Changes to GetGlue's website & True Blood Fandom Discounts!

GetGlue rolled out some new changes to their website today in addition to announcing a partner program with HBO to offer a discount on True Blood merch.  I'll touch on the latter of these first.

Hit the jump for more!


The True Blood promo will net you a discount in HBO's online store on True Blood merchandise. The discount is supposed to range from 10% (no fandom) to 15% (Fan/Truebie) to 20% (Super Fan/Maker) and the icing on the cake is that the Guru gets a $50 gift card.

And apparently as of right now it's broken. Bringing up the True Blood page still shows only the 10% discount level for me. I hit Maker level back on September 2nd, which means it should be showing up with the 20% discount. I guess we can chalk this up to another release-day bug, which is a bit of a bummer because I'd be seriously chuffed to go use that 20% discount.  And if I was anywhere close to being able to gun for it, I'd try for the Guru ranking.  But I can't do that either, which brings me to the point of the changes to the site.

The first thing you'll probably notice when you head to a page is that the layout has been a bit rearranged. Your Profile page will still look the same, but head over to any other page and you'll see the changes.  Check-in and Review have been moved up and the check-ins on the site will now give you notification that you've earned points.  Below that it shows a tabbed area for people who have recently Liked the item, people on your subscriptions who have Liked the item, and the Top Rated users who have commented on it.  Down the right side of the screen you'll see the visits/likes/check-ins that used to be in the center of the page as well as a list of recent check-ins to the topic, which lets you know what kind of buzz level the topic has.  Below that is the "hall of fame", which lists the Guru, Recent Superfans, and Recent Fans.  Nowhere in that sidebar is the "vote for me" button that used to be present if you had Liked and Reviewed a topic. The option to pimp yourself for Guru doesn't even appear until you've checked in to an item several times and then click on the Top Rated tab for a page. This is a good thing in my not-so-humble opinion, because it will hopefully cut down on the number of people doing a power grab on the Guru position by stopping them from pulling a single post/vote for me combo like they've been able to in the past.

So are all these changes for the better?  The website's response time seems a bit slower, I'm still running into weirdness where five check-ins to an item won't net me a Fan ranking, some of the topics I'd previously earned a Fan ranking on aren't recognizing that status, and trying to get new stickers is taking me multiple check-ins above and beyond what should be required, but I'm thinking the latter two may still be the "you've got too many stickers" bug rearing its ugly head yet again.  We'll have to wait and see how things pan out.  Until then, I'll keep on plugging away and dropping e-mails to support when things break.  Eventually they'll get sick of hearing from me, I'm sure. :)

EDIT:  So apparently I was wrong about the whole "have to check in a few times to go for the Guru" supposition.  It appears that once again I was the victim of a bug on more than a few topics and as such it's not registering that I've checked in to them, so it won't give the option to ask for votes. Other topics are working as expected and will pop up the option to ask for votes as soon as I've liked, reviewed, and checked-in to the topic. I'm assuming I'm not the only one running into this.  GetGlue seriously needs a forum where the users can go to report suspected bugs, because this is getting ridiculous.