Accounts

Profiles, commonly referred to as accounts, are a feature of Nitrome.com first mentioned in Nitrome.com 2.0, and set to be released with the Nitrome 2.1 update. They are the first feature on Nitrome.com to support a username and password.

Profile creation
On December 12 2012, Nitrome uploaded a sprite sheet for their website. This sheet was updated with various content relating to the upcoming profile feature. Although not much has been revealed, the player will have to pass a Captcha. They have the choice of either an audio or visual captcha, which they will then have to write down. Alternatively, the player can either sign in with Facebook or Twitter.

In a blog post explaining more about Profiles, it was mentioned that users would be able to register with an existing Facebook account, or register from the registration page. Even if users who create a Nitrome account do not create it via their Facebook account, they can still link their Facebook account (and also earn a badge).

Profile content
After creating an an account on Nitrome.com, the player has access to a profile to customize.

Avatars
Likely for safety reasons, users will probably be unable to create their own avatar. Rather, they can use images of of Nitrome characters for avatars. Other Nitrome avatars can be unlocked for doing certain things in games, as well as going to parts of Nitrome.com. A full list of avatars the user has found, and the avatar they are currently using is displayed in their profile.

In order to unlock avatars in Nitrome games, the player has to find them in the game they are playing (assuming the game supports an avatar to find). Avatars to select and achievable avatars are displayed on the avatar selection page, achievable avatars having a description on how to unlock them., a description that may sometimes be written in such a way that the player has to actually think on what to do instead of being told what has to be done to unlock the avatar. .

List of known avatars

 * Billy
 * Raven clan viking Ice Breaker
 * Stretchy dog
 * Takeshi
 * Zapo
 * Miner canary
 * Enemy engineer
 * Cactus man
 * Penguin on toboggan
 * Cuboy

Awards
Users can win avatars for completing certain tasks. Currently, badges can be unlocked, but possibly other objects can be unlocked also.

Badges
Badges are a type of object given to users for doing certain actions. At launch of accounts, badges can be obtained for performing actions "not linked to games", but badges will eventually be expanded so that game specific badges can be obtained.

Outside of games, badges can be earned for commenting on Nitrome blog posts, sending private messages to other users, unlocking new avatars , and reporting offensive profiles and and offensive comments. Special "reporting badges" can be obtained for reporting bad behaviour.

Number
Users are given a nine digit number, for reasons currently unknown. This is possibly for users to give to other users to get to their profile, or to show what number of user that had joined (e.g. number 0000000100 would indicate they were the 100th user to sign up), or a number to identify them.

Friends
Users can send friends request to other users they see on the game high scores or on a comment. A user's username can be manually entered to send them a request, or users can search for another user by other usernames they go by in different games.

If the user has linked their Facebook or Twitter account with their Nitrome profile they can invite friends from Facebook and/or Twitter to come and make an account, or to be their friend.

Hearting
A list of games the user has hearted is displayed in their profile, for the user and others to publicly see.

Comments
Comments they have made on articles are listed.

Games
Content from games are also provided or updated with the creation of a profile.

Saves
When the user creates an account, it is planned for their saves to be inputted into their account, so that when they access their account from a different computer, they can also access their saves. This prevents saves from being lost due to site errors.

Nitrome games have to be updated to be able to save the player's progress to their account. Generally, popular new and hearted Nitrome games will have a higher chance of being updated. A selection of older Nitrome games will also be updated to support saving the player's saves to their account. Although the game saves update will not come at the launch of Nitrome 2.1, Nitrome does plan on implementing this via cloud saving.

Game high scores
Nitrome plans to release an update for all game high scores to tie in with the friends system. It is currently not known what this update will do.

Linkings
Certain features can be done by the user linking their Nitrome Profile with their Facebook or Twitter profile. Users are allowed to link both Facebook and Twitter if they choose, both having exclusive features as well as features both Social sites have when connecting with Nitrome.

Linking with Facebook
By the user linking their account with Facebook (once there account is created), they can log into their account (once it has been created) with this. Users will also be able to invite friends from Facebook with their Nitrome Profile. Nitrome will be able to tie the high score a user submitted to a game with the user's Facebook account, and allow them to filter the scores to to let them see who has the best scores out of all their friends.

Consequently, users will be able to register for Nitrome account with a pre existing Facebook account.

Linking with Twitter
Linking with Twitter will allow users to send invites to friends on Twitters, and talk about high scores they achieved in games with their Twitter followers.

Commenting
Users will be able to comment on Nitrome blog posts, but will have to have an account. When commenting, the user's current avatar and username will be displayed. At the very bottom of the comment will be the date - full name of the month, number of the day, and year.

A bit after this is a report button, where a user can report a comment. This button is even placed on the user's own comments. For a user's own comments, they can also edit and delete them after publishing them. It is not known if comments will support HTML code.

Moderation
Comments will likely be moderated by a comment moderator. Also, Nitromians can moderate other peoples comment by clicking the "report" button if they come across a comment that has bad behaviour in it. Users can earn badges by reporting bad comments if the bad comment is dealt with by a moderator and the comment does show bad behaviour.

Abuse of the report button
Nitrome has realized how the report button can be abused. Because of this, Nitrome has created an anti-abuse system for abusing the report button, a system that will not harm regular users of Nitrome accounts. Nitrome has not spoken of how this system works, however, it is likely to prevent potential troublemakers from finding a way around it.

Testing
Nitrome has stated that upon releasing accounts, accounts will still be in their beta stages, with Nitromians being the beta testers.

Alpha stages
The alpha stage is the stage at which Nitrome accounts were still being worked on. Generally, many features were still being implemented and testing could generally not take place. The timespan of the alpha stage is the time when work on accounts began, and the end being when testing of the accounts functions begins.

Pre-beta
Pre-beta is the stage at which Nitrome begins to test the functions of the accounts. This stage was discussed in the April 9th 2013 blog post on the Nitrome blog. These stages involved the Nitrome team testing out the private messaging system, messing around with the accounts to see if they could get potentially offensive content past the moderation system, and to make sure everything works properly for regular users.

Beta
This stage, as described by Nitrome is when accounts are made public, so that users can use them.

Beta elements
Nitrome accounts previously had some features that were talked about in previous Nitrome blog posts about Nitrome 2.1, but these features were later taken out for unknown reasons. Possibilities for this are that they cannot be achieved with the current capabilities Nitrome has.

First talked about on the 2.1 Update Features (January 20th 2012) blog post on the Nitrome blog, users would have been able to log into their Nitrome account using their Twitter account they linked to.

Blog posts
The below Nitrome blog posts have covered accounts. Notably, Nitrome blog posts that covered accounts tends to be very long.
 * Future Blog Comments - March 7th 2011
 * 2.1 Update Features - January 20th 2012
 * Upcoming Accounts - March 7th 2013
 * Website Update - April 9th 2013