10 years of World of Solitaire!

Wow!

This week, World of Solitaire turns 10 years old!

Can you believe how fast time flies?

I hope you've all had a great time playing and I hope you all continue to have fun :)

Happy Birthday! World of Solitaire is 9 years old!

Hello!

In just a few days, World of Solitaire will be 9 years old!

I hope everyone has been enjoying the games and I hope you all continue to enjoy them :)

-- Robert

World of Solitaire turns 8 years old!

Hello everyone!

Just wanted to wish everyone a happy birthday as World of Solitaire turns 8 years old this week! Wow!

I hope everyone continues to have fun playing :)

-- Robert

Challenges!

Hello!

I have added an exciting new feature to World of Solitaire: Challenges!

Challenges are pre-shuffled, numbered deals that are guaranteed to be winnable.

Each challenge is rated for difficulty: Easy, Medium or Hard.

Each time you play a specific challenge number, the same cards will be dealt in the same order. So you can keep trying a specific challenge until you find a way to solve it.

Test your skills and see how many you can solve!

Challenges can be found in the top left 'Solitaire' menu, click on 'Challenges...'.

If you are a registered player and you win a challenge with the fewest moves or shortest time, then your name will appear on that challenge entry for all to see.

Challenges are only available for a few different game types right now. If people like them, I can add more game types in the future. Also,  I can add more challenges for each game if people solve the current ones are are looking for more.

I hope you all continue to have a lot of fun playing :)

New Victory Images!

Greetings everyone!

Since August 19, 2007, World of Solitaire has shown the following picture when you win:

Being over 7 years old, that image is looking pretty dated!

It's time for something new!

Over the past several months I have been working with over 20 artists. Each artist has created one or more 'Victory' images for World of Solitaire.

Now when you win, you will be shown a random victory image. There are over 25 different victory images and some of them appear less often than others. Some are quite rare indeed!

If you do not want to see the new victory images, simply go to the 'Options' menu at the top and select 'Classic Victory Image'. Starting after your next deal, any future wins will show the classic victory image above instead of the new ones.

I hope everyone enjoys the new victory images and I hope everyone has a lot of fun! :)

Tutorial Videos

Hello everyone!

Wanted to let everyone know that I have added tutorial videos for each game.

This should make it a LOT easier to learn new solitaire games.

There are three ways you can watch the videos:

1. In 'Solitaire->Select Game...' click on the game preview image that shows on the right hand side when selecting a game
2. While playing a game, click on the blue question mark at the top right corner and then click on the image at the top
3. Directly on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/worldofsolitaire/videos

I hope you find the videos useful and I hope you all continue to have fun playing :)

3 BILLION hands dealt! New game! New deck!

Some time yesterday the 3 billionth hand of solitaire was dealt! WOW!

To celebrate, a few minutes ago I added a new game to the site: Australian Patience.

Yesterday I added a new feature for Canfield, Royal Parade and Bear River. The 'hover' information at the bottom left will now show you which card to play next. This should be helpful as it can be easy to forget which cards comes next in those games.

I forgot to mention it before, but earlier this month I added a new deck: Elements

I truly hope everyone is having fun playing :)

Touch support! iPad, Android, Surface!

Greetings everyone!

World of Solitaire now works on touch devices!

This includes iPad, iPhone, Android, Surface and other touch enabled tablets and phones.

Sorry about it being so long since my last update. Life has been pretty busy for me these past few years. I hope everyone is having fun playing and I hope you all continue to have fun :)

Updates complete!

So yesterday on Christmas Eve I put live all the fixes and updates I have been working on for the past several weeks. These fixes and updates are all 'behind the scenes' and the games themselves have remain unchanged.

My motivation behind these changes were fix a growing problem over the past several months, the fact that sometimes statistics were not being recorded correctly. This should now be fixed.

