Letterbox Trading Cards

Thanksgiving Day, for those of you not in the know, is a pretty slow day on Atlas Quest. Which is expected--you should be spending quality time with friends and family and enjoying the day off of work. Many of you, I suspect, might even be off letterboxing, dragging along those friends and family despite their protests. This is good. It isn't call "quality time" for nothing. ;o)

So I thought I'd use the relative lack of activity to do one of my rare daylight updates to Atlas Quest. This particular update: Support for Letterbox Trading Cards, or LTC for short. I've also seen them called Letterboxing Trading Cards and Letterboxer Trading Cards. All the same, though.

You can now create, list, find, and search LTCs on Atlas Quest as a distinct type of letterbox. No big shocks about how that works. It's all the same as before--just that you now have an option labeled LTC whenever there were options for box types. Additionally, I created a separate section in the help pages explicitly for Letterbox Trading Cards. If you have questions (or answers) about them, that's the place to go. Not to mention the LTC message board as well for discussion about them.

I have to admit, when I first heard about the idea of LTCs, I groaned. "What do we need another type of letterbox for?" But I brushed it aside, figuring it was a passing fad.

Probably a month or two after I first heard of them, my opinion of LTCs changed, and you can blame Batty Girl for that. ;o) She surprised me with a package full of them--probably from a dozen or two people in all--and they were absolutely amazing. Wow! How cool! I showed them off to Amanda, and even brought them with me to the Western New York gathering where I showed them to a couple of other people. "They're not trying to change my mind about LTCs, and they're doing a darn good job of it!"

But I still worried about it being a passing fad and didn't do anything with it. Wait and see, wait and see....

A few more months have passed, and there's still talk about them. More and more people seem to be asking about them. More and more people seem interested in them. At the Bye Bye Turtle gathering, dbltall brought an album filled with this amazing little pieces of art, while everyone else around the table oooed and awwwed.

I've finally decided, LTCs aren't going to go away, so I finally decided to officially support them. Anyone who already listed a box that started with the letters LTC--I've automatically changed the box into an LTC. If you listed LTCs but didn't bother to prefix them with those letters, you really should. I'll come through in another week or so and convert any new boxes that start with the letters "LTC" into an LTC.

For now, there aren't any special attributes that go with them. There are no special tools to track groups of people who want to share them. (Some people have adopted trackers for that purpose, but trackers were never designed to handle LTCs so use them at your own risk.) Perhaps in the future I'll add attributes and tools, but for now, I'll start things simple and see how they evolve. The LTCs of today could change over the next several months, perhaps dramatically so. No sense building a bunch of attributes and tools that may not be useful down the line.

So that's what's up on this Thanksgiving Day. =)