MyGamerCard.net no more

[retroed]

I wondered why some people's signature pictures weren't working.

For over five years, MGC has served the Xbox Community in ways that I had never imagined. What started as a "test of concept" for a few Xbox.com forum users led to a rollercoaster ride that has been one of my life's greatest adventures.

When I started working on the code that would eventually become the heart of MGC, I certainly did not imagine that nearly five million unique GamerTags would end up using it. Nor could I ever fathom that the handful of requests that saturated my home cable modem (and kept me from playing Halo 2!) would eventually require five servers to handle the load of thirteen million daily requests!

However, in the past few years, that love for community has been lost by Microsoft. The closure of customer-to-company community-centric interfaces (that weren't tech support (no disrespect towards the awesome @XboxSupport!)) was a huge blow for Xbox fans. Especially those who really felt like they had a connection to the company they were spending their disposable income on. Similarly, the Xbox Community Developer Program - the program that was essentially created for MyGamerCard and a select few similarly broad-minded community projects - stagnated, with extremely few updates or new data features (despite constant requests), and waning communication as Xbox was not allocating any time to the program.

To make matters worse, while most of us who insisted on playing by the rules (Terms of Use) of the XCDP, others were showing their lack of respect and selfishness by setting up 'screen scraping' mechanisms to gather additional data from the Xbox website that are otherwise unavailable to us. If you've ever been to Xbox.com and noticed how slow it is - they are the reason why. These sites - some of them for-profit corporations - benefit from having the type of information that the rest of us had been asking for, which quickly started eating away at our traffic. Repeated discussions with Microsoft regarding this issue have gone largely unacknowledged (and certainly un-actioned) by anyone beyond my initial contact.

Eventually, the rise of these websites, coupled with the declining advertising ecosystem, pushed my out-of-pocket expenses upwards as advertising alone couldn't maintain the (quite modest, comparatively) monthly hosting fees. Eventually, the decision had to be made to take down the site. It wasn't (and still isn't) a decision I've made lightly; proof of that is the simple fact that I've been running half of my monthly costs out-of-pocket for over a year now. But despite the sadness of having to shut down this part and chapter of my life, there's a part of me is a little relieved that there's a set 'closure' to all of it, rather than infinite abandonment.

You can read the full thing at mygamercard.net

[Hendo]

I wonder if Raptr is one of those sites it mentioned, I bet it is.

Shame but there's sites that do the same thing but better now, I guess.

[Sly Reflex]

Raptr needs more designs as I think most of what they have look real crappy.

[Pikman]

I'm gonna make the switch, does it populate friends from your xbl account or is it all manual?

[Hendo]

Raptr? You put your XBL tag in and it populates with your XBL friends but you can also add other people in. If you set an account let me know so I can add you to the Raptr chart.

[Pikman]

Already done mate, just wasn't sure if it populated as I've linked my accounts but its not updated yet