The 'Timeline' part of the statistics is gone and likely not to return. It wasn't all that informative and I think I can use this part of the screen to put more interesting statistics and data. If anyone has any suggestions as to what should go in this area, please feel free to either comment or e-mail me your ideas to robert@cosmicrealms.com

The 'Largest Size' card option was missing for a day or so, but I have restored this option. The site was defaulting to 'Auto Play Obvious' for new visitors, which upset a few people so I've changed this it to default to 'Auto Play When Won' for new visitors instead. Remember, you can always set it to 'Do Not Auto Play' if you don't want any auto playing and this option will be saved.

I hope everyone is having a great holiday :)

Fixing Statistics - Update

Hello everyone!

Some folks had asked for an update on my progress on fixing the statistics problems.

I'm delighted to say that I'm about half way done. I've got the new system all designed and about half the code is written.

Progress should proceed at a faster pace now now and I *hope* to be finished around the end of this year.

I'll be ordering two new servers tonight which end up being the future home for World of Solitaire. These machines will be much more powerful than the current ones and combined with the new code and system design there should be no more statistics problems once they finally go live some time early next year.

In the mean time I hope everyone has a kick butt holiday season :)

Fixing Statistics Problems - Work has begun!

Several months ago I posted about how I hoped that some changes I made would fix the statistic recording problems on World of Solitaire.

Sadly it has not.

I wanted to let everyone know that I haven't forgot about the problems.

In fact, I have a solution that I am actively developing.

It will take the next several weeks for me to finish developing the solution and test it thoroughly.

This solution should fix the problems once and for all :)

I do not know if the solution will 'repair' any previously missed statistics or not but it will certainly ensure that all future statistics recording will work correctly.

I will post again when I'm closer to the date that the changes will go live.

In the mean time, I hope you all can continue to enjoy playing the games :)

Statistics Problems - Continued

Hello

So the changes I made earlier this month did not seem to fix the problem with statistics not recording correctly.

As of this morning I've implemented some more changes that should hopefully fix the problem.

The only visible change to you the player is that Global statistics are now updated just once a day instead of every 3 hours.

If after a few weeks with these changes, if it becomes clear that the statistics recording problem hasn't been fixed, I have another idea on what I can do but it will be a lot more work to implement so I want to see if it's absolutely necessary before beginning to work on it.

I hope that even with the slightly buggy statistics issue that you are all able to still have fun playing World of Solitaire :)

Statistics Recording Problem

Hello World of Solitaire players.

For the past few weeks several users have reported issues about statistics not being recorded correctly.

Games that they've won not being saved and they were showing up as 'losses' in the Statistics.

This has been a very difficult problem to track down.

About 5 minutes ago I implemented a change to the server that I *hope* should solve this issue.

Sadly, games already played that were not recorded correctly are not able to be restored due to the glitch not recording that the game took place.

I hope that that my change should prevent stats from getting more messed up in the future.

Sorry again for the issues.

New Deck! Egypt!

Hello World of Solitaire players!

I put up a poll here on the blog a week or two ago.
Since then nearly 100 votes have been cast and the option with the most votes was 'New Deck'.

I'm proud to announce that there is a new deck available!

You'll find it located in the 'Decks' menu at the top of the screen. The deck is an Egypt themed deck crafted by Sean Wilson.

Here is a preview:





























I've posted a new poll with the new deck option removed, feel free to vote again.

I hope you all enjoy the new deck and I hope you all continue to enjoy playing :)

Inappropiate ads have been blocked

World of Solitaire uses Google ads for it's advertising and what ads are displayed on the site are entirely controlled by Google. The ad displayed can be different per user, depending on what Google feels would be best for that visitor.

A World of Solitaire player e-mailed me to inform me that they were seeing an ad of a sexual/suggestive nature and were upset by this.

I completely understand that families play World of Solitaire and the site shouldn't be showing suggestive ads of this nature.

After doing some investigation it looks like the ad is for a game called 'Evony'.
The ads feature girls showing significant bosom.

It appears that a large number of people on the internet have the same problem I do. Google showing these inappropriate ads on their sites as well.

It turns out there is a way I can instruct Google to block specific ads.

