Goodbye, MyGamerCard

[Cloral]

Came to the site to post and noticed that my signature image had changed. Where once had sat my xbox live profile was a note that MyGamerCard.com was closing. This is certainly a disappointment. It was fun keeping my achievements posted for all to see, and comparing them to the rest of you around here. But I guess the owner's finances weren't working out anymore, so he did what he had to do. So I say goodbye MyGamerCard. It is truly sad to see you go.

[Darth Marsden]

Aww... That sucks. These things are always useful. Now I have to find somewhere else to get my gamercard as well.

Farewell, MyGamerCard. You served us well.

EDIT: Found a rather similar one here (http://card.josh-m.com/). Much more limited, but it's still better than nothing.

[AtmaWeapon]

Did you go to the site and see why he was closing it? I think that was most disappointing of all.

He was trying to be legit and rely on APIs provided by MS to get the information, rather than writing code that periodically screen-scraped the XBL web sites to gather the information. This is cool for a number of reasons:

It's hard as balls to scrape HTML reliably and it would break every time MS changed the site, even if the changes weren't apparent cosmetically.
APIs can be hosted on separate servers to reduce load on the sites that run forums, DLC purchasing, etc.
API traffic is mostly text and can be pruned to just the text that matters, so it's much less of a burden than the screen scraping incompetent script kiddies do (smarter people request just HTML; many people drop a WebBrowser control on a form and use its DOM.)
If someone's application is making too many requests and having a negative impact on the rest of the service, you can revoke their API keys and cut off their access.

Apparently there are other services that do screen scraping, and those services are part of the reasons why the XBL community sites are slow. (It could also have something to do with MS thinking having separate forums for each game is a good idea.) The API didn't give all of the information scraping could give, but ethical people preferred using the API. MS continued to not do anything about scrapers while not adding to their APIs, and apparently the MGC guy lost more and more traffic due to having less features until he was paying out of pocket to run the site.

It's a shame; I liked the service. But MS is very fickle when it comes to supporting developers, and if you aren't in their mainline scenarios this is what tends to happen. Apparently they'd rather let the community suffer than open up.

[Cloral]

Yeah I read the moment of silence he put up. Though I would have to say that his site seemed to have more features than any of those other gamercard sites I've encountered thus far. I looked over a few others today but none of them had enough features for me to want to put them in my signature.

[KING STON]

Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life- Monty Python
Angels - Robbie WilliamsWhen You're Gone -Avril Lavigne.