Curse : announcement

Welcome to Curse.com!

Nimloth — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 11:53:14 GMT

Greetings everyone,

Today marks the release of our brand new, totally re-designed website as well as the domain change to www.Curse.com. While we've called this "v4" internally and even publicly in news updates about the website, this is truly a new step forward for the Curse brand.

We've learned quite a bit going from "v3" of Curse-Gaming to now. From working more closely with game developers to listening to user feedback about site features and upgrades, many hours have been poured into the creation of what we feel is the number one destination for online gaming. Our developers, designers, content team, and everyone else involved in the new website have shown tireless devotion to preparing the best possible end-user experience. We hope you agree that Curse is truly the next step in online gaming communities.

Gone are the days where you need to type annoying URLs to reach specific areas of the website; all of your favorite locations are just seconds away - be it Videos, Images, Forums, Downloads, or Blogs. We've also made general site navigation much simpler; the left-menu has been scrapped for a cleaner top-bar horizontal menu. In the place of the left-menu is now a menu containing logos for each of our game portals - all easily discernible and one click away for your game-specific needs here on Curse.

On top of that, we've worked on a full suite of new features for the website. My Curse; a fully-featured social network profile system which allows members to share the games they play as well as the characters from those games, create personal image galleries, post videos and projects, talk with other members, add and keep in touch with friends, manage favorite files and pages (as well as almost anything else on Curse), and even share information about themselves.

If you haven't yet, you'll want to check out the Control Panel - your one-stop solution for managing everything about your personal profile.

While you're managing your profile, don't forget to take a peek at our Games List; with over 200 games and growing, everyone is sure to find the games they play. And adding them to your profile games is just one click away! Our games list is also the home of our all-new mini-portal system. Each game in our database has its own mini-portal where you can read general information about the game, browse images and videos, post on game-specific forums, and even find other Curse members who play the game.

Although this is the release of Curse.com, we're not stopping here. We have so many amazing features lined up for the months ahead, from the Curse Client to many others; it's sure to be a great 2007 and beyond for Curse members. So why not sign up? It’s easier than ever; simply create a free account by visiting our Registration Page, and you’re set.

Forums

Our forums have undergone major improvements, and are now available for all games. Whether you are browsing the forums for a specific game portal, all forum posts on forums.curse.com, or the forum posts for a game in the games list, the forums maintain a standardized design allowing for ease of use. Our forums use the "Mediawiki Wiki Syntax", much the same as anywhere else on our website, allowing for cross posting of content with a simple cut'n'paste!

Blogs

A new addition we have with Curse.com is the Blogs section. Got something on your mind about recent game events and you want to share it with the world? This is the place to do it! You can even add other Curse members - allowing them to post their own stories under your blog! - a great way for guilds to create their blogs.

Videos

With the launch of Curse.com, we also open up our Video section for everyone to use. Feel free to upload any of your game-related videos to share them in high-quality streaming with the world easily through our object embedding syntaxing (details below). Featuring high quality video streams, Curse.Com video gallery is the perfect place to share, rate and find videos related to your game of choice! Whether it be WoW Videos or Warhammer Online Videos, Curse is the place to go for sharing and viewing it all! Be sure to submit your videos today!

Images

Our Image Gallery got overhauled again! No more need to use Imageshack or Photobucket with bandwidth restrictions for your image sharing needs ever again! Our Curse image gallery is unlimited amount of images and bandwidth usage on fast and reliable servers! You can even batch upload many images at once by adding all your desired images into a zip archive and uploading that!

WoW / VG Database

Earlier this year, Curse was the first to create the most comprehensive user submitted Vanguard Database, much to the rejoice of the Vanguard Community. We are once again expanding on this with a rich, fully functional and easy to use World of Warcraft Database that allows lookups for Items, Quests, NPCs, Spells and map locations! Additionally, download the Curse Client and participate in keeping Vanguard and WoW databases up to date! By using the Curse Client, you also have the ability to have character profiles for both your WoW characters as well as your Vanguard Characters automatically kept up to date!

Get YOUR profiles today!

My Curse

If you enjoy sharing your interests and experiences with others, then my.curse is for you. We have a full suite of features available for Curse members, all centrally located on one page: http://my.curse.com/yourusername/. Anyone who visits the Curse.com website will be able to view your profile and read any information you make available to them.

So what exactly can you do on my.curse.com?

Control Panel allows you to edit every facet of your profile, including Personal and Additional Information, your default Picture, add emails, add your mobile phone for SMS messages, manage email subscriptions, set filters for news and downloads, and change your password.
The Characters tab allows you to manage all of your characters you have on Curse. Vanguard and World of Warcraft characters require the Curse Client, but you can add characters for any game we have in our database as well.
If you want to show off your latest rig, then the Hardware page is what you'll want to visit. Here you can add in any information about your computer and show it off to the world.
The Articles tab displays a list of every article you've submitted to Curse, and the Images tab shows all of your personal images, including albums that you can use to sort images the way you like.
Our Games List displays every single game we have in the Curse database. Over 200 to-date and growing.
The Messages tab lets you view the messages you've received, compose messages to send to other Curse members, browse messages already sent and check out archived messages.
Projects are easier than ever to access. This tab displays all of your projects on Curse, as well as the latest comments for each project. Clicking on the project will take you directly to the project page, and there's an edit link as well which allows you to quickly access the "Edit Project" page.
If you've uploaded videos to Curse, then the Videos tab will help you manage them a great deal. Here you can view every single video you've ever uploaded to Curse, including links to the video and quicklinks to the edit page for that video.

