dotblu blog

Add photos to your profile with blupix!

For a while now, many of you have been asking for a way to upload more than one photo to your dotblu profile.  We've heard your calls, but we wanted to make sure it was done right, and it's finally here!

blupix is a new feature to upload photo albums to your dotblu profile. Show your friends what you did for vacation, who you've been hanging out with, or just some funny pictures that you want share with the community.

So head on over to your profile and upload some pictures!  And if you don't have any pictures to upload right now, check out your friends' pictures.  Maybe they've even uploaded a picture of you in there.

As always, if you have any questions about blupix or anything else, feel free to email us at feedback@dotblu.com or contact the House. Good luck!

Introducing Pwned! A new photo-based game.

Check out photos of the hottest dotblu players and buy and sell them to earn blubucks! Pwned! Is a new game that lets you buy and sell other users and hold their photos on your profile page. As you pwn more photos, you'll earn more blubucks.

It's easy to play, you can scroll through photos of users and when you see one you want to pwn, click 'Pwn It!' Then you'll pwn that photo until another user buys it, and you'll make blubucks! You can upload up to eight photos of yourself to Pwned, so other users can buy and sell you, which will help you earn blubucks as well.

So check out Pwned! and start pwning your friends and earning blubucks!

As always, if you have any questions about Pwned! or anything else, feel free to email us at feedback@dotblu.com or contact the House. Good luck!

Happy New Year from dotblu!

All of us here at the dotblu staff would like to wish all of you on dotblu a happy and prosperous 2009. We've grown a lot over the last year, and we thank everyone that's used dotblu to make new friends, keep in touch with old ones, play games, and helped make this growing community great.

In the end, what makes this site great is you the users, and we've listened attentively to your feedback, criticisms and suggestions to try to make dotblu the best web site it can be. Thanks for all your contributions to helping dotblu grow and expand and become even better.

We've been hard at work on some great new features that we hope you're going to love, and will be rolling them out very soon. In fact, there's some big new features that we're going to start beta testing on tonight, so keep your eyes peeled! Only some users will be able to participate at first, but if it's you, you'll know who you are. And before too long everyone will be participating.

So thanks again, and happy 2009! As always, if you have any questions about the dotblu store or anything else, feel free to email us at feedback@dotblu.com or contact the House. Good luck!

View profiles without leaving your game.

Ever been chatting with a user in the arcade chat rooms and wanted to see their profile?  Now when you double-click on any user in the chat room, you will see a smaller version of their profile, right in the game window.  Find out more about your friends without even closing the game you're working feverishly to finish.

As always, if you have any questions about the dotblu store or anything else, feel free to email us at feedback@dotblu.com or contact the House. Good luck!

Two new games in the dotblu arcade: Spider Solitaire and Invaders

We added two brand new games to the dotblu arcade today: Spider Solitaire and Invaders! Here's the details on the new additions:

Spider Solitaire In Spider Solitaire, Move cards from one column to another by stacking them consecutively from highest to lowest. Once you've completed a stack from King to Ace, the stack will disappear. You can move multiple cards at a time as long as they are stacked in order, but you can only move the top card or stack in any particular column.

When you run out of moves, click one of the cards in the lower right corner to deal another card to each column. However, you cannot deal a card to an empty column. Once any of the columns are empty, move a card from a different column to that one to deal again. You will gain points every time you make a stack disappear, but you will lose 10 points for every move you make. To achieve a high score, remove all the cards in the least amount of moves possible.

Invaders In Invaders, you are the lone protector of your homeland against an alien fleet of alien invaders. Use the arrow keys to move your ship left and right on the game screen, and the space bar to shoot your weapons. The enemies will continue their advance unless you destroy all of them. As you destroy more of the enemy ships, they will descend more rapidly and be harder to destroy.

Another enemy ship will occasionally move across the top of the game screen to steal the last digit from your score. Destroy this ship before it has a chance to do that, or before it leaves the game screen to get your score back. Once this ship is destroyed, it will drop a package that will give you more advanced weaponry if you pick it up.

You have three chances to destroy the enemy fleet. Keep firing and collect the highest score you can to win!

As always, if you have any questions about the dotblu games or anything else, feel free to email us at feedback@dotblu.com or contact the House. Good luck!

