World of Solitaire

New Deck! Egypt!

2009-10-04T08:20:00.004-04:00

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 :)

A Donate button has been added

2009-09-22T07:35:00.003-04:00

Greetings World of Solitaire players

You may have noticed that there is now a donate button at the bottom center of the site.

Over the past several months I've received several e-mails from players asking me to put up a donate button.
The e-mails mentioned how they enjoyed playing the games, how they really appreciated the site being available and wanted to donate something to help keep World of Solitaire up and running and show their appreciation.

As I've mentioned in the past World of Solitaire is a labor of love for me. All expenses are entirely out of my own pocket and I run the site in my spare time.

The ad I put up a few months ago has helped keep those expenses down which is great. However even since putting up the ad, some people have requested a donate button so they could show their appreciation.

So I decided to finally put one up. It uses PayPal and is entirely optional. Please don't feel like you are compelled to donate. World of Solitaire will continue to be a 100% free site.

It brings me a lot of joy to know that so many people are having so much fun playing the games.

I hope you all continue to enjoy playing :)

Inappropiate ads have been blocked

2009-08-10T11:37:00.004-04:00

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 :)

World of Solitaire - Ad Update

2009-06-10T07:52:00.003-04:00

So almost 1 month ago I made a post about how the costs of keeping World of Solitaire running were increasing and that I needed to come up with some sort of revenue to keep it operating as I was no longer able to continue paying for it out of my own pocket.

Since that post I've received a LOT of great ideas and suggestions and I want to thank everyone who e-mailed or commented on the blog post with tips on how I could solve my dilemma.

A few days after I made my post I put up a Google ad in order to test the waters and see how it would perform.
I tried a few different placements, left, bottom and right.
The left didn't work out because the Solitaire menu is on the left.
The bottom causes issues with stacks that run down to the bottom of the screen.
The right is the best location. Help can still be shown over-top of the ad and nothing else is using this space directly.

One of the first things I did was provide a 'Hide these ads' link directly above the ad.
This link becomes visible as soon as the game has started.
When you click on this link the ad is removed and the space it took up is reclaimed by the playspace in order to have more room for cards.

After a few weeks of it being up, I am pleased to say that it is performing very well and will be keeping World of Solitaire running.
It will also allow me to make World of Solitaire more reliable by providing backup servers in the event that one fails.

Everyone has been very understanding and I appreciate that.
For those that really dislike ads, I hope that the 'Hide these ads' link that I provided is sufficient.

Thank you all for playing and I hope that you all continue to enjoy the games :)

The Future of World of Solitaire

2009-05-15T08:51:00.008-04:00

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!

2009-04-29T20:57:00.003-04:00

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

2009-04-16T10:00:00.002-04:00

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

2009-02-27T09:52:00.002-05:00

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

2008-06-07T14:34:00.004-04:00

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 :)

New Records! New 'Browse Decks' feature!

2008-03-31T08:44:00.004-04:00

At some time over the weekend a World of Solitaire player made the 1 BILLIONTH move!
Also on Sunday at 2:51 PM, Anonymous User #762,803 won a game of Klondike (Turn Three) marking the 2 millionth won hand!

This weekend I introduced a few changes to the World of Solitaire interface.
First notice that the 'Decks' menu now only shows 4 decks instead of 8.
There is a new option in the 'Decks' menu to 'See More Decks...'
Clicking on the 'See More Decks...' menu brings up a Decks window that lets you browse all the available decks in a much more visual manner. You can examine all the different cards that make up the deck seeing them in much greater quality than before.

If your wondering why I did this... you'll have to wait a while longer. I have a new feature coming to this 'Decks' window that I'm really excited about.

For those of you out there using larger computer screens, I've added larger sized deck images for 7 of the 8 decks on the site. This means playing with a bigger screen should result in a much nicer looking experience.

I really hope everyone continues to enjoy playing at World of Solitaire :)

Three new games! Deck Usage Statistics

2008-03-29T17:08:00.007-04:00

Hello everyone!

I've just finished implementing three new games:

Eight Off
Baker's Game
Baker's Game (Kings Only)

They are similar to FreeCell. Eight Off is one of the more popular Solitaire games, I hadn't played it until today, but I find it a lot of fun!

I was thinking about decks lately, and decided to put together a pie chart showing deck usage statistics:

As you can see, the default deck for the site, Paris is the most popular.
Seeing the 'Anglo American' deck be in second place really surprised me! I really figured I'd see Ornamental higher.

