Awhile back I posted about my phpDiplomacy game monitor for the Windows Vista sidebar. (It also runs under XP with a little effort; but runs well.) Figlesquidge and a few of my friends have been testing it and giving me valuable feedback for several weeks, which I appreciate greatly, and now I'd like to expand the test a bit to maybe eight or ten folks who run multiple simultaneous games here.

If you object to Plura, please be aware that it does use Plura (but a totally different non-intrusive method unrelated to the applet embedded into web pages), but you can adjust how much work it does, or you can opt-out completely. However, since this is a test I'm asking that you agree to run it at least part of the time so that I can get maximum coverage for testing purposes until I release it publicly in a week or two. Then you can do whatever you want.

I also prefer testers who are reasonably computer savvy for obvious reasons.

I will say (since I have been asked) that I've been informed that the gadget will not get a link from this site once it becomes widely available, but keep an eye peeled for an announcement that it's generally available for download. I'll announce it once, and then word of mouth will be the only way anybody else will hear about it on this site, unfortunately. I don't want to spam up the forum pushing my stuff, no matter what else happens.

I've had about six people running it 24/7 and have received nothing but very positive reviews. Frankly I can't imagine playing multiple games of Diplomacy without it. It cycles through all of your active games, you can click to instantly open your browser at any given game, it has a message notification icon, it has adaptive timing so it starts updating more often when a game is approaching the end of a turn, it shows you who has finalized orders and who hasn't yet, it shows turn phases and time remaining, CDs, eliminations, and more. It's probably the most full-featured Sidebar gadget I've ever seen, if I do say so myself... and we're building more for other strategy game sites.

So, if you're interested in trying it, you're pretty good with computers, you're willing to commit to running it full-time for about two weeks, and you're ok with the Plura thing, please contact me at [email protected], tell me your username and numeric user ID here (in case I need to pull data from your public user information for troubleshooting), and of course, I'll keep track of the e-mail address you use to contact me.