Troy Hepfner's Blog

No new games?

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 06:18:14 -0800

You may have noticed that there haven't been any new third-party games added to the site so far this year.

I've been looking, but I haven't seen many decent family-friendly games come out yet. Most of the new releases I've seen on Big Fish Games have very dark themes and graphics. And I've yet to see a new indie game that I would want to recommend. So in the meantime I'm just continuing to pour all my efforts into finishing Dirk Dashing 2.

I'm also trying to minimize the number of new games from Big Fish that I put on my site. Their affiliate program terms state that all referrals become theirs after one year. So one year after I refer a new customer to them, I won't get any commission from sales made to that customer - even if they purchase a game directly from my site. It's been almost 2 years since they instituted this change to their affiliate program, so you can probably guess that my income level from Big Fish has dropped considerably in recent months. I'm earning very little from them now.

And that's a bummer - because roughly 30% of my yearly income has been from commissions on third-party games. That extra income has really helped me out.

But business is business. I understand that. So I'm thinking about pruning many of their titles from my catalog soon. I'm planning to redo my web site layout later this year to make the pages wider and easier to maintain, and when I do, I'll be re-evaluating each of the games on my site. If I can't work out a direct affiliate deal with the developer, their game will probably be pulled from my catalog. The only exceptions will be some children's games that I can't obtain from anywhere else (like the Dora games) and a few other games that have been popular with my customers.

I've already got direct affiliate deals with many indie developers, as well as some larger developers like Playrix, Realore, and Youda Games. I'll continue to pursue those relationships, as well as others, so I can continue to bring you good clean games for your family.

New anti-spam tools are GREAT!

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:37:44 -0800

I must say the new anti-spam tools I installed in the forum at the beginning of January are working GREAT!

Previously I had anywhere between 20-30 spammy threads/posts per day that I had to deal with. This was a largely manual effort to review them, delete them, and ban the offending users. I spent at least a half-hour every morning dealing with this junk - plus checking the forum multiple times throughout the day just to make sure things were ok.

Since I installed the new anti-spam tools, I've only had to deal with 2 spammy posts. For the whole month! YAY!

I now have multiple lines of defense set up. The first new tool is preventative, and is designed to keep out automated spiders/bots. These things have gotten smart lately, to the point where captchas and text-based questions are easily circumvented. This new tool presents a custom image to the user, and requires them to provide an answer based on what they see in the image. The image doesn't contain text or anything that can be programmatically scanned, so only a human user is going to be able to answer this question.

The second tool is also preventative. It screens all new user registrations against a huge database of known spammers, and if it finds them, it prevents them from even registering in the first place. If it doesn't find them, it allows them to register. This tool also provides another good feature - whenever I ban someone for spamming, it submits their user information to this database so they won't be able to register on any other forums that utilize the database.

Next, all new users are placed in a special user group with very tight restrictions. All new threads and posts by users in this group are placed in the moderation queue. So if a spammer does make it onto the forum, their spam posts will NEVER show up - I will delete their posts and ban the user permanently. In addition, users in this group are not allowed to edit any posts (so they can't go back later and insert spammy links). And they can't use signatures or other forum features that could be misused for spam.

Once I'm satisfied that a user is not a spammer but is rather a positive contributor to the community, I'll promote them to the user group I've set up for approved users. Approved users will have normal forum privileges.

Lastly, I've also configured the forum so that I will be e-mailed whenever a new thread or post is submitted or edited (by any user in any group). So I don't have to keep checking back here multiple times during the day to see how things are going.

So there's still some manual effort. However, since this forum doesn't have much traffic yet, this manual effort is minimal. I've been able to reclaim a lot of time that I was spending each day on dealing with forum spam. So I'm happy about that!

Catching up on my to-do list

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:24:28 -0800

Today I'm taking a bit of a break from my work on Dirk Dashing 2 to catch up on some other items on my to-do list.

First up was Rick Rocket. You've probably already seen the announcement about the new home page. I've been meaning to put together a new page for that game for awhile now. I wanted something that shows off the game better, and is hopefully more attractive to visitors, particularly people who arrive by clicking on one of my ads. It's the first thing a visitor sees, before the game demo or even the video trailer. So it's important that it looks good and catches their attention.

Second, I haven't been doing much advertising for my site or my games lately. And it has shown in terms of my site traffic and sales this month. So I spent some time this morning looking for new advertising opportunities and setting up some ads.

Next up is a broken RSS feed that a customer e-mailed me about earlier this week. My blog's RSS feed hasn't been updating in awhile. I think I've fixed that now - I'll know as soon as I publish this post...

As you can see I wear a lot of hats, depending on what needs to get done. But I love working for myself, and I wouldn't trade it for anything!