Seraphx2

@bollard: Dunno why the site is shady. It's ad-less and doesn't ask for a bunch of personal information. But whatever.

These are keys from Bungie that are available to all users to gain a little extra for any account on any platform.

They are redeemed on Bungie's site, not that platform's store.

These links will take a site that stores keys. The links take you directly to the claim process (so you will need an account to gain access to them and view them in your Claimed Keys section).

Grimoire Cards (x17): http://bit.ly/1lWsmcL

Emblems (x6): http://bit.ly/1lWsB7J

Armor Shaders (x2): http://bit.ly/1lWsWHC

@sterling:

Which is exactly my point. If you just go back to it later and don't read it immediately, it's not that hard to just load it up on a website.

@sterling:

And some people would rather not be overloaded with data while they are trying to experience the here and now of the story flow. If you really care, reading it on a website or in-game shouldn't be a big deal. If you can't be bothered to read through a website, then you really don't care enough to take the time, so it doesn't matter one way or the other. When you are trying to play with friends, stopping everyone just so you can read is selfish. Plus, it takes that much longer. Most likely, you'd end up reading the stuff later on your own time anyway. So, what's the difference if you login to the game and read it all or login to a website and read it all.

I have a new website up: Game Key Xchange. It's for posting and finding Game Keys in one central location. Lots of times, people get extra promotional keys they don't need. This is a central place to cobble everything together to give more people quicker access to keys instead of using forums. Obviously you can still use forums if you like, but this is a place to store a bunch of keys and keep them on an account so you don't lose them. If you don't want to post publicly, you can make private key groups, passcode protect them, then post the assigned bitly URL into your forum of choice to only allow those people you notify that the key group exists. I think it can be a useful website that if used to offload keys you don't need anymore to the public, can be quite useful to the gaming community.

Agreed, date ranges need to be added and all fields available to a /game need to be made available to /games to keep us from having to do extra calls to the API.

Thanks for the info. I will try to keep that all in mind.

One thing that my login allows is to login with any of the major social networks. You don't need to make an account, per se. Just add a username after verifying your social network through OAuth. You won't need to add an email or even need a password. It will be really simple and quick. Then from there, you will have a log of any keys you ever claim. You can have an email to help protect your password, but it won't be a necessity.

I plan on trying to implement bit.ly for quick simple URLs. I believe they have an API you can hook into.

Also, you'll be able to add as many keys as you want to a single Key Group; I plan on implementing a simple text import: one key per line can be read in from a text file for quick insertions of large amounts of keys.

@geraltitude: Thanks for the input. So far I haven't been outright flamed, so maybe that is at least an incentive to continue developing and give the site a try. I have a lot of it already programmed and a domain name. Of the two systems, the hidden system is by far the simplest: all it entails is a "Claim" button that assigns the key to that user. My current method is that you have a place to go view all of the keys you have ever claimed. In addition to the limit of one key per type/platform/game and needing Captcha, I have also thought of X amount of keys per user per hour. IP would be interesting too (though could cause problems for people behind company walls or on school campuses or some such network setup).

After I get the claiming system finished, I will actually let you take a look at what I have in mind since, as I said, most of the site is done as we speak and it is actually available online if you know the address. You seem to have an organized head on your shoulder; a lot of your initial "key-claiming" flow and even how to manage the keys and group them is spot on as to how I'm developing the site.

And thanks for the Trade rule idea. I hadn't put a lot of thought into that part of the site yet, but I figured it would have to have a decent amount of "complexity" to allow people to setup trades. It's definitely not going to be ready before site launch. lol.

I could implement private/public key groups so that you could share with only friends you give the address to. I currently have a login system because it's the easiest way to manage who is putting up keys, who is claiming keys, etc. I do allow Google/Twitter/Facebook logins. I'm not sure there is a way to implement that with GB because their API I don't think gives access to all of that.

Currently, I am using the API to simply call games and generate my database and keep it updated with only the info I need to run the site.

So, I am currently working on a site to facilitate a single location to get and trade all game keys from. It would allow a person to post their keys, and then also allow them to try to trade for other games. The idea is also to help limit the frustration of when chancing upon a list of keys, probably not being able to get one, but not even knowing which ones have been taken.

I've been trying to retain the spirit of the current methods of trading keys through forums, or getting them from FB/Twitter. However, I've come up against a problem that I'm having trouble finding a solution to and still maintaining the openness of the key system. So I will describe the issue below. Maybe someone will be able to think of a clever way to make the system work for all parties.

So, Bungie dropeed 10 keys on FB one day for the Destiny Beta. The fact that all 10 keys are always displaying means that whoever gets to them first gets them. But, you could never sell a key because everyone else knows what they are and can use them immediately; the key doesn't exclusively belong to you. However, at the same time, because of this openness and lack of assignment of keys, you could grab a key, it not work, and then you know that most likely all the other keys are gone now too. It's a daunting task that seems pointless to try to put all 10 keys in, in hopes just to find the one key that (most unlikely) is still unavailable.

What if they had used my website? The idea would be that Bungie posted those keys. They would advertise them in a similar way but the users would be directed to the keys on my site. They would know immediately if a key has been claimed and if they even need to waste their time because they would know whether every key was taken, immediately. Here is where the problem lies: do I hide or display the keys?

If the are visible: there is no incentive to claim the key on the site, because you just want to put the code in as fast as possible. And, without claiming the key, it doesn't mark it out so people still don't know whether most or any of the keys are even available if people don't utilize the site properly and help eliminate keys from the list. A nice guy would help the system work, but I don't trust most people to do that.

If they are not visible: this method allows you to force someone to claim a key before they can see it. This helps with the curating of the keys, keeping claimed "hopefully used" keys off the list. However, by hiding the key, you lose the "accountability" and someone could just as easily take the key that only they have seen and attempt to sell it. Which, I think, is rude both to other players, and the developers who have made the key available for free.

In light of some issues with hiding keys, you could run into issues with a single person hoarding keys. Well, all of that has solutions. You limit each user to one key of each type (Alpha, Beta, Steam, etc), per game, per platform. Also, I would implement a Captcha system to keep people from botting the system and trying to harvest a bunch of keys.

Ultimately, I just need a way to retain the openness of the site, but still get people to want to help out and click the claim button to help everyone else out. Hiding the keys is sort of ideal, if you don't care about other people being douches and trying to limit that. Does anyone have some clever solution? Or, should I just give up and let the system keep working through forums, FB and Twitter?

For anyone using the API in an environment that is utilizing HTML and JS, here's a quick little code snippet to help patching the issue until something can be done about bad links (though it wouldn't be bad to just always keep this code running anyway).

At first, when I thought I would just have an empty reference (null), I was checking for null and either replacing with the 30x30 "No Image" that GiantBomb uses for their dropdown search, or when displaying the game details screen, not showing an image placeholder at all. Then, I found out some links don't even work and hunted around for a solution to detecting a bad image. I had never used onerror before on an HTML element, so was quite happy to find this solution:

That JS code is for when the user goes to the details screen for a game. I don't want the block that houses the image showing at all, so I just remove the whole DIV tag so that everything aligns properly.

I have another method specifically for my Autocomplete game search textbox that changes the actual source for the image to that 30x30 "No Image" file that GB displays on their autocomplete, when they don't have an image. Originally, I was just checking for null entries and if it was null, assigning the URL for that "No Image" file to it. However, now that I have two different issues, I just let the "null" get passed through and since it will generate an error, or a bad link will, I let the JS handle updating the source.

So, if you just want to update an image link, instead of doing the line of code with the ".hide()" in it, just do: image.src = "image.jpg".