About a week ago, Microsoft split the XBLIG and WP7 site back into two sites. One for Xbox LIVE Indie Games and one for Windows Phone 7 development. This is nice... actually it's more funny than anything as originally the XBLIG had it's own site.. but anyway.
UPDATE (September): Looks like the forums and searching is working again. Hooray! Thanks Microsoft for getting it fixed.
ORIGINAL STORY:
After that change it turns out that doing a search for information on the forums does not work. Let that sink in. Search is broken.
Doing a search for most things on the XBLIG development forums fails. What happens is you are redirected to a pretty page that asks if you want to make an Indie Game or WP7 game. Even if you click on the Indie Game, it ignores whatever you were looking for and just takes you to the main XBLIG. Search aborted. Can't find the help you're looking for. I've found a few things that work, but the vast majority of searches fail.
We need to get that fixed, and that means writing "creators@microsoft.com". If you develop Xbox LIVE Indie Games, let's get this change happening.
Here's the body of an email I've sent. Please write your own, or use mine as a starting point or wholesale. I'd keep it short, polite, and say what's broken.
Hello team!
After the transition from pulling the XBLIG site back out of the apphub/phone site it seems the forwarding links when doing a search for information don't work. I was hoping this was just a short matter of time, but it's still not working.
This is critical for the site to be useful. That impedes not only seasoned developers but especially new developers which will crush growth.
Can we please get someone on this?
Thank you!
In any case developers, it's up to us to help convince Microsoft this is an important issue. Please write them!
I love playing and developing XBLIG as I'm sure you do as well. Keeping the forums in a healthy state is critical to the platform's ongoing growth and development.
2 comments:
Not just search but every blog and twitter and every internal cross post (like all the FAQs) are broken too... clearly the conversion was done with the care and attention we have come to expect from the XBLIG team (or what is left of it!)
I don't know if you already know this or not, but if you do a google search and your result in in the XBLIG forums, you can prepend "xbox" to the address of the (now broken) link and you should get to your desired link.
Not a solution, of course, but it should allow you to get your answers in the mean time :)
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