I have researched these 'Evony' ones and have updated my Google ad settings so that these ads will be blocked and will no longer show up on the site.
I just applied these changes and Google says it may take a few hours to take affect.

Since what ads Google shows is different per visitor, other inappropriate ads might show up that I never see myself.
Also since I have to specifically block ads, new ones might come into the rotation and I'll need to update my block settings to include them.
So if anyone sees any inappropriate ads being displayed on World of Solitaire, please e-mail me the name of the ad you saw to: robert@cosmicrealms.com

I will then do my best to make sure they are blocked from appearing.

I apologize if anyone has been offended by the ads. I never imagined that Google would display such things. I hope that the block I applied squashes all the inappropriate ones that were being displayed.

I hope you all continue to enjoy playing :)

The Future of World of Solitaire

Hello everyone.

A few years ago when I first launched World of Solitaire it was just an experiment. A little hobby project of mine that I did just for fun.
When I launched it I just hoped it would make a few people happy each month. Maybe 50.

Since then the popularity of World of Solitaire has skyrocketed beyond what I could have imagined and now over 350,000 unique players get joy from playing each month.

Knowing that so many people are getting so much pleasure from the site has truly been a wonderful thing for me. It makes me very happy to know that so many are getting some pleasure from something I've created.

Unfortunately a side effect of having so many more people playing is that the cost to run World of Solitaire has been increasing. The bandwidth and computer power needed to run World of Solitaire is not cheap.

Each and every month I pay the monthly server costs out of my own pocket.

I've never had any advertisements on the site because I didn't want to 'clutter' up the page. I like the clean, sleek look World of Solitaire has and I don't want to ruin that with ads.

Another reason there are no ads is because money is not a big motivator for me. I have no desire to try and make lots of money from the site by putting up ads all over the place.
My primary motivation is just to make people happy and provide a fun place for everyone to let off a little stress by playing some Solitaire.

With the number of players continuing to rise however, the costs to run World of Solitaire continues to increase.
I am far from being rich and have a day job that pays my bills. But it is starting to get really expensive and I'm trying to figure out some way the site can make enough money to pay for the costs of running it.

I've had a few different ideas on how I could help pay for cost of running World of Solitaire.

I'd like to run these ideas past you, the players, and I would love some feedback from you.
You can reply to this blog post or e-mail me at: robert@cosmicrealms.com

- Donations
I thought about putting up a donation button where the players could donate whatever they feel comfortable donating to help pay for the server costs.
This to me seems like the cleanest and best option.
My dilemma here is that I'm not sure that it would be enough to cover the costs of the servers. Also I feel that most people would just donate once, so even if it pays for the servers for the first few months I think I would wind up right back where I am at now.

- Sponsorship
Find a company that would 'sponsor' the site by paying the costs to run the site. In exchange they would get their company logo and name on the site that would link back to them.
This to me seems like a good option. No annoying ads on the site and the server costs are paid for.
The dilemma with this option is finding a company willing to sponsor the site. It will take a lot of time and effort to try and find a company to do this. And in the end there might not be anyone willing to do so.

- Membership
Another idea is some sort of yearly membership. Players could pay this membership and in return get some sort of special features. Maybe additional member only decks, maybe special starts by their names in the leaderboards.
The problem with this of course is I'd need to come up with features useful enough to be worth paying a membership fee, but not too useful as to upset non-members who can't afford to pay.

- Ads
Now we are down to the dreaded ads option. I could put up an ad right now that would probably cover the costs of running the site, but as I've said above I really don't want to do this. I don't want the experience of playing on World of Solitaire impacted by an ad.
There are other issues with ads too. Most ads on websites are designed to pay based on the idea that users are only on the page for a minute or so and then they load another page.
On World of Solitaire however players play for hours and the ad would be visible the entire time. Thus I feel that ads on World of Solitaire have more value than the normal ads on other pages where they may be scrolled out of view or the user may leave the page after just a few seconds.
This means that the normal ad programs out there (such as those from Google) are not very well suited to World of Solitaire.
The other thing to mention about ads is if I were to go this route, I would certainly want to provide some sort of yearly membership where for a small yearly fee you would not see any ads.