Who are your best friends on dotblu? Let everybody know on your Top Friends!

Now you can change the order of your friends and let everyone know who your best friends on dotblu are. Your top friends will be the first friends displayed on your profile.

To change your top friends, use the 'friends' pull down menu and go to 'top friends'. On top, you will see a list of all your friends, on the bottom, you will see your 100 top friends. Click on your friends' image on the top to add them to your top friends, and drag and drop them on the bottom to change the order of your top friends. You can add up to 100 top friends, and the top fifteen will be visible automatically on your profile.

As always, if you have any questions about the dotblu store or anything else, feel free to email us at feedback@dotblu.com or contact the House. Good luck!

Add a picture to your question's title!

We've added a new way to illustrate your questions, by adding a picture to the header of your question. We noticed that many users like to have an image to illustrate the question itself, in addition to the illustrations for the choices. Until now, many would add an extra choice for this, titled 'don't click here'. Now that won't be necessary, as you can add the image directly to the header.

To add an image to your question, after you enter your question in the creation form, there is an 'add image' link right next to your question. It works just like the images for the choices, where you have an option of either uploading an image or using Google image search to find one.

As always, if you have any questions about the dotblu store or anything else, feel free to email us at feedback@dotblu.com or contact the House. Good luck!

New Quizzes are in Effect

As of today we have changed the way that quizzes are settled. Here's how they work now:

• You create a quiz by filling out the forms as usual, but now you can set the ante and the close date of your quiz.
• After creating your quiz, choose the correct answer from the preview screen, and click "create" again.
• You will not be able to answer a quiz that you create. At the moment, there is no creator reward for creating a quiz.
• When you answer a quiz, you will be informed immediately if your answer is correct. You will have to wait until the quiz is settled before your BluBucks are rewarded and to know how many BluBucks you've earned.

We think this will be a big improvement for the quizzes, and will give players an incentive to create more challenging quizzes, and give users an opportunity to earn even more by playing quizzes. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to write to us at feedback@dotblu.com or contact the House Good luck!

Coming Soon: Win more with quizzes.

Starting very soon, you'll be able to win more on quizzes than the current 100 BluBucks per question.  Right now you can only win 100 BluBucks for every quiz you answer, no matter how many people have played, or how many got it right or wrong.  Starting very shortly, quizzes will work very similarly to Majority Wins and Prediction questions, where the pot is divided among the winning players.

What that means is that when you answer a quiz correctly, you'll win more depending on how many other players get the question wrong.   That means that more challenging questions will have a much bigger payoff than they have now, but questions that are too easy will have very little payoff at all, if any.  That's because all players risk an ante when they play, which is added to the pot.  When the question is settled, the pot is split between the winning players.  If everyone wins the question, everyone just gets their ante back.

You'll still know right away if you answered the question right or wrong, but you'll have to wait until the quiz is settled to receive your winnings.

Important note: All quizzes created before the transition will still reward 100 BluBucks automatically as a correct answer.  For the remainder of the time these quizzes are still open (about a week), both types of quizzes will coexist on the site until the last of the old type close.

As always, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions feel free to contact us at feedback@dotblu.com or contact the House. Good luck!

Name your price! Users' market now open at dotblu store!

Have you collected a few extra houses, landscapes or cars for your dotblu world that you're not using anymore? Would you like to sell those items and get your BluBucks back so you can place a few more bets and win more BluBucks? Well now you can! Starting today you can sell any item you own in the dotblu store.

To sell an item, just go to your 'edit world' page from your profile, and find the item you'd like to sell. There will be a button that says 'sell this item'. Then you set the price you'd like to sell it for. If you set the price below what you bought it for, your Net Worth will go down, but those BluBucks will be added to your Balance so you can place more bets and play more game challenges. If you set the price for more than you bought it for, your Net Worth will go up, but the item might be harder to sell, especially if it's not sold out in the dotblu store.

So if you've got a few items to sell, put them on the market. And if you've been looking for some of those hard to find items like Lamborghinis and Ferraris and classics that sell out quickly, check and see if other users have put one up for sale. From the world store, click on 'more info' to see if any users have placed the item on sale. Check out the dotblu store and see what's for sale!

As always, if you have any questions about the dotblu store or anything else, feel free to email us at feedback@dotblu.com or contact the House. Good luck!