more buzz about xuqa

Shouting out to all Iranian Xuqans

I'm going to have an important meeting in Iran with all the Iranian Xuqans in the near future. All of your questions will be completely answered and all of your problems will be fully discussed and tried to be solved. It will be more like a training course. So if you're a Xuqan in Iran, you're kindly invited to join this friendly meeting! I will be very happy to hear all of your comments about Xuqa and everything related to it. ( I = Alex Anderson )
You will be informed of the exact date and location of the meeting soon. Everyone interested in this case, please inform me in Xuqa. I will be very delighted to hear from all of you Xuqans.

Stay Tuned!

Shouting out to all British Xuqans

I'm going to be in London 31st-2nd Sept and would loveeeeeee to meet up with any XuQa ppl in the area. ( I = Murti, one of XuQa's founders)

If you're in London shoot me an email at murtaza (at) xuqa.com and i'll email you more info. Hopefully we'll have enough people to throw our own little XuQa party =)

Lots of bugs fixed today

We spent about a week since launch fixing bugs, fine tuning things and finally uploaded today. 50+ bugs were fixed! Phew!

Peanut update: Everyone who had peanuts stolen, are going to be reimbursed by the end of the week. Sorry for that glitch. Its been fixed.

Location update: Now you can select your city & school/uni. We've also added the feature to change your country.

Poker Update: Poker is now (finally!) stable. Hats off to Prosper for working his magic.

Stats on XuQa 2.0

Since we launched XuQa 2.0:

Daily signup rates have increased 3X!

Average time spent on XuQa has increased 1.5X

Peanut Economy size: ~100 million peanuts

Check out the alexa traffic graph:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=xuqa.com

New ways to get peanuts

By the end of this week, we're hoping to get XuQa stable and secure (the recent peanut bugs have all been fixed).

Mid next week, we're introducing new ways to get peanuts.

1. Surveys. Users will be able to take surveys for leading brands and get peanuts in return.

2. Affiliate offers. Sign up for affiliate offers (no Credit Cards required) and get peanuts.

buzZ

Xuqa 2.0, which was just uploaded yesterday, is starting to generate some buzz in the blogosphere. We'll update this post as we go along. Have a look:

GigaOm writes about Xuqa:

Mashable writes about Xuqa:

Updates. Fixes. Changes.

Someone in the forums had an excellent suggestion about re-doing the actions part. We've revamped actions into one page, with a simple return all button. Thanks a lot for that.

In other news, Poker is now much more stable than before. It doesnt randomly hang up. Its not 100%, but we're working on it.

Emails are currently not going out. The mail que is jammed. Just gotta wait for it to clear.

Bugs we've fixed uptil now:
1. Peanuts not updating after playing poker
2. Profile edit is now fully functional
3. Forum view counter works now
4. Pictures are uploading to all servers
5. UI issues for odd screen resolutions
6. The number of people currently online on XuQa now actually works
7. (about 20 more that i can't seem to remember)

Do note, since XuQa mail servers arn't working right now, if you have an issue, we ask you send us an email directly to feedback@xuqa.com rather than through the contact us form.

Some bugs

Some bugs we're currently working on.

1. Making Poker more stable. The Smartfox servers seems to randomly hang.

2. Search. The new search engine we're using randomly crashes.

Please report more here. =)

Xuqa 2.0 is LIVE

Go play with her. Be gentle, while we remove bugs over the next 2-3 days.

**update** the new site has been taken down temporarily for bug fixing. it will be back up in a few hours (sunday night pacific time)

3:56 pm. She goes live. =)
(now to fix all the bugs!)

Part 4. 2:30 pm. Upload time

(i havent slept in 2 nights. I don't think most ppl around me have either)

"We're almost done!", famous last words. I hear these every 5 minutes, and yet some thing somewhere goes wrong. Murpheys law coming to haunt us. Knew it was too good to be true. But after almost 10 hours of effort, we're 'almost' through. The devs are finalizing some final server details. Looks like XuQa 2.0 is set to go live within the next hour.

Someone just got up and said, UPLOAD! Its actually happening. Devs are done with debugging. Now sysadmins need to turn on the switch. Tick, tick, tick...

Part 3. 10:45 am.

Database changes done. Indexing almost finsihed. In the next 30 minutes, the site should be ready for testing. We're going to take another 3-4 hours testing and bug fixing and then will make it live. So far this has been one of the smoothest uploads ever! Welldone ya all. You guys rock!

Programming with broken wrists

Meet Nomi. The lead development dude. He takes care of all the front end, UI, design, cross browser issues. Also does a amount of the backend stuff. Last week he broke his wrist in a car accident and guess what, he didnt stop programming. He kept punching away at the keyboard and got XuQa ready in time for upload. Now thats heart. I love this kid!

