Ops-center

[Scarecrow]

Thanks Brian, we really appreciate the kind words!

We will address the Rule issue with a broader solution - that tab is one of the oldest from a design - not sure why there is even a map in it. Suffice it to say, we'll be overhauling that tab and we'll make the rule definition system and selection more elegant.


THIS WEEK AT OPS-Center


Brent is off in Newfoundland leaving me the shop (Bastard!, and I don't mean the BB kind). I've used it to ignore him and further my personal agenda since he's not around to object to my design changes (grin).

If you've been watching the project you may notice dramatic changes to the footer. We've installed new security features, and have a monitoring service hammering us each night looking for problems in our security. This has been very helpful - thanks to the people at GoDaddy. What a ridiculous name for a company, but what an awesome company at the same time. So we've made a lot of changes that include passive and active penetration testing and have made many changes based on the feedback we got. We also set up SSL. Its a little overkill, because all of our financial transactions such as banner ads and ticket sales (yes, hosts will be able to sell tickets to their games shortly) occur on our partners sites which have even greater security than our site (millions of dollars worth). So I can say that the site is very safe to entrust your profile data to.

We fixed a lot of little things over the week, but most of the work has been behind the scenes. Those of you on the site have probably received our new "OPS-Center Weekly Update - Whats Happening Near You!". I don't know about you, but I really appreciate certain kinds of emails from my social networking sites like Facebook or LinkedIn which push useful information analysis to me. It saves me hunting stuff down or logging into sites on the chance there might be something useful. So that spirit, this is the first in a bunch of optional emails we've started having the system send out.

This email is generated every Wednesday at about 3am EST and looks like this:



This email uses your home pin to find everything going on in the next three weeks within a 150km radius and lets you know where your friends are playing and what other events are going on that you might be interested in.

As with all our messages, you can turn all notifications on or off as you want. We'll be doing both host and player reminder emails as well - this is where a well described Event can help immensely. Put basic stuff in the Summary of the event description and keep it short. Put the rest, like camo, gameplay, required kit, etc in the detailed section. We're going to compose email reminders that go out to players prior to an Event with this information. So the better the Event descriptions the more useful the reminders will be.

So I think you can see as we go further along in the development, the BIG benefits of a custom event web application for Airsoft versus posting events on a d-board. We're up to 300 users on the system, growing about 10 to 20 a day, and the users are now coming from places in the US and the UK.

HOSTS come onboard! Give your players the ability to self-manage their participation in your Event! Push your event with permission, professionally and expertly to the player base. PLAYERS - Find games and finding places to play and games has never been easier or less annoying. Get on board!. Its cheaper than dirt, its FREE. Damn I bought dirt today for my garden, trust me, it IS cheaper than dirt!

We added Event and Field Transfer features - so if you set up and Event or a Field and need to hand over control to a friend, you can do this without help from an admin.

We've had some comments on iOS oddities - I've noticed them too - we'll get those fixed shortly. I love my iPad and I love surfing OPS-Center on it.


THE REALLY EXCITING NEWS

We've just settled a deal with EventBrite to utilize their ticketing engine to enable hosts to sell event tickets through OPS-Center. This is something Hosts have been wanting for a while. We've started the integration work and I expect you'll see full implementation before the end of July. What does this mean? It means Hosts can define a single or multiple Event tickets for the game as well as other items, and Players can purchase them using almost any payment method (sorry they don't support EMT yet) online, embedded within OPS-Center. Hosts can collect and reconcile Event attendees and even issue ticket refunds when necessary. There is an iOS and Android App for controlling gate entry/attendance:



There are a pile of other features, but needless to say, this should streamline paying for the event for everyone involved. Pricing is being set, but its going to be very reasonable (<$3.50 on a $25 ticket and that includes all elements of the transaction.). This solution will work with anyone in the world short of China and some Asian countries.

There are a ton of other little things we've been doing, but you'll systematically see new features come online as we move along. We're thinking about the whole Side management framework with automatic private discussion bunkers and so forth. We're not going to recreate something like ASC, but, we are going to put new discussion features in that facilitate comms within an Event (sorry no OFF TOPIC section in OPS-Center!)

I'm off to enjoy the long weekend - everyone stay safe and I'll update you next week. In the meantime if you have not logged on yet, get off your duff and get onto OPS-Center - we're building this for YOU.

Cheers

-- crow out.

[PrIeSt]

That has gotta be the coolest feature. Great for big ops like claybank etc.

I'd really love for a direct rss feed and implementation into a persons site.
Be able to show near by games and allow people to join by clicking from my site. As long as they have a user name. Then bounce em back to the. Maybe askin for too much.
People seem to dislike to many pages and having to goto other sites etc.

[Scarecrow]

Originally Posted by takagari

That has gotta be the coolest feature. Great for big ops like claybank etc.

