :D Just trying to help spot bugs.
I just placed 2 orders to take advantage of the GM day sale. The second order processed, but there has been no email confirmation.
Yep, my order processed, was added to My Downloads, and downloaded fine (if a bit slow, but that's understandable). However, the email confirmation never arrived and it's been 3-1/2 to 4 hours now.
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I dont know if you want feedback as such, but the "my subscription" page seems a little odd (whether newly odd or always been odd, I'm not sure).
My Subscription page changed to - overall clear.... but I really miss the summary of the upcoming shipments which was not there (although the space for it is there.
Oh yeah, good point. Now that I've noticed it - I miss it too! :)
I guess the product schedule page is still there. The estimate of upcoming costs was a useful feature though, even though the next months cost was always woefully out if you had sidecart, back order or preorder items.
RPG Superstar Season 9 Top 16, RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32
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Everything looks really, really strange.
This is a picture of what I am seeing.
*edit* It seems to work.
Assistant Software Developer
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Yeah, top row is cascading down through everything else for me. Y'know, the "Hello, NAME HERE! | Sign Out | Account | etc". The "Paizo/Messageboards/paizo.com/etc." line does too.
Things get really squirrely when I go to my profile. Currently viewing on Windows 7, IE.
If you are seeing formatting problems, it would be super helpful if you told us what version of what browser you're using, like IE 10 or Chrome 34. You can usually find it in Help->About in windows or Program Name->About Program Name(I think) in OSX.
If you are on IE, then clicking the compatibility mode button may or may not help(it should be off and looks like a page torn into pieces in the address bar.) It's a simple thing that can be easily checked so it's worthwhile to give it a try.
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If you are seeing formatting problems, it would be super helpful if you told us what version of what browser you're using, like IE 10 or Chrome 34. You can usually find it in Help->About in windows or Program Name->About Program Name(I think) in OSX.
If you are on IE, then clicking the compatibility mode button may or may not help(it should be off and looks like a page torn into pieces in the address bar.) It's a simple thing that can be easily checked so it's worthwhile to give it a try.
Gotcha!
At the moment:
Internet Explorer 9
Version 9.0.8112.16421
And confirming that Compatibility Mode fixes the cascading problem! The profile formatting is still center-aligned, but it still looks more neat. Thanks!
