Live healthier, for fun.
Hello fellow Health Month-ers,
It has been quite some time since the last blog post (we do apologize), but please don’t take this to mean that we haven’t be hard at work - we have been! And we’re pleased to announce a new batch of changes coming your way. See below for a list of updates that will hit the site within the next week. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please email us at team@ and we’ll get back to you.
Thanks,
Derek & Billy
Change Rule Reminder Settings - applicable to paid accounts only
For already finalized games, you may now toggle or change the schedule for rule email reminders from “Notification Settings” under “Game in Progress” and “Play Next Month” in the footer.
Health Month Widget
Do you want to embed your live Health Month statistics into your blog or website! Well, now you can. Get your widget embed code from your Health Month home page.
Email Nofications for Updates from Followed Users (Optional)
You can now receive email notifications for game wall notes from people you follow - even if you are not on the same team. Simply enable this setting under “Email Notifications” in your profile management page.
Improved Compatibility for IE browsers
If you are a frequent user of Internet Explorer, you have probably already noticed that this has already been improved. We appreciate your feedback regarding this, and do let us know if you encounter any more glitches.
Daily Updates
Daily emails are much smarter now and will no longer ask you to play for the day if you have already checked in.
Invitation Rewards
We are always grateful when you ask your friends to join our community. We now track metrics for determining which users are most active at doing so and will be using these metrics to implement a reward system that gets you really cool stuff.
Private Rules in Emails
Emails we send to you should now have proper descriptions of your private rules.
It appears that with our last update, we introduced a new bug to the system that many people seem to be affected by. An email is being sent out with the subject “Ongoing game on Health Month” that is suppose to remind people who haven’t played their turns in awhile to come back and do so. Unfortunately, it is sending them to everyone currently playing a game with us.
I just wanted to let everyone know that we are aware of the issue and are working on solving it for our next batch of updates (within a week). I apologize for any inconvenience and thanks to everyone that made us aware of the problem.
Derek
Sorry for the short notice (and delayed notice in a couple cases below), but we will be updating the site with a few items on Monday January 14th. The primary reason for the upgrade is that a security hole has been found in the version of coding HealthMonth uses currently, and therefore, it needs to be patched. So we’ll take care of that, along with adding the following changes:
- fix display of Team Points. This issue has persisted far longer than we like, but believe it to finally be fixed. Let us know if we’re wrong.
- email reminder for incomplete game setups. Have you ever started to setup a new game and then forgot to move forward with it - we’ll help you remember now.
And unfortunately, I wrote a blog post about a couple changes done on the 1st, but just realized that it didn’t publish. My apologies. At any rate, those changes include:
- timestamp for wall comments. Every comment now has a timestamp for when it was posted - not just the original comment.
- re-order user’s home page. The News / Updates section has been moved above the past games section on user’s home page to allow for easier viewing.
If you notice anything wrong with the above, please let us know. Thanks again to all for your feedback - it is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Derek
Tired of setting resolutions for the new year that you don’t stick to? Try something that works - HealthMonth.com.
To kick off 2013 with a bang, we’re offering a deal that is too good to pass up. For just $20.13, you’ll enjoy all the benefits of a premium account to HealthMonth.com until the end of June. And, if that wasn’t enough, we’ll also throw in 2 sponsorship chips so that you can share HealthMonth.com with a friend.
To purchase the promotion, follow the link below.
http://healthmonth.com/choose/new_year_promo
So from all of us, to all of you…Happy New Year and happy Health Monthing!
We will be launching some new updates tomorrow that we have been working on. Most of these updates are bug fixes, but there are a couple of changes as well. If you have any questions, please let us know.
Just a quick note to let everyone know that we’ve upload a fix for the bug regarding team points. For the past couple of weeks, team points were not being calculated or displayed correctly - causing rankings to also be thrown a curveball. This should now be fixed.
If you notice anything still wrong with them, please let us know.
Thanks.
Stuck for a Christmas gift, why not give them the gift of HealthMonth? Available in 3 and 12 month certificates, follow the steps below to acquire one:
1) Purchase the gift certificate amount you want via PayPal.
- 3 months @ $15.00 - CLICK HERE
- 12 months @ $50.00 - CLICK HERE
2) Once you have made a payment via PayPal, make note of your Transaction ID - you’ll need it for the next steps.
3) Download the appropriate Gift Certifcate Template. 3 months 12 months
4) Type or write the Transaction ID where it says GC ID in the PDF.