Part 2. Upload continues 7:20 am

Its me Ali, Prosper head to head on poker. Upload is going very well (didnt expect it to go this well), so we're treating ourselves to some poker. Peanut poker ofcourse. Btw if you don't know already, my grand pa is Poker god =)

Database changes going well. Scripts running. Finalizing some poker client issues. Some UI issues. Seems to be going suprisingly well. hmmmmmmmm. If this luck continues, we should be live within 6 hours (instead of 24).

Inside the scenes drama. Part 1. 4:24 am

We're about to take XuQa down and begin uploading the new site. Prosper is with Ali, Gorman and co in San Francisco. Its an ungoldy hour for them (4:25am), but they're up and almost ready to make the switch.

I'm here in Karachi with the other development team. Lots of drama here. Our lead system admin got stuck in the monsoon rains (lots of flooding). Lets hope the internet doesnt go down.

The site is 80% bug free. We're uploading anyways, since bugs seem inevitable. No worries. We'll upload and fix them. I'm sure the moment we begin the process, lots of dramma will unfold. I'll keep everyone updated real time on the blog every three hours on the progress. Wish us luck!

World Cyber Gamers 2006

hey every body WCG is on The Way
we want to hold a WC3 TFT in iran with the name of XuQa
iranian players Join us in it games

XuQa 2.0 is launching this weekend

After months and months of developing, fixing bugs and developing some more, XuQa 2.0 is ready. We're in the final stages of bug fixing / beta testing and expect to take XuQa 2.0 live over the weekend.

A big thank you to all the users who helped us beta test. =) You rock!

So what is XuQa 2.0?

Its an online reality game, where people compete for wealth, status and power. If you win (get to level 10), you get $1000!

Yup. Its pretty simple. Its all about being famous and rich (thats what XuQa 1.0 was about anyways). Get famous by getting people to visit your profile and get rich by winning at Peanut Poker.
Your level (1-10) = Profile views + # of wins at Peanut Poker
Each new level will give you access to lots of cool items and rewards. Get to level 10, and you will win $1000!

We've also added customizable profiles, 6 new actions and 6 hidden ones which you can un-lock (we got bored of just kisses and tickles!), new ways to get peanuts, your own fully customizable poker room and lots more.

Since we've rewritten the entire backend, after the first few days of launch, XuQa 2.0 will be much faster and more stable than 1.0. Thats a promise. =) (error 808 haunts us just as much)

What about features from XuQa 1.0? Blogs, profiles, pictures?

Blogs
We've renamed blogs to forums (because thats what they were anyways). They're super-charged now. Post Flash movies, images and HTML! The forums will be have their own section and will not show up on the main page (in an effort to reduce clutter)

Profiles
Yes. They're all there. In fact profiles are now completely customizable and they're compatible with myspace codes. So no need to make a another profile, just copy paste your myspace one.

Pictures
Yup. In fact we now allow UNLIMITED picture uploads =)

Some stuff to look out for:

1. A lot is changing. We've rewritten the code for the entire site, redone the user interface, added a game play element, poker, etc etc. As a result the site will be down for approximately 24 hours while we make the switch. We hope to get the job done sooner, but we're keeping some spare time for unexpected issues. Note: All that can go wrong, will go wrong (Murphey's law).

2. After the initial downtime of 24 hours, the site realistically will still be buggy (despite our best efforts). So please give us another 3-4 days to hash everything out. During this time, if you see a bug, please send us an email via the contact us page. This will allow us to find and squash bugs much faster. Your email will be read by one of the founders and we promise to read and respond to every email within 24 hours.

3. If you don't like a feature or its implementation / have a suggestion to make things better, please leave your comments either with customer support or via the suggestion box on the left. We've changed a lot of things and feedback from you guys would be very helpful in fixing things we might have overlooked.

Breaking news: AOL blocking mail from Google(?)

For a couple of weeks, I noticed that mails sent from my Gmail account were being rejected by AOL servers. Any email sent to anyone with a "@aol.com" email address were being returned with an SMTP failure, with the following error message:

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 12): 554-: (HVU:B1) http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/554hvub1.html
554 TRANSACTION FAILED

This message was identical in all returned mails. Now I'm not a spammer, this is my personal Gmail account. So I was annoyed. I checked the content in all those emails (links to possibly spam sites?) etc, but all my emails were perfectly legit. I then went on to an old Yahoo email address I have which I use to sign-up for all websites, and tried sending the exact same email, to the same person.

Voila! It went through. I was exasperated. I called up all my friends / colleagues who have an aol address, and they explained that they were having trouble receiving stuff from Gmail too.

Is AOL blocking Gmail? Has anyone else had similar experiences?

Live Xuqa Radio FM

Something suprising and awesome happened today. Some Turkish Xuqans have setup a LIVE Xuqa radio station on Winamp, complete with a DJ et all. To tune in, open this URL in your WinAmp:

http://64.247.58.62:1142/listen.pls

Or click the link above if you already have Winamp installed! DJ Arda rocks - don't miss this.