The Basha Has Arrived!

After months of planning, research and a lot of hard work, the Jawaker team is proud to announce the launch of its newest product: Jawaker Basha. Jawaker Basha is the premium paid service of Jawaker. We bundled a bunch of extra features into one service offering that will be offered to players at a reasonable monthly subscription fee. In addition, we will be developing all future features under this service offering, so players with a Jawaker Basha account will take advantage of the current and future set of features. That being said, the core Jawaker product, which players have been enjoying for all this time, will not change and will remain free forever. We will not and do not plan to take away anything from Jawaker players, and will only have additional features in the Jawaker Basha service offering.
Our rationale for launching Jawaker Basha was based on a number of things. First of all, we are experimenting with a bunch of ways to monetize the traffic on the site. Even though we believe in our online advertising model, we feel that Jawaker would be more solid with a hedged revenue stream like monthly subscriptions. This would strengthen the company's finances and fund future developments on the site. We also believe that a free basic service offering and a paid premium service offering has the benefit of only charging players who are willing to pay for these additional features, without risking the backlash of charging players who want the basic feature set for free. For more information on what Jawaker Basha offers click here.

Private Chat

After months of hard work, the multi-talented technical team at Jawaker launched one of the site's greatest achievements: Private Chat. This feature is simple and powerful, and it facilitates one-on-one private chat between friends on Jawaker; across different games and the game index list. The functionality was built from scratch and also includes notifications of when your friends come online and go offline. The intention of this feature is to make it easier for friends to organize games and play together on Jawaker. This feature will be part of the premium paid bundle to be offered by Jawaker in the very near future.

Mutual Friendship

Jawaker is a more than just a card gaming website, it's a community. We made an important step towards this vision by introducing the concept of mutual friendship. Whereas previously players could "Star" and "Flag" each other, these actions were one-sided "bookmarks", so to speak. Today we launched a new approach that models a standard social network. Players can add friends directly from the game table or manage their relationships from the "Friends" page on the profile. this management includes accepting and refusing invitations as well as blocking players. Players can also search for their friends by username from this page, in case they missed them on the game table.
Another small change is that we took out the complaint system from the friendship model. This means that complaints now go directly to the Jawaker Team and we use the data to manage our site policies.

Game Creation and Filtering

We just launched our latest set of features to be tested: Game Creation and Filtering. This set of features will allow users to create a private (password protected) game that doesn't show on the game index. Once the creator shares the game link with other players, they are prompted to enter the password in order to join the game, otherwise they will not be allowed to join.
We also added the ability for players to create games by minimum rank. This feature defines the minimum rank a player must have in order to join a particular game, thus ensuring that similarly skilled players can play together.
As an added cherry on top for this feature, we also included the ability for players to filter games on the game index by minimum rank, games with friends and timer.

More Helpful Forms

We love numbers and statistics here at Jawaker, and we love solutions that are derived from studying the numbers. Based on some statistics that we gathered, and based on some research we performed on forms, we decided to revamp our two most important forms: the "Sign-up" and "Log-in" forms. We introduced the concept of guiding textual instructions that come up as the user fills up these forms in order to increase our sign up and confirmed user ratio.

Advertise on Jawaker!

After weeks of hard work, Jawaker is proud to announce the launch of the almost-ready-for-market campaigner. We have integrated the Jawaker campaigner into the website to allow companies to create an advertiser account on their own, buy credit online (via Amazon FPS) and create their very own targeted campaign.
The process has been simplified and automated. The client company only needs to upload one image and Jawaker will resize and crop the images on the back-end to fit on the back of cards and on the game table. Each company will also have statistics on their campaigns and will be able to set an expiry date for each campaign. Open an account and advertise with Jawaker now!

Experimental Features on Jawaker

We are very proud to announce one of our most "structured" deploys. Today we launched two feature sets in an experimental fashion. First, let us tell you about the feature sets.

Profile View
Our new design for Jawaker was based on building for the future. Part of that forward thinking was to make way for versatile and flexible functionality on the game table. We did this through the introduction of "layers" or "views". We initially had only one view, the "Game View", which allowed players to see information related to the game itself. The "Profile View" now allows players to see information about other players, including details about their rank, membership date, tokens and country. It is important to note that the game is fully playable in each and every view by design.

Admin View
This view allows every player to see who the game administrator is and also allows players to change their seat during the game in order to play with a preferred partner. Game administrators can also change the game parameters, such as time to play and game name, during the game. In addition, Game admins are able to kick any player out of the game (and thus banning them from that particular game) at any time.

The great thing about this new feature launch is that it will be opened up on a feature-by-feature basis to a select set of players. We will ask these players to provide us with their feedback and improve each feature set based on player feedback. We are particularly proud of this approach to adding new features, as it marks an important milestone in our goal to host a top-tier professional website.