New features: Keyword Alert and Badges, Planet Partner usernames renamed, styling

Today, other than working in the house (we had a few windows left to paint and getting the shades fixed on them again), there was also some time to work on EP.

Firstly, I'm excited to release another feature in beta: "Keyword Alert". Like with the Bookmarks, this is intended to become a feature exclusively available for premium members in the future, but I wanted to let you play around with it before locking it up when I feel we have a nice offering that will hopefully entice more people to sign up as premium members.

Anyway, the new feature is called Keyword Alerts, and it will allow you to be notified by E-mail whenever a specific keyword is used in new posts, or when a specific user posts. It's configurable to get you semi-immediate (the mails are sent out every 30 minutes), daily, weekly or monthly alerts.

To use it, in your account menu (top-right, and hover your mouse over your username), and select Keyword Alert:

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(there currently is a minor bug in that both the Blog Details entry and the Keyword Alerts links seem to be in the same link together when you highlight the Keyword Alert link).

In the Keyword Alerts screen, you can define keywords and usernames you want to get alerted on. In the example below, you can see I defined three keyword groups: Arkadia, Toulan and Cyrene. In the Arkadia group, I only have a keyword defined: "planet arkadia". In the Toulan group, I have a trigger that alerts me whenever the user Farah - Toulan posts. This is accomplished by prefixing the username with an @ symbol. Lastly, in the Cyrene group, there's a mix of username alerts and a keyword alert:



You can also add exclude rules, which at this very moment only support using a user's id number (if you have someone on your ignore list, that is honored already, so even if that person posts your keyword, you will not receive an alert about it). This would take the format of "user_id = 1". I have not tested that part fully myself yet, and while for now the functionality on it is limited, in due time the exclusion rules will be more extensive, allowing you complete control over what you want to be alerted on, and what you wish to skip.

Once a person you defined an alert on, or one of your keywords is encountered, an automated job will send you an alert by E-mail to notify you of the event:

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It might not be visible, but the mail was triggered by the "Planet Cyrene" keyword, which was made italic in the mail.

I trust you share my sentiment that this could be a valuable tool for you to stay on top of exactly the content you want to be notified quickly about :)



Becoming a premium member is only USD 3.50 per month or USD 35.00 for a whole year, and you would be helping us recoup a fraction of EntropiaPlanets' operating costs, as well as help us get more features available for you!

Should you feel inclined to chip in, you can sign up as a premium member in your account menu, and then selecting "Account Upgrade":

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To show our appreciation, you will not only be able to get special priviledges like the ability to continue using the Bookmarks and Keyword Alerts mentioned above (as well as other upcoming priviledges we intend to offer to premium members), but can also use bigger avatars, and enjoy some additional premium rights. I will try to update our premium membership offering soon to show an exact picture of what you would get.

However, one thing I'd like to announce straight away is that as a premium member, you will receive a visual perk in the form of your username being green, and with a star (because that's what you are for supporting the only independent Entropia Universe forum), but additionally, your user info profile in posts will also allow you to don a cool "Premium Member" badge:

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I also addressed a rather unpleasant bug that prevented our Planet Partners who had their EP username reflect their planet partnership by means of a " | PlanetPartner name" tag from using the EntropiaPlanet Wiki. As it turns out, the "|" symbol is not supported by MediaWiki, and thus it threw an error whenever these good people attempted to head on over to the Wiki. I mostly wanted you to be aware of these changes, and thank @Tass for finding the list of illegal wiki characters. Oh, and of course to congratulate @Ordaz for having the wisdom to stick to just his regular name even when we alerted him to the " | Theryon Wars" opportunity ;)

Lastly, I have solved a few issues with wrongly coloured text in the various styles, and made the recently released Planet Partner footer links a bit more easy to see.

 

I assume it's to pick those fourms you want to see the keywords in (white list - as in only notify me when the keyword pops up in these forums) or not in (black list - do not notify me, even if the keyword is used in these forums).

 

The bug mentioned earlier causing the Blog Details and Keyword Alert links to visually mix together has been solved.