Well, eight months ago I started a short BZstats survey where I asked 40 active users about the possible future development direction of BZstats. The end of the survey was in February. Since others might be interested in the results too, I'll post the results here (with a delay 'cause of laziness ^^).

So, here is the result I sent back to all participants:

- 15 of 40 have gave a feedback.
My hope was to get 20 responses but 37.5 % is a good ratio for surveys, I guess.

- The majority liked the site as it is now (67 %).
That's good. :o)
Most of you made further suggestions which I assigned to the topics below too.

- Especially league players want to have a lower server query frequency.
It's not a big deal to reduce the query times as long as there's a fixed frequency/interval (or a multiple of it). That means I can query some very attractive servers every minute if necessary without changing the internal structure but with a script modification. My aim is to allow flexible intervals with no game-specific lossless internal data compression which (unfortunately) requires a completely new data structure. However, the new data structure and the a better query mechanism (higher query rate for attractive servers) are on top of my priority list.

- The Cross-Server-Chat would be a nice add-on (~ 30 %).
The few of you who would like to have that feature implemented would primarily use it for match arrangement. It's still an idea I personally like, so I will keep it in mind for sleepless nights.

- A few more "Web2.0" features are welcome (~ 40 %).
Most of you who voted for that idea gave suggestions for features they would like to see:
> a better integration into leagues and vice versa (overview of what happened in the users' leagues, allow a way to communicated BZstats users to arrange matches, more league-specific stats, supporting leagues with the additional information),
-> Some these suggestion are pretty hard/tricky to deal with. Let's see...
> an included web frontend for bzadmin,
-> I don't know if that's a good idea since you still have to enter your password again for each server connect. I'll have to think about that and set this item on a low priority level.
> RSS/Atom export for several information (server and player list [already available on request], my collection of BZBB account information,.. )
-> Well, why not. The RSS suggestion brought up the idea to create a collection of relevant BZFlag information sources (BZBB, wiki, player blogs, league sites) and to export them as RSS/Atom feeds. Since this sounds very interesting, I'll probably do that before I care for the new BZstats data structure for flexible bzfs query intervals. There are still some problems to deal with the data sources I mentioned but that's "only a question of time"...

- Extending the site to host other games too, isn't of interest.
That's something I can understand since the current site is if for BZFlag only (BZstats = BZFlag statistics). The idea to concentrate on smaller open-source games isn't helpful too because most of you won't play them anyway. There was only one of your who liked that idea. Well, I'll see if I'll find the time & motivation to implement more than just a simple online server browser for the games I already collect(ed) data for. It's at least not one of the top ToDo items.


Most of the functions/features listed above will take their time...a lot of time...

Further suggestions are always welcome, of course.

As a result of the BzWorldCup a new league has been created - the BzMatchBall League (bzmatchball.org).
The idea is to play on a football-field and in difference to all the other team-based BZFlag leagues you only have one flag to run for. If you took part in the BzWorldCup and liked it or are interested in that kind of matches or just want to see if you like it, feel free to give it a try.

Just a short status update:
BZFlag World Cup was added in the leagues section.
The list of match servers was brought up-to-date.
The team and player profile links were linked to the new GU website.

After another request for placing a "force refresh" link in the server profiles I finally allowed all logged in users to refresh the server data on demand. (You can thank Bambino who finally made me add this function.)

Some of the regular users with the setting to show monthly graphs for server activity (server details) might have noticed that very active servers caused problems now and then. The reason was pretty simple - the internal server memory setting didn't fit the requirements. That's fixed now.

BZstats website and all of its services will be down for a while somewhen during this weekend because of a server software update.

Since the Showdown League has been offline for a long while now - and after a consultation with the league's main admin - I removed it from the BZstats.

Today, the data have been cleaned from old double entries for players (resp. player names). For performance reasons it was (and under special circumstances still is) possible to have multiple data collections for the same player name. Since a few players had trouble because of that issue, I felt it was time to merge these data.

Many thanks to Brad who sent me an email with (a remarkable number of) match server updates for the leagues. Furthermore, he gave me a link to a web-based IRC client (called "qwebirc") hosted by freenode.net. This made it possible for me to include it in the same way as I did with the old CGI:IRC interface.

Have fun!

I added the template for the new 2.99 server description details - LuaRules, LuaWorld, replay server. (This is the 7th server detail template.)

It seems many registered BZstats users choose the theme "desktop". This one is pretty special since nearly all colors depend on the local computer's desktop theme (if browser and GUI support that). Different studies showed internet users do NOT prefer websites with a color theme similar to the desktop UI. :)

I had to fix a bug in my source code parser for BZFlag's key bindings. The bug affected the displayed bindings since 9 months and I didn't got aware of it...uhoh...