Since BZstats highly depends on the very well maintained/operated official BZFlag list server (bzfls), any issues in its availability hit hard. Around 15 years ago I implemented a very simple workaround to bridge short outages of the list server, which worked as poor as expected. Since mid of April I have been running a different solution which *should* work for long outages as well. It is no alternative to the official list server, neither in functionality nor in data up-to-dateness. However, if someone operates own online server/player solutions and needs a fallback/backup list server that delivers a server list (including all server/player data) in the case of an outage of the official list server with an up-to-dateness delay of up to 3 minutes, let me know.
Regarding its data this new solution relies on the official BZFlag list server and its own bzfs discovery measures. Thus, it is completely independent from all BZstats data, which makes it a lean and separate solution.

If you wonder why I did this now...well, a question of time and need. I needed to become more familiar in dealing with mixed IPv4 and IPv6 data in programming and database handling. And no matter if or when BZFlag will support IPv6, it was a nice and useful little project. (The rest of BZstats doesn't support IPv6 at the moment, but now I got a glimpse on how to migrate - where to start, what works best and how to implement.)

Fixed a major bug that caused server session duplicates. While most data shown through the web-frontend have to pass plausibility checks and clean-up measures the issue didn't cause noticaeble effects - except for the server activity graph on the home page. However, the issue is gone, while cleaning up the historic sessions will be a future task.
Maybe that will be done before reaching the 20th anniversary of BZstats. :D

Thanks to Loymdayddaud and Zehra!

Loymdayddaud made the suggestions to add the most recent player sessions for servers and to change the email string to "motto" (which has been done in the game in 2011, already). Zehra pointed me on a bug in the server list (causing double entries).

Even though the website comes in a (very) dated look, I still try to keep the content as useful and as error-free as possible. Thus, I welcome any kind of feedback for improvement (be it suggestions or bug reports). :o)

Database issues

During the last days you may have experienced some responsiveness and/or availability issues for bzstats.strayer.de and 1vs1.bzflag.net which was due to massive load on the database because of web page calls by web scrapers/crawlers/spiders/bots that respect neither the content of robots.txt nor a gentle request behaviour. The most affecting ones have been blocked that night.
A presumed secondary damage by these request-floods had been inconsistent database files. This issue took a while to be observed. Therefore, bzstats.strayer.de lost around 7hrs of player data.

Right now, everything looks working fine again. ;o)

Happy New Year!
...even when being a little late... :o)

During the last weeks some minor changes here and there and some clean-ups have been done.
For those who are interested into some BZstats site stats:
- 45.875 server configurations
- 13.100.101 server sessions (server stats changes)
- 646.198 player names
- 21.822.520 player sessions (player sessions on servers)
- 2.292 server-to-owner relationships
- 23 BZFlag leagues or tournaments supported (2 leagues are active)
- 3.8 GiB of BZFlag data and 2.8 GiB of GeoIP data

Best wishes for 2025 and happy tanking!

Well, a whole lot has happened the last days. Unfortunately, all of that has been maintenance work. So you won't notice anything. :D

Let's summarize:
> 1vs1 League Tournament für 2024 (20th Anniversary!) endet and it's BZstats integration has been built back.
> The FAQ section has been updated.
> The BZinfo section contains a lot of general information. The data gathering backend scripts had been disfunctional for serveral years and got an update to deliver up-to-date information again.
> Similar to the BZinfo scripts, the script that updates GeoIP data (that allow to map a server to a country) didn't work until a few days ago.

To be true, the maintenance work wouldn't had happen if Bertman wouldn't have noticed that the GeoIP data were no longer correct and if he wouldn't have talked with Kierra about that who sent me a message. Thank you for the motivation. ;o)

Serious bug-fix!

Thanks to alfa1 who found data inconsistencies between the server list and server detail information I was able to fix a serious bug which affected player information on Rabbit Chase servers since several years.

Unfortunately, the bug has influence on the historic BZstats data records and I am not really willing to rebuild all data sets since 2012. Well, I still have the raw data (around 110 GByte of query data - and further 72GB for the years back to 2006) since I always planned to rebuild BZstats from scratch...which obviously never happened. However, you may excuse the gap of some missing Rabbit Chase server player data entries.

However, THANK YOU ALL who helped me keeping BZstats alive!
Within the last years I got several bug reports as well as information about technical changes in advance to prepare my query scripts. This all helps and helped quite a lot.

Goodbye Ducati League,
goodbye GamesUnited League!

Welcome Leagues United!

What most of the players might already be aware of is the fact that the oldest league and the most active league merged to bundle all players and administrative resources under one roof. Therefore, the two time-honoured leagues were removed from the BZstats pages as well and replaced by the new one. May the players have fun playing on the huge set of available maps!

Well, I'm reworking some backend data gathering scripts.

Today I fixed a typo in the BZBB profile thingy which didn't update the BZstats BZBB member information since November. Since grabbing the data from the forum pages was working correctly all the time, I just had to import the dumps for the last two months and fix the bug for automated updates from now on. So, no data are lost, all aliases (as long as they weren't changed within 24 hours) are available since 2009-03-18.

Next step will be to support the BZFlag's GIT repository to fetch changes in ChangeLog, Flags, Commands, Key Mapping, BZFS Options and Permissions...

I'm so sorry for the downtime of the website!

It was caused by a failed DNS transfer.
During the downtime the stats were still running.
I apologize for the incovenience you had - even when it wasn't my fault. ^^