I think that Second Skin is an interesting look into the world of gamers. It aims to be unbiased and show a normal median of gamer life.

For me an important part of the movie is that gaming is just another outlet for our basic human needs. People venture into virtual worlds to fulfill the need for stimulation, conflict and human interaction.

IRL is slowing becoming a closed, shut down, place. Where class and station are less fluid than they were, or how we imagine they were. These virtual worlds offer a level playing field, a blind justice, where everyone starts with the same potential for greatness. And that’s what these games do, they allow for greatness. They take the mundane clicks and drags and turn them into accomplishments.

These closed ecosystems grow their own societies, with their own social norms and cultural histories. They allow for the players to escape what the real world has become. One power of the Internet is to bring together geographically dispersed groups of like interested people. No longer are we to make due with only those we can physically meet. And so with mmo games do we find other disenfranchised looking for more in their lives.

It’s an interesting documentary, if you get a chance you should watch it.

• Sanya Weathers talk about Community Management Lessons From Sarah Palin as brand management.
• HTML5 Boilerplate for starting new web projects.
• Kyle Brandt asks: Should Developers have Access to Production? and other release related thoughts.

The Walled City forum was recently spammed by a link spammer. It struck me as such a rude thing to do. Here we are inviting the world into our den for conversation and camaraderie. I feel like someone came into my house and put advertising posters on my wall without my permission.

But spamming is far from dead for the simple fact that it works. Spammers make money. They wouldn’t be doing it if they didn’t.

Spam is a reality. There’s no getting around it’s existence and the spammers who pollute the web. The best we can do is accept that it’s there and take precautions against it.

Putting our heads in the sand and giving up or ignoring spam doesn’t help our businesses, it doesn’t help us enjoy our lives.

Walled City has a new release that brings a number of substantial back end changes.

The largest change to the back end is a move to a more modular architecture. We decided to use the MVC style design pattern common in web applications. This will allow us in the future to reduce the chance of breaking interdependent things and to quickly add new features because of code reuse and the modular nature.

Secondly we migrated the database back to MySQL for the forums. We had been using CouchDB for a short bit. The reason for moving back was due to the stability and depth of MySQL. As well as using it for all our other data back ends. CouchDB was nice, but the unstable nature of the still developing project made it unwise to use when changes between versions broke Walled City. CouchDB is also such a specialized data store that using was in fact a form of premature optimization, something I’m trying to stay away from. All this was the deciding factor in using MySQL.

We have made some sublet changes to the layout of Walled City’s forums to help give some depth and ease the eye’s movement around the page. In addition some changes will help in navigation.

There is a new profile page for each user which will be their username after the domain name. (ie: http://walledcity.com/3jane ) The profile now only lists the Legend’s name and how long it’s been since they’ve registered.

To improve security and prevent forum spamming we have added reCaptcha to the registration process. This will make it harder for automated bot attacks. For now we hope this will suffice and there won’t be a need to add it to the posting and reply forms themselves.

Lastly a ton of little bugs were fixed that improved usability and security.