I'm working on some new features for the site that I'm pretty sure you are all going to love :)
I hope it doesn't take too long. I'll of course make a blog post once I've put the new feature live on the site :)

Until next time... thanks for playing and I hope you all continue to have fun :)

6 New Games! Other Improvements

2008-03-23T17:05:00.002-04:00

I wanted to let everyone know that since my last post just a few days ago, I've added 6 new games to the site.
They include:

Cruel (Traditional Redeal)
Double Klondike (Turn One)
Double Klondike (Turn Three)
Triple Klondike (Turn One)
Triple Klondike (Turn Three)

The new Klondike's are basically just 2 and 3 deck variants of the regular Klondike.
The 'Traditional Redeal' version of Cruel redeals cards the same way the original Windows 3.1 game redealt cards. It's a lot easier to play than the regular 'Cruel' version which is a more modern redeal approach similar to the way several more recent Solitaire games implement it.

I've also shortened the updates for Global Statistics and Leaderboards to every 5 minutes instead of every 10.
Several minor bugs have also been fixed such as the leaderboards not showing all of the top 10 and the timeline graphs looking inaccurate.

We are getting close to having our 20 millionth hand dealt!
Also each day we get closer to having our 1 BILLIONTH move made!

I want to thank everyone that I received e-mails from. Whether it be bug reports, suggestions or just 'job well done' e-mails, I really love getting them. It helps to keep me going :)

I hope everyone continues to have fun playing :)

New Game - Cruel, Statistics Improvements

2008-03-17T08:04:00.003-04:00

It's been about a month or so since my last post, thought I'd give a quick update.

I fixed the statistics code that was responsible for showing up to date Timeline graphs of hands played. There should be up to date timeline graphs now for all the games.

Also, I've added a new game, Cruel.

A user requested this and so I went ahead and added it in this past weekend.

If anyone would like to request a Solitaire game be added, just comment here or e-mail me: robert@cosmicrealms.com

The site continues to do well. More and more people are coming each and every day.

I really hope everyone out there is having fun playing :)

Leaderboard Improvements

2008-02-15T21:14:00.003-05:00

I wanted to let everyone know about some improvements I've just made to the Leaderboards.

Instead of showing multiple users in the Fewest Moves and Shortest Time To Win boards, it now only shows one entry for a user per board, their best entry. This allows lots of other people to compete for placement on the boards.

All global statistics, including the Leaderboards, now update every 10 minutes!
I think everyone agrees that this is much better than the previous 6 hour update delay.

I'm still working on the Timeline graphs. Those are currently are not going to show up at all or are out of date. I'll let you all know once I've fixed those as well (those may take a bit more time to correct).

That's it for this update... I hope you are all having fun :)

Undo/Auto Play Changes, Speed Improvements

2008-02-13T22:29:00.005-05:00

I wanted to let everyone know that I have changed the way Auto Play and Undo are handled.

Now when you Undo, it will just undo 1 move. The last move made.
If that move was one done by the Auto Play system, then Auto Play will not make another move until after you've made a move.

This means if Auto Play makes three moves in a row, you can now undo just one or two of them and choose to play the card you undid too differently.

This was requested by many players and I agree that it's much better this way.

Also I've been receiving reports that pulling up the statistics is a lot slower now a days.
I've spent most of the night coding a new system for storing statistics on the server, one that makes retrieving some of the statistics MUCH faster.

So you should now see the 'Most Played Games' pie and the 'Stats' section come up really really quickly.

The 'Timeline' statistic has been disabled until I have a chance to improve it's speed. It may be disabled for a few days.

I intended to do some other changes too but didn't have time. I'm sure I'll be in the mood to do more changes in the future so keep your eyes open :)

I hope you all are enjoying the games!

Four New Games!

2008-01-26T10:57:00.000-05:00

I've just implemented four new games!

La Belle Lucie
Three Shuffles and a Draw
Trefoil
Trefoil and a Draw

They are basically the same game with just slight variations in rules. Enjoy!

10 Million Hands! New Games! Feature Enhancements!

2008-01-24T21:26:00.000-05:00

On Tuesday January 22nd at 1:54PM, Anonymous User #488,131 dealt World of Solitaire's 10 MILLIONTH hand of Solitaire!

I want to thank everyone for playing! I really hope that you are all enjoying the games!

As a celebration, I have made some improvements!