Games List

Curse now lists most every MMO game there is, either already released, in beta testing or in development! Our Games List now has information, images, overview, system requirements and forums for every game currently in our database. Fielding a whopping 200+ games, we are sure to have a game that fits your taste! While there, be sure to add the games you like or play to your My Curse profile also! While we support character and server listing for ALL of our games, our World of Warcraft Characters and our Vanguard Characters are customized to allow display of items, stats and skills!

Object Embedding (Videos, Images, Files & Items)

We allow for easy cross-embedding of Images, Files, Items and Videos pretty much anywhere on site, be it a blog post, a news article, a comment or a forum post. In order to embed an object into content, there are simple tags that allow for this easily. You can find these tags in the "Share on Curse" as displayed here.

To embed a video, simply use: <video>videoID</video>. Optional parameters are width=x and height=x to customize the size of how the video will be displayed. For example, <video width=240 height=160>460</video> will display the video in a 240 by 160 resolution.

The same concept is implemented for Images also, and the tags to embed an image from our image gallery are as follows: <image>imageID</image>. Optional parameters are width=x (height will be autocalculated to ensure aspect ratio is kept intact!), type=default,thumb,original and align=left,right.

For items, the code looks like this: <item ns="wow">10042</item>. The options for the item tag are: type=default,tooltip and ns=wow,vg (World of Warcraft and Vanguard).

Embedding files use the same system: <file type=default>3404</file> with the options type=default,tooltip.

Summary

In conclusion, a lot of work has been put into making Curse the best MMO website there is. Here at the Curse offices, we are finally proud to present the product of many months worth of work. That isn't to say, however, that we will rest easy from here on out. We have a bunch of very awesome new features, extensions and tweaks in the works for the following weeks, months and even years!

So what can you expect from us in the close future? Well, I'm not going to spoil much of anything just yet, so I will leave you with this one small spoiler. A dark skinned theme for all of Curse will be avaiable as an option in your Control Panel shortly!

Sincerely,

Curse Inc.

Coming Late JUNE 2007 - Curse.com!

Nimloth — Thu, 24 May 2007 04:28:23 GMT

Greetings Ladies and Gentlemen,

For those of you who don't know me, I'm Christopher Carter - the Public Relations Manager here at Curse. Today, I have the pleasure of bringing you some very grand news.

We are excited to annouce that our new Curse portal is in late stage development with a scheduled release for late June. The new portal will also be launched along with our new URL: www.curse.com

The new Curse.com portal is meant to bring to light our many existing and exciting portal functionality and will also includes many new tools, applications, services and content. Our goal is to better enable, simplify and improve all of your gaming needs with the services and tools from Curse. Most importantly, we are retaining all our existing functionality, while adding and improving to every aspect of your Curse experience.

"V4", as it's dubbed, will bring a complete re-design across all aspects and segments of the portals. After much work, feedback, suggestions and quality assurance, we are going to provide you with a better user interface, a new flow, look and feel, all designed to significantly improve the usability of our site, its functionality and thus your experience. These relevant changes will increase your interaction with the extensive amounts of content and tools, with other users and the MMO communities that interest you most.

Curse is about you - Curse is about our MMO communities. Keeping this in mind, we are actively working on the development of many new free features, tools, services and content which will be included in the launch. Some of the new features include: Multiple new game resource databases, free video sharing & hosting, an improved wiki system, as well as a fully functional and interactive community social network where you may tie any pertinent content type across the portal directly into your profile.

There are actually many other improvements and features in development which we can't disclose just yet that will exceed your expectations and reach far beyond current applications and services in the market. All this, while keeping Curse membership, our tools, communities and our new social network initiatives Free, of course.

We expect the new portal Curse.com to launch towards the end of June, and are looking forward to receiving your feedback, suggestions and comments. A “private beta” phase will be made available soon to our most active community members.

Stay tuned for more detailed information regarding functionalities, features and tools to be included in "V4".

The Curse.com Team

Website Updates

Nimloth — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:40:14 GMT

Recently, we have launched The Lord of the Rings portal over here at Curse which is accompanied closely by our LotR-O Radio Show: By the sign of the prancing pony. The next week or so will be spent gradually filling the wiki and building the forums and community so in that regard, welcome and enjoy yourself.

In other news, today we also had our 1000th news post posted on our website, so this marks the first milestone of our hours of labour spent in development.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of our volunteers who help build Curse to the information resource it is today. Some particular people have put in a lot of effort, and deserve a special shout out:

Thanks to FuF, TiV73, Werik, Guilliotine, Rixier, Kody (and crew) for their excellent work on the WoW portal, as well as all other WoW staff members.

Thanks to Vladoz, Surtur55 and holymight for the mass amount of submissions to the Vanguard Database which is ever growing in size!

And lastly, thanks to everyone who uses Curse on a daily basis for your WoW, Addon or MMO news needs.

Welcome to Curse

Nimloth — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 01:45:54 GMT

Welcome to the new and enhanced Curse-Gaming.com. We are proud to announce that after months of development, version 3 is finally out and available for full use.

In light of this, it is STRONGLY recommended that you take a Tour of the New Website.

From here on out, YOU - the user, is now in control of submitting news, images and files to the website just as much as we are. Should you find something unrevealed in WoW - post a news about it! Have a writeup about a zone to share? Make a wiki page and news linking to it!

Only wish to browse news for WoW? Only visit the WoW portal.

Your options for personalizing your viewing experience at Curse has been expanded tremendously. Between RSS feeds and improved favorites, stay on top of the news and files being updates. The bottom line is, with the new website we leave alot of the content management and customization in your hands.

In conclusion - The power is yours!

Sincerely,

Christopher Carter / Nimloth {{{ Public Relations Curse }}}