I'd really love for a direct rss feed and implementation into a persons site.
Be able to show near by games and allow people to join by clicking from my site. As long as they have a user name. Then bounce em back to the. Maybe askin for too much.
People seem to dislike to many pages and having to goto other sites etc.

RSS, embed code and widgets will come with time. We're still building functionality. Once the data schema stabilizes we can look at outbound feeds, but we also are refining the privacy policy and disclosure wishes of hosts and players. There is more research and development to be done there before we start firing data offsite.

The embed graphic is all a host needs right now to link to a dboard. Problem is most dboards don't support HTML embed code from a third party site. I'd rather build an API and feed data that way, its far easier on cpu, bandwidth, etc.

I'm predicting you'll see the smaller games and hosts do paid tickets first. It costs a LOT of money to build this type of tool. Larger budget events can spend on web presence and a simple paypal gateway - the average 20 person game once a week during the summer can't finance this type of thing, but they can certainly use it if they don't have to build it.

[tygr701]

Posted my game up on ops center but its not allowing me to take away certain rules even though it says it successfully edits them so I have multiple FPS rules on my event at the moment. Other than that looks great keep improving it and it will be a good tool for hosts.

[Renegade)]

Originally Posted by tygr701

Posted my game up on ops center but its not allowing me to take away certain rules even though it says it successfully edits them so I have multiple FPS rules on my event at the moment. Other than that looks great keep improving it and it will be a good tool for hosts.

Thank you for your submission! If you are experiencing this issue, please submit it via the feedback button.

It could just be under construction right now, as mentioned a few posts earlier, we are going to make improvements to the Rules section, to make it much more usable and less busy as it is now with everyone submissions.

[Scarecrow]

Originally Posted by tygr701

Posted my game up on ops center but its not allowing me to take away certain rules even though it says it successfully edits them so I have multiple FPS rules on my event at the moment. Other than that looks great keep improving it and it will be a good tool for hosts.

Looking at the problem now.

Are you going to define sides so people can join your game?

[Gunk]

Yeah, the rule thing is funky. When putting up the Sunday/Finches game I thought I had selected only certain options from some of the sub-headers, but then all the rule options were added to the game.

That, and the screen seemed to like to jump up and down some when I was moving the mouse around inside the rule selection area.

[Renegade)]

Originally Posted by Gunk

Yeah, the rule thing is funky. When putting up the Sunday/Finches game I thought I had selected only certain options from some of the sub-headers, but then all the rule options were added to the game.

That, and the screen seemed to like to jump up and down some when I was moving the mouse around inside the rule selection area.

I just tried it, worked fine for me. Make sure when you want to pick individual rules, you dont check mark the box that selects all.

Its still alot of busy in there, but we are working on a modification to help make it a bit more organized.

[Scarecrow]

Gunk, have another try - the programmer made some changes - still a lot to be done, but right now we're just trying to stabilize what we have.

[Gunk]

As of 10:54pm I go into the eyewear section, I click 'select all' twice, once to select all, the second to deselect all. Eyewear tells me I have selected 0/11. I go into the menu and select 'full seal only' and click 'done'. Eyewear now tells me I have 11/11 selected. I open the sub menu and see that the only box checked off is still the 'full seal only' box. I click done. Eyewear now tells me I have 12/11 options selected. 0.o

Select all twice, clears up the 12/11 thing. Back to 0/11. Open menu, click 'full seal only', click done. 13/11 now selected.

When in the event page some of the rule sets seem to be proper. The eyewear thing is still off.

[Scarecrow]

Gunk, try it now, we addressed your specific issue...

[Scarecrow]

Dropdown menu for iOS fixed...

[Renegade)]

Just a note to everyone, I received an email from a host saying hes not getting many players signed up to his game with ops-center.

We need as much help from the hosts, from EVERYWHERE to help grow the player base! Ops-Center runs WITH your current dboard that you used to host games on. In order for the ops-center player base to grow, you as hosts still need to promote your games the same way you did before!

So follow these simple steps!

1: Create your game in Ops-Center fully filled out in all tabs!
2: Create a thread on your discussion board advertising your game.
3: Use the share button from your Ops-Center game post, to share a link right to page 1 of your dboard post.
4: Enjoy the assistance of Ops-Center's event management system to make your game organization a breeze!

Thanks everyone!

For more information directly from a valued Host in the community, read here: http://www.airsoftcanada.com/showthr...ght=ops-center

Regards,

Derek &
Ops-Center Staff

[Renegade)]

Ops-center has hit a milstone, 500 users!

Like our page on facebook! https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ops-C...76346812382104

Enjoy Ops-Center!

[MrEvolution]

Used this thing to host a game in Niagara (Battle of Grenoble), was easy to follow and ran smoothly. Its the facebook of airsoft.