Author: Sam Shadow (SMSHDW)

Welcome to the new Spawn Room website! I’ve spent the last few weeks redesigning and recoding everything to make it simpler, more accessible, and purpose driven. Before version 0.3.0 the website was designed to handle a wide variety of different features and ideas, but I realized it was too confusing. I had trouble explaining to people exactly what we did here.

So after sitting down and thinking about it, I decided to attack this project at a new angle. Rather than merging all my ideas into one site, I want to create an eSports Network that handles multiple websites under one user account. If you’re familiar with the Stack Exchange (with sites like Stack Overflow), you’ll be familiar with what I’m doing here.

This website specifically will focus on eSports data. The front page is now a search engine for finding players, teams, events, etc. Within these pages we track various stats, allow users to rate and comment, and if you own the page or earn the priviledges, can help submit and modify data. Think of this as the IMDB for eSports!

As with all updates on The Spawn Room, it is important to remember that bugs may exist. Since I code this project alone, I can only discover so much on my own. If anything looks or acts broken, it probably is. Please notify me via email, Facebook, or Twitter and I’ll take a look. If something looks funny, this is probably the CSS acting weird. You can usually solve those issues simply by refreshing the page (F5 on your keyboard). Again, if that doesn’t fix it, or breaks it even worse, shoot me a message.

Finally, I wanted to mention that some features, that existed in the previous versions, have been removed either temporarily or permanently. I will be analyzing each of them over the next few weeks to determine if they belong on this site or somewhere else. Please be patient as I continue to roll features and fixes out. I’ll try to get everything up to snuff as quickly as possible.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading and feel free to share any feedback, suggestions, or criticism whenever you can! I’ll be listening. :)

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I’m currently working on SQL optimization to try and get queries running faster. But I’m also limited by my web host so…yeah. Eventually I want to move to dedicated hosting which will greatly increase the sites performance!

Quite a few changes have been rolled out this week as verison 0.2.4 nears completion.

Of these changes, the most important have been the minor visual alterations, the freedom of creativity expansion, and the addition of some new filters. I’ll update the Site Progress page once all the changes have been implemented.

Please check out the “Sample page” which shows how you, the event organizer, player, manager, or whatever, can style a page to advertise your…whatever it is. Wow, there’s probably a better way for me to have said that, but I don’t feel like erasing it.

Anyways, my next development focus will be on more filters and user abilities. Stay tuned!

So yeah, version 0.2.2 turned out to be a little bit bigger than anticipated. The visuals have been altered, the entire backend has been torn apart and then reassembled, and the conceptual model of what we’re doing here has been updated.

One unfortunate result of this update has been the loss of the previous posts, views, comments, and ratings. Actually I shouldn’t say loss since the DB is still intact and will remain backed up, but rather, I wasn’t able or willing to convert all the records. It would have been a huge headache. In the future I might do something with them though.

User accounts have been transfered over though! So logins will still work all fine and dandy.

You’ll also notice this is a “preview” release right now. The reason being that I changed so much that some minor features have been removed, some things might be broken, and there is undoubtedly a handful of bugs lying in wait.

I’ll give an update when everything is rolled out 100%. Until then, thanks for reading and see you around!

The latest update has been applied and with it comes the “pages” feature. This “preview release” offers the ability for registered users to create pages for events, games, matches, players, and teams. The idea behind this feature is to build a Wikipedia-like experience for discovering aspects of the eSports world. The main difference here being that it’s specifically designed for eSports, allowing you to, for example, submit an event, and then connect players, teams, and matches to it.

Right now the feature is slim and contains just the core functionality. But there’s a wide range of additional options I want to apply over the next 0.2.x patches.

The next patch, version 0.2.1 is already planned out and will contain a bunch of little updates and tweaks. One specific fix will (hopefully) address a persistent bug with submitting text fields. Currently, if you paste from Google Documents, it adds extra tags and cuts off posts. I’ve tried fixing this before, but TinyMCE doesn’t appear to be stripping tags properly.

I’m also going to be looking into caching again to increase site performace, various visual and accessibility tweaks, adding edit/delete to comments, more submission forms for shows and the RSS feed, and some other housekeeping updates. Should be a decently large patch.

Until then, please let me know if you discover any bugs! Thanks.