So those are the options I've come up with.

I really wish I didn't have to do any of them, but the costs of running World of Solitaire are only going to increase and the above methods are the only ways I can think of to keep World of Solitaire running.

I really would like to hear your ideas about this.

If anyone has any ideas at all, comments or offers please either reply to this blog post or e-mail me at: robert@cosmicrealms.com

In the mean time, I hope you all continue to enjoy playing :)

New Game! New Leaderboard!

It's been nearly 10 months since I've last added a new game to World of Solitaire, so I thought it was about time to add a new one:)

You'll notice a new game called 'Bear River' is now available on World of Solitaire.
This game was created by the Levin Family and was requested to be added personally by the authors via e-mail.

I've also added the #1 most requested feature of all time.
A 'Highest Percentage Won' leaderboard.

This is calculated based on how many games you win out of how many games you played.

Therefore if you analyze a dealt hand before making a move and decide that it's not winnable (something easily done in Pyramid for example) then you can choose to just deal again and that hand won't impact your percentage won score. But as soon as you've made a move, if you care about your percentage won score you should try your best to win that hand :)

One last thing I'll mention is that I've made some behind the scenes improvements for players using the Firefox browser. Firefox users should notice that the site loads a lot faster after you've visited it once.

I hope you are all having a lot of fun playing :)

World of Solitaire - Problems Resolved

So I got back from my honeymoon last night.

This morning I had several e-mails from players unable to login and no statistics were being recorded.
Turns out I ran out of disk space.

I have corrected the problem and logging in and statistics all now work correctly.

I posted a blog post earlier stating it would take up to 2 days to correct, turns out I was WAY off on my estimate as it's resolved now :)

Enjoy playing :)

World of Solitaire Status Update

Hiya everyone!

I'm sorry I haven't blogged in so long.
I've been pretty busy in 'real life' over the past few months. I met my first girlfriend ever about 2 years ago, and we are getting married in April! I'm also moving into a new place. So I've been pretty busy :)

Just wanted to give a quick update on World of Solitaire.

We've recently surpassed 100 million played hands. That's quite a milestone!
I run World of Solitaire for fun and so I can share fun with others, and I certainly think a lot of people out there are having fun :)

As far as updates to the World of Solitaire site, the #1 requested feature (BY FAR) is a Top 10 list of 'percent won'.
This is on the top of my to-do list.
To make room for this new list, I will probably cut the "Total Number Won" list from 25 to 10.

I'm not sure I'll be able to get it in before I get married as I'm busy packing, planning, etc.
I do however intend to try and accomplish it after I get back from the honeymoon :)

I hope that everyone out there is enjoying the games :)

7 New Games! Plus other improvements

It's been a while since I've made my last blog post.
These past two months have been very busy for me in real life and I haven't had much time to spend working on improving World of Solitaire.

Things have quieted down recently, and that has allowed me to add some new games and features to the site.

7 new games are now available!
These include:

• Royal Parade
• Easthaven
• Easthaven (Kings Only)
• Double Easthaven
• Double Easthaven (Kings Only)
• Triple Easthaven
• Triple Easthaven (Kings Only)

I have also enhanced the 'Select Game' browser.
You'll notice on the left a new folder: 'Games - Recently Played'
This folder will show your last 5 played games this session.

In addition, due to the growing list of games, I have reorganized the folders a bit.
The Alphabetical folder is now lower in the list in order to reveal that additional categories are available from which to browse for games.

If you take a look at the 'Games - by Time' and 'Games - by Difficulty' folders you'll notice they are have descriptions now as to what the different levels mean.
I've also went through all the games and corrected their Time and Difficulty information to more closely match the statistical information. I believe the information is MUCH more accurate now.

It's been a lot of fun seeing World of Solitaire grow over the past few months.

I want to thank everyone who has sent me an e-mail or made a comment on my blog.
Your input is greatly appreciated :)

I hope everyone continues to enjoy playing :)