5) Print the PDF and stuff it in a stocking on Christmas, or Save the PDF and send it to your loved one.
If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at team@healthmonth.com.
Due to popular demand for more privacy measures throughout the site, we have started making changes in that direction. One of the consistent requests we got had to do with the display of usernames vs. real names - depending on what page people were viewing, they would see a username or the person’s real name. The obvious argument became “why do I have a username, if you’re going to display my real name anyways?”
We agreed.
Therefore, by default, throughout the site, a person’s username is now displayed by default (keeping their real name private). If you would like to show your real name instead, this is also doable by following these steps:
1) Login to your HealthMonth.com account.
2) Click “You” from the footer and then “Edit your Profile”.
3) Scroll down to the bottom.
4) Toggle the box that says “Use my real name throughout the site”
5) Click the “Save Changes” button
6) Your real name will now be displayed throughout the site instead of your username
Note: Regardless of what option you use, you will always use your username to login to the site.
As some people noticed these changes before this post was written, and were not terribly excited about it (having not known prior), we will be writing blog posts prior to uploading any new changes from hereon out (except for emergency bug fixes).
If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know.
Thanks,
Derek Thornton
HealthMonth Team
We’ve been working hard the past month to bring a major update to the Health Month community. And now, the wait is over. If you have gone to www.healthmonth.com and you are seeing this post, it means we’re doing some upgrades that require the site to be offline (sorry!).
So what’s the big deal? The big deal is that by popular request, we’ve made major improvements to “team” features:
- users can now join multiple teams
- users don’t have to request to join a team each month (once you’re on a team, you’re there until an admin says different)
- team organizers are automatically added to a team (rather than having to join a team they create)
We have also made some changes to the backend in preparation for some additional features - more on that later though.
As always, let us know if there are any issues we should be aware of. And please, keep the suggestions coming.
Thanks,
The HealthMonth Team
A big thanks to the Health Monthers who notified us of a bug in the system, where it would not let you import last months rules into next month.
Good news - the bug has been squashed and it is now fixed. As soon as we heard about the bug jumped to action and cracked the whip on our dev crew.
So once again you can import your rules as expected. If anyone runs into any other problems or bugs with setting their new month just let us know and we’ll be more then happy to help out ASAP.
Take another lap, drink your water and have a Healthy Day!
Regards,
Team Health Month
Ever setup a rule for yourself and wished you could be reminded by more than just your daily nudge email? Well now you can.
All right, no more infomercial talk.
But seriously, you now have the option of being reminded for each individual rule - on a schedule that you setup. However, full disclosure on this one, you do have to be a paying member of the site. This means that even if you setup 3 rules or less, if you want a separate reminder for any/all of those rules, you’ll have to find 5 bucks in the couch cushions and send it to us (jars of pennies not accepted).
If you have already started playing the game for the month, we’re sorry, but you won’t be able to enable this rule until your next game. We tried to get it done before the end of September, but it just didn’t happen.
As always, feedback is important and helps make Health Month, um, healthier. So have at it and let us know what you think.
As you have probably noticed by now, your inbox was the lucky recipient of a freshly minted reminder email yesterday informing you that a new month is coming - and therefore, you should be thinking about a new set of rules.
Due to user feedback via the Idea Tracker, we’ll send this reminder email 7 days prior to the end of a given month.
Thanks for the feedback and continued support. Much, much more to come!
It’s true that clothes make the man (or woman) - both on the outside and inside. People will notice an improvement in your wear and compliment accordingly. The lasting effect of those comments will increase your mood and self esteem.
Fore these reasons, and more, we’ve added “Dress Well (Better than Usual)” as a new rule. Give it a try for September, or if you’ve already started the month, try it in October. You may surprise even yourself!
Teams are great. They can support you when you need a pick me up, they can challenge you to go the extra step, they can make you feel like you belong to something bigger than yourself, etc.
That’s why we’ve created Team Health Month. Looking for a team, join ours. Want to compete against the owners (Billy and Derek), sounds good to us. Want to appear like we hand picked YOU to work your goals along side us, we’d love to have you.
Request your invite here: http://healthmonth.com/teams/show/874
At the request of some lovely members, we have added “Limit Video Games” to the list of “Mental” rules. If you’re an avid video gamer, perhaps you should try it out for September and let us know how it goes.
Thanks,
Derek
