GarageGames.com Site Update: Jan. 16, 2009

Launching the website has been a little like one of my favorite games, Left 4 Dead: intense, cooperative, and full of zombies.
It's been a few days since you heard directly from the web team. I know there's been a lot of activity on the site, and I am glad to have had awesome co-workers to take care of keeping you guys in the loop so I could focus my energy on the first update to the new site.

After making sure the site did not crash down over our ears (thanks Ops team!), the web team immediately huddled and make a SWAT list of things we wanted to tackle based on the feedback we received. So here is what you should find on the new site:

• Redirect URLs should now be working: This one gave me the most headaches because something went wrong between the test servers and the live site, but it should be working fine now. HUGE thanks to Orion for his short-term solution.
• Missing forums have returned: iTorque, GreenEar, and Collada are all available. We also pulled Constructor out of the Artist Corner into its own category.
• International Sales: There is now a Country drop-down list on the billing information form, this should help our international customers.
• What's my password?!: There's a new reset password option on the login page in case you're having trouble logging in.
• TDN lives: You should be able to log into our online wiki once again.
• Download links have been added to resources: So now you can get all those files back.
• Return of Watched Threads: All of your previous watched threads have magically returned (don't worry, it won't remove any you may have marked as watched since the new site went up).
• Edit comments on forums and blogs: Fear typos and 1 am comments no more!
• Unread forum threads functionality is back: You can mark all forum posts as "read" so you can always log into the site later and see what's been happening in your absence.
• The Markup Lite cheat sheet is back: No more guessing to try to remember how to add a video or otherwise pretty-up your post.
• Tweaked bulk accounts for educators: It should be easier now to manage student licenses if you are working for a school.

Rest assured that this is only update number one. There are many things we still need to improve on the new site, including a re-skin of the What's New page, tweaking the layout of blogs/forums, and continue to experiment with the forum structure to strike that balance between having too many forum categories and too few.
Thanks, and I'll keep you posted when the next update goes live. I'll be fighting off zombies until I see you next time.