1) Two new games!
Tri Peaks and Tri Peaks Strict. These were requested by a player and I'm pleased to add them to the site. Keep those game requests coming, you can e-mail them to me at robert@cosmicrealms.com

2) The Undo Move feature have been enhanced!
A common annoyance was after the computer auto played a card, when you chose 'Undo Move' it undid the move the computer made, but then the computer went and made the same exact move again. This made it impossible to undo further back in time unless you clicked Undo Move several times in rapid succession or you turned Auto Play off.

Now whenever you Undo a move, it will always Undo the last move that YOU made.
That means if the computer just finished automatically making 3 moves, when you Undo those three moves and the move that you made before that will be undone. This should make the Undo Move feature much more useful.

3) The Auto Play feature has been enhanced!
Auto Play used to automatically make moves at the start of the game, which resulted in the Timer to start before you even got a chance to look at the board.
Now Auto Play will not make any moves until you've made the first move. This should give you the ability to look over the board first and plan any strategy.

4) Sultan now uses the Auto Play feature!

5) Golf and Golf Relaxed no longer require you to clear the Stock in order to win.
Just clearing the Tableau spots is now enough to win (since clearing the Stock is trivial).

In addition to the five items mentioned above, I've also cleaned up some of the statistic graphs in order to be read more easily.

I also fixed a bug a few days ago that caused Spider to sometimes be un-winnable due to having some 'extra cards' left at the end. This bug caused many headaches for many players and it was a difficult one to solve. I'm fairly confident it's squashed now :)

Each and every day brings more and more players to World of Solitaire.

I hope you all continue to enjoy playing!

New Help Feature

2008-01-15T09:27:00.000-05:00

Just wanted to pop in and talk a bit about the new help feature I just implemented.

In the top right corner of the game you'll see a big blue question mark.
If you click on this question mark, the rules for the game you are currently playing will appear on the right hand side of the screen.
You can click on the question mark again to make the rules go away again.

You can resize the rules box by grabbing the left hand side of the rules box (the vertical grey bar) and dragging left or right.

You'll also notice in the rules little magnifying glasses. If you move your mouse over them, the game will highlight the areas that correspond to that section of the rules.

I hope that this new feature will make it easier for everyone to learn the different versions of Solitaire on the site.

Enjoy playing everyone :)

New Year, New Server, New Deck

2008-01-10T09:12:00.001-05:00

So as we start to creep into 2008 World of Solitaire has gone through some new changes.

Firstly, the server move is complete and we are now on new hardware. This means that statistics are back to being calculated every 3 hours rather than once a day. The new server should also allow growth to continue at the rate that it has been over the past several months.

Secondly, I've done some cleanup of the statistics removing entries that were impossible to achieve. Based on user feedback and what I see I think there are still some bugs in this area and I'll be taking further looks at this in the future to try and correct these issues.

Lastly, I have added a new deck! It's basically the same as the 'Oxygen' deck except with a white background and slightly easier to look at coloring. I hope you all enjoy it.

What is in store for World of Solitaire for 2008?
I plan to continue to add new game types. It would be great if I could double the number of games available before the end of the year.
I also plan to re-write the instructions for each game to be more clear and consistent. Maybe even go so far as to have an animated tutorial of sorts to show how the games are played.

I want to thank you all for playing. I'm really pleased with how many people are enjoying the site and hope that you continue to have fun in 2008!

Happy new year everyone :)

Speed and Statistics

2008-01-03T09:02:00.000-05:00

As World of Solitaire has continued to grow over these past few months, stress on the server has also been increasing.
Some of you may have noticed small glitches where the delay to login may be very long, or the site in general will take some time to first load.
Also statistics have been slower to generate. Global Statistics were once calculated live, then they were calculated every 3 hours and just recently it has been changed to once a day updates.

It should come as good news to everyone that a new, faster server is on the way.
I hope that within a few days I'll have World of Solitaire moved over to the new server which should solve most of the issues I described above.

In addition if you've seen the Leaderboard, there are some scores that seem... well... not quite possible.
Thanks to user e-mails and further investigation it does appear that some scores are simply impossible to be legit, such as solving Klondike in under 52 moves.
Along with the new server will also come a clean-up in any erroneous statistics.

This means the leader board will change and you may find yourself ranked higher than before.

Thank you all for playing World of Solitaire. I really hope that you are having a good time playing.
If anyone has any comments, suggestions or new solitaire game requests, please feel free to either comment on this post or e-mail me at: robert@cosmicrealms.com

Thanks again :)

3 New Games! 6 Million Hands Dealt!!

2007-12-14T19:12:00.000-05:00

Wow. It's already been over a month since my last update to this blog. Seems like just yesterday :)

Since the last blog update, World of Solitaire has been doing great.
I've added three new games, Clock, Sultan and just today, Flower Garden.

