Welcome to PBBG Warp. The goal of this website is to describe and classify PBBGs in a way that connects players to the types of games they are looking for. If you didn't already know, PBBG stands for persistent browser-based game. More information about this type of game is available at PBBG.org.

This document provides information about the workings of PBBG Warp and is intended to preemptively answer some of the most likely questions about the website.

Each game listed on PBBG Warp is encouraged to place a voting link on their website. This allows their players to vote for the game and boost its exposure on PBBG Warp. Votes are restricted to one per day per person, which enforced by requiring same-day uniqueness of the first three octets of each voter's IP address. Vote logs are cleared daily at 3 AM Eastern time.

PBBG Warp ranks games by their "vote score", which is displayed under listing links (in parentheses) and also on the listing pages. A vote score is currently calculated by summing the number of votes for a game in the past week. Summing the past week's votes every day means that there is no abrupt reset date like most other voting websites.

PBBG Warp was designed to be extensible. That is, over time the listing template for describing games can be expanded -- new properties and choices can be easily added as needed without any programming, which is good for lazy webmasters. This aspect of PBBG Warp isn't externally visible, but is mentioned here because the evolving nature of the listings will be noticeable.

You will notice that each listing has slightly different information on it. This is for two reasons. (1) As the listing template is expanded some listings may not be updated with the extra information immediately. (2) Listing managers are allowed to exclude properties that are not applicable to their game (for example, the number of days per round does not apply to a perpetual game).

Most of the properties that are currently in the listing template are self-explanatory. However, a few of the special properties deserve some explanation.

The game properties under the "Popularity Metrics" header are collected from a variety of sources (Alexa, Google, Compete, and Yahoo) and can give you a feel of how popular the website is. These statistics are updated every ten days. Here are some simplified explanations:

For more information on any of these measures take a look at the provider's website.

The "Dynamic Properties" area, when implemented by game owners, displays information that is gathered from the game server. Currently it displays the number of total players, effective players, and online players. This data is refreshed every hour.

The effective players statistic reports the number of players who have signed in within the past two days and whose accounts are more than three days old. The point is to exclude idle accounts and one-time game samplers from the player tally.

At the bottom of each listing is a set of three pretty graphs. Each graph charts daily data spanning back two weeks. The first graph plots the number of daily votes, the second plots the number of daily visitors sent to the game from PBBG Warp, and the third plots the number of daily views of that listing.

Refreshed Hourly: Dynamic properties.

Refreshed Daily: Vote scores, category pages (including the main page), graphs.

Refreshed Every Ten Days: Browser thumbshots, popularity metrics.

PBBG Warp provides software that allows game owners to give their players a reward for casting a vote (or, depending on the game, for attempting to cast a vote). Whenever a vote is attempted the PBBG Warp server notifies the game's server and reports whether the vote was successful. The game server is free to reward (or not) as it pleases, and PBBG Warp has no control over lost voting rewards.