NaNo Word War Tool

Sample Word War Stats Screen

Description

The NaNo Word War Tool is a website created to help with the creation and tracking of word wars between competing groups of wrimos. It was designed to support diverse team sizes and intra-region wars if desired. The default tools for tracking region competition on the official website are lacking, since they operate exclusively off of the total wordcount of the regions. If the regions are close to the same size, this is acceptable. But if you have two teams of different sizes, you need to work with a different metric. The Word War Tool operates off of the average wordcount of the teams, and allows as many teams per war as you want.

In its earliest form it was created in 2006 by ML Utoxin of Utah::Elsewhere, for a contest between his region and the Utah::Salt Lake County region. It stayed as a local tool for several years, but in 2010, he created a much more versatile tool and shared it with all the MLs. It was a smash hit, and quickly became a favorite of many regions. Unfortunately, in 2011, the NaNo website changed the API definition and had many issues with the API functionality, so the site was mothballed temporarily. In 2012, with the bugs ironed out of the official site, Utoxin returned the site to service.

Links

• http://utahwrimos.net/nano_stats - NaNo Word War Tool Main Site

How To Use (Regular User)

1. Go to the website, and click the 'Register' link on the left
2. Create an account, and wait for your confirmation email to arrive.
3. Click the emailed link to confirm your account
4. Log in with the username and password you registered
5. Click on 'Edit Account', and provide your NaNo User ID (See screenshot).
   • This will be similar to your NaNo username, but may be slightly different. You can get it by going to My Account, and taking the text after the final '/'. You must also have created a novel on the official site before this will function.
6. Now you're ready to join a war!

Joining a war is simple...

1. Click on 'Join A War' in the left menu
2. Depending on whether you want to join a public or a private war, this step varies...
   1. To join a public war, just pick it from the dropdown
   2. To join a private war, paste in the invite key you received from the creator of the war
3. On the next page, simply pick your team and click 'Join'
4. Congratulations. You've joined a war. Your homepage will now have a list of Joined Teams, with a little bar chart icon on the far right. Clicking on that will take you to the stats page for the war. This is where you'll see how well your team is doing.

How To Use (War Creator)

1. Create account and log in (See previous section)
2. In the left menu, click 'Create War'
3. Give your war a name, and choose whether it should be public (anyone can join), or private (requires a special invite code to join)
4. In the left menu, click 'Create Team'
5. Give the team a name.
6. Repeat creating a team for each team in the war
7. Join a team, if you're competing by clicking on 'Join This War' and picking your team.
8. If it is a private war, you will see an 'invite key' on the main page for the war. This is what your participants will need to join.

If you want to lock down the teams after a certain point to prevent people from joining or leaving, you can edit the war and set it to be 'Locked'. This means team membership can't change from that point forward.

If you have a list of people you want to automatically put on teams, click the small icon that looks like two people in the Actions area (tooltip will say 'Import Team Members'), and follow the instructions on that page.