Just a quick post here to thank everyone! It's been real fun and while GameGum is growing tremendously still despite hold we've put on our new launch I want to say that someday it will come! And it will be worth it!

Thank you all, now go out and play some games!

So, to all you flash game porn lovers out there: View our Adult Flash Games.

Cheers!

What Will be New

In our massive update coming up soon, we will be upgrading the friendship feature. When Elmer adds Freddy as a friend, Freddy will see a little notification letting him know that he has a friend request pending. Once Freddy approves this request, Elmer and Freddy can see each others' feeds and will be acknowledged across the site as friends. This opens up many new options for us, we can have friends lists, friend buddy lists and instant messaging (something we're working on now), and better privacy options.

Just one little thing, but gives an idea of our broader goals. I will continue to post updates on features leading up to the launch, which is moving closer by the day.

How We're Doing It

For any rails developers out there, the process is not as hard as you may think. We are moving the database files by dropping it into CSV files, and then creating a set of migrations used specifically for the imports. With the help of the gems faster-csv and ar-extensions, we can move the entire users table in about 12 seconds, and the games table in about 15, with data validated as we move. Because the tables are so big, I did a few tricks to keep the load down while migrating. Here's a small snippet:

# matched to the new database's columns new_columns = [:id, :title, ...] values = [] n = 1

FasterCSV.foreach("#{RAILS_ROOT}/path/to/table_data.csv") do |row|
  # match these to the old data's columns.. ruby does a little magic here
  id, title, ... = row

  values << [id, title, ...]  # add the values to our array

  # heres the part to keep load down
  if n%500 == 0
     Game.import new_columns, values
     values = []
     GC.start  # Begin garbage cleaning
   end
   n = n+1
end

# and get any last rows not yet imported after the loop to import
Game.import(new_columns, values) unless values.empty?

Update: Looks like the beginning of the code is not being formatted, some Markdown issues. Oh well, should be readable. Will of course be fixed when we migrate the data :).

That's it! You can see that for the most part it's straightforward. ar-extensions and fastercsv brought the time down a ton. Our first attempt at importing the users table took almost an hour, and with the refactoring done to get what is shown above we can comfortable run the entire migration set multiple times in a period of minutes, great for testing and tweaking during the building process.

Rails

The biggest change comes from under the hood. We are 80% of the way to completing the entire rewrite of GameGum in Ruby on Rails. It's coming along very nicely and symbolizes what we want to do with GameGum as a whole: become better, faster, and remain the best social gaming site on the net. We are the only social gaming site that has built our entire platform in-house from top to bottom. Everything on the site is built and managed by us, and that means one thing: we can move very fast. The transfer to rails is enormous, but will once again allow us to keep our edge. We are bringing every feature from this site, and advancing many of them to bring you the new GameGum.

New Look

Another redesign is in the works as well, one that once again takes the site in a dramatic new direction. Expect a sleek, dark look with plenty of glow. It's unique and easy to use, and definitely badass.

Developers

Upon the launch, our main focus will be on Developers. We want to further GameGum's revenue share, and we have some great ideas. These will be kept under wraps until they are ready to be shown off, but if you are a flash game developer you're not going to want to miss out. Sign up now and begin to build your credibility as we begin to reveal our ideas for a new type of game advertising.

Gamers

As usual, gamers will get the most out of GameGum. We are looking for more ways to share revenue with our players and provide a much more immersive experience. We want it to be easy to instantly connect to your friends on the site, no matter the game or page you are on.

More

And of course, there will be more to come as we continue to develop. I will keep the blog updated as progress continues, until then I encourage our players and developers to keep up the good work and enjoy being part of our wonderful community.

Personally, I was incredibly dismayed by the situation and I'm sure our users we're unhappy to be unable to connect to the site. We expected to be back up within a matter of hours and not days, and if we had known we would have at least been more communicative through a temporary website.

In the end, we are back up and as strong as ever, and hope to make it up to everyone with an amazing new update coming within the next month (this time I hope our ETA is more accurate, and I am pushing hard for the new version to be released).

Next up: an overview of what's coming next with GameGum.