More amazingly is that the game continues to grow in popularity.
Since the last update the number of hands dealt on the site has DOUBLED from 3 million to over 6 million today.

The 6 millionth hand was a game of Golf dealt to user Skeletor54 on December 13th 2007 at 5:19PM.

I'm really happy that so many people are enjoying the site, it's turned out so well. It's far surpassed any expectations I had when I first started developing it several months ago.

I want to thank all the players that play, without your feedback (both in e-mails and blog comments), bug reports and comments the site wouldn't be where it is today. So THANK YOU.

Until next update... enjoy playing!

*** UPDATE: I fixed a bug that caused games like Pyramid not to work. I accidentally introduced the bug last night with the new game. Sorry about that :)

New Deck and another milestone!

2007-11-05T19:49:00.000-05:00

When I first started World of Solitaire, I had no idea it would be so popular.

40 days after launching the site, 1 million hands had already been dealt.
34 days after that another million hands had been dealt.

Today I announce that on November 3, 2007 at 7:31PM that Anonymous user #233,297 was dealt the 3 millionth hand in a game of "Klondike (Turn One)"!
That's only 17 days since the 2 million mark!

I want to thank everyone for playing and I hope you are all having fun.

In celebration of this event I've updated the game with a new deck!
This deck is called 'Animals' and has a bit of a playful/cutesy theme.

I've also vastly improved the speed for viewing statistics. The trade off for this speed is that the Global and Leaderboard statistics are now only updated once every three hours.
Your personal statistics are still shown in real-time.

Over the past month or two I've also received some reports about the game not loading up correctly. The progress bar when you first load the game was getting stuck for some people which prevented them from being able to play. I've changed the way I preload the card images and I hope that this progress bar will no longer become stuck.
Let me know if anyone experiences any problems.

Enjoy playing! :)

2 Month Anniversary! 2 Million Hands Dealt!

2007-10-17T08:12:00.000-04:00

World of Solitaire has reached another milestone! Over 2 million hands have been dealt!

The 2 millionth hand was a game of 'Klondike Turn 3' dealt to Anonymous User #196,888 at 2:19 AM this morning, October 17th 2007.

Over 86 million moves have been made and traffic has been increasing ever since launch!
I am really pleased that so many people are having fun playing on the site, it makes it all worth it.

Today is also the 2 month anniversary since World of Solitaire first went live!

I want to thank everyone who plays for playing as without you I wouldn't have the motivation I had to make the site into what it is today.

You may have noticed it's been almost a full month since my last update. I've been taking a little break from development and just been enjoying 'real life' for a bit. I still welcome all feature ideas or new game suggestions as I write them down in a to-do list.

I hope everyone continues to have fun playing! :)

1 Million Hands Dealt!

2007-09-24T08:18:00.000-04:00

Last night at 7:38PM CDT time, World of Solitaire dealt it's 1 MILLIONTH hand!

The user who was dealt the 1 millionth hand was an anonymous user, User #50,758

The server move is pretty much complete at this point and the site should respond better during peak use times.

My plans for the site over the next few weeks/months is to add more and more game variations while continuing to fix bugs that are reported.

I'd like to thank everyone who plays for help making the site a success! I am glad that you are all enjoying playing and I hope you continue to have fun :)

Speed Improvements Coming

2007-09-21T17:59:00.000-04:00

*UPDATE - Sat Sep 22nd*
Part 1 of the server move is complete. The database is now running on a different more powerful server and the statistics should be a bit quicker now.
Part 2 will take place silently in the background over the next few days the web server moves to the new box. After that is complete things should be much faster :)
*END UPDATE*

So over the past few weeks I've watched the World of Solitaire become more and more popular as more and more players visit and play each day.
During certain moments the site can become slow and the statistics are as you know very slow to load.

Well after forecasting traffic patterns, I've determined I need to get a new server to sustain the traffic and provide a faster experience :)

So over the next week I will be working behind the scenes to get the new server up and running.
You won't notice anything until I'm just about ready to switch over to the new server. This will require having Statistics and Login be offline (the game will still work fine though) for a few hours one of these days coming up.

When I get closer to knowing when that is I'll let you know. I'll also make sure the site shows a message (bottom center of the board) when the move is taking place.

Thank you all for making World of Solitaire a success and I hope you all continue to have fun playing :)