We've made some changes to the referral system, to encourage users to really get BYOND noticed. As of today, if someone you referred becomes a member, you earn $5.00 instead of $3.00. That's also retroactive to any bonuses that haven't been paid out yet. For those of you who've already been bringing BYOND to the outside world, this is our way of saying thanks. You can see any bonuses that are coming to you by going to the Manage Account page and clicking on the Wallet tab. We also now provide BBcode for links as well as HTML, so if you post on a lot of BB-ish forums you can post a link there now too, or even put it right in your signature.

There's a new feature available for those who want to promote their games--or games they like--on other sites or forums. On most game pages you'll now see a link that says "Introduce this game to the world!" There, you'll find a quick way to grab HTML or BBcode you can use for linking to that game. This goes by the same referral system we use for the regular site, so if the people who come to see the game stay and become BYOND members, you'll get our newly expanded thanks.


When new users come to BYOND through a game, now they have instructions for how to get started. It might have seemed a little confusing before, so we want to make the process of getting set up with BYOND as quick as possible so people can jump right into the game.

We're trying to clear the way for a lot of new users to discover the exciting possibilities in BYOND 4.0, so this is just one of the first steps. Keep telling the world about BYOND, and now your favorite games too!

Our slew of website updates continues. Now one of our new features is the ability to send and receive pages from the website itself.

If you visit your home page, you can receive any new messages that are waiting for you. You can reply to those messages right from there, without ever having to start up the BYOND pager.

BYOND Members can now see icons next to their online friends, which let you send them messages. Those friends may be on the BYOND pager, or they might be viewing the website, but either way they should be available to receive your message and respond.

You also can see the people who have added you as a friend, your "watchers", so you can discover new friends to add to your list and perhaps new games as well.

And this concludes our regularly scheduled website feature-creep. Next up, BYOND software feature-creep!

A lot of stuff happens in BYONDspace, stuff of which you might not be aware. Important stuff.

Now, thanks to the nifty new home page, you can easily keep track of said stuff. Track your favorite games, friends, blogs, and more thanks to our new BYOND alert system. When something interesting happens, the boring, stationary BYOND atom in the menubar will be replaced with the the new, exciting version !! Click on that to go to your home page and see what gifts await. It's like Christmas all over again!

You'll also notice that the menu is a bit more colorful. Whenever a game you follow on your pager is live, its icon will appear on the bar. You can then view the status by clicking on it.

Our goal eventually is to move all of the pager functionality over to the webspace, to further blur the distinction between the site, the hub, and the pager. That way you'll always be able to stay alert of friends, games, and events in the world of BYOND.

The BYOND Hub-- that beast responsible for tracking users & games across the BYONDspace-- has been going "out to lunch" in the wee hours of the mornings for the past three nights. Unfortunately, with our limited staff, we've been unable to handle this expediently. Sorry.

Server Guru Mike H. has isolated the problem and is working on a fix. We'll also attempt to monitor the system better so this doesn't happen again.

Hopefully this will mean you'll be able to once again play NarutoLegendsOfTheSoiledPants even in those early mornings from here on out-- but if you can't, please bear with us. Sometimes these things take a bit of trial and error to sort out. Please don't spam our forums and support system with reports when others have already done so before you.

Happy gaming!

It's been a little while now since we got the new BYOND site running. Work on the new site has been ongoing, and several improvements have been made--some at the request of our users, and some for our own benefit.

Blog posts have had some improvements and changes. When the new site went active a new flag became available, allowing users to choose to hide their page from the main members page if they want. That way if they feel it's not kid-safe or very community-friendly, they can keep it hidden so only their friends or guild members will see it.

Attaching files to posts is a little easier now too: All file attachments go into a custom directory set up just for that post. Once you submit the post, the files are tied to it so if the post is deleted, the files are too. This should help everyone keep their files organized a little better. You can also attach files while editing a post now, not just when you first make it.

The way you post a review for a game has also changed a lot. We noticed a lot of users didn't seem to fully understand how to post reviews, so now the system hopefully makes this a lot clearer. When you're writing your post, you just have to specify that the post is a review, and a box with more options will appear. Those options now include scores that you can use to judge games on their gameplay, presentation, originality, and overall impression. Along with these changes, any images you attach to the review--which are assumed to be screenshots--will appear as thumbnails at the top of the post. Eventually we hope for this easy access to screenshots to make its way onto the hub entry itself, so that users can get a look at your game to whet their appetite.

Speaking of hub entries, another change we've done is remove the ability to use the <style> and <link> tags there. If you took a look around the hub before the change you would've seen pretty quickly why we did this. Some people were using layout templates and such that were designed for Myspace or other totally different sites, and these caused major distortions to the page. Some were practically unreadable. Sadly when CSS was designed, no one thought it might be desirable to limit its effects to only a certain part of the page. You can still use styles on your hub pages by using style attributes inside your HTML tags, though.

At the request of some of our members, we've added the ability for BYOND members to block any of the ads on the site. This is accessible via your account settings page. The ads are still in flux; we've been making changes to put them where they'll do the most good, and take them out of the way on pages where they just don't do much of anything. For the moment we've taken the ad off the sidebar to see what happens--but it could come back. We're still testing a lot of this stuff out, so please bear with us!

Another request we've had is to allow people to turn the sidebar on and off. There is now a small toggle button that can be used to switch off the orange sidebar + topbar area. Switching this off only lasts for a single browser session. That way if we make any changes to the sidebar like adding a box for special events, you'll still be in the loop.

If you've been having problems with someone on your site's forums or who's been submitting inappropriate games to your guild, you now have the option to send them a warning. A warning must be read and acknowledged before the user who receives it can continue to use the rest of your site. Unlike the old forum warnings, these are one-shot deals but they're also harder to ignore.

You may have noticed that when you're managing the members for your guild, you can name people as contributors. So what's the difference between a contributor and a member? In practical terms, none. You can set up contributors for your site and assign them ranks, so they can be named as admins even if they aren't BYOND members who can join your site on their own. Another recent change is that if a member of your site leaves, their rank will stay intact if they return. This is pretty helpful if you've set up a "sandbox" rank for the folks who join your guild just to submit games that don't belong there, and it also means if you accidentally leave a guild you can return with your full rank intact.

We hope the new changes are generally well-liked, though of course it never seems possible to please everyone. While we were at it we also fixed some bugs in the way the site appears in Internet Explorer 6. (On a personal note, I implore everyone for their own sanity to upgrade to Firefox, or at least to IE 7.)