GOODBYE BZFLAG v1.7x

This is BZstats' official farewell for the good old 1.7x release servers. Since the last public server went offline at 2010-02-01 13:20 UTC, this part of BZFlag's history book seems to be closed now. :o(

Today, the data update for the server and player cache tables has been changed. The modification will avoid some minor issues when using the BZstats website. Most benefit will be for users of Tut Tank Ahmon's BZFriends Jabber Bot (JabberID: bzfriends@jabber.org). The bugfix will prevent from getting short-term incorrect player status messages. (Yes, that was a bug on my side!)

During the described change I was very close to deleting all historical player and server data (by mistake). Not, that there aren't backups or BZFlag server query logs. But I'm sure I wouldn't have the time or the motivation to recover everything again.
Phew...one of the moments when you believe in some kind of god controlled intervention. :o)

Congratulations Anticipate the Rush - winning team of the first "Ducati Cup"!

This night the "Ducati Cup" ended with the final matches between the teams Rive and Anticipate the Rush. Well done players (of all team) and good job ostatnia_lama who organized the whole event.

What a mess!
After investing all the preparation to reduce the server's downtime (time without BZFlag server queries) during the server change we had some other issue today. So we "lost" data for around 80 minutes (= 22 server query runs) today due to some obviously crappy software neither [dmp] nor I have to account for.
In the end it's with this software like with the BZstats - you get what you pay for...

BZstats on a new (and more powerful) server...

[dmp] (server owner) and my humble self moved the BZstats website to a new web server. I already noticed a significant performance enhancement during the test phase which never is a bad sign. :o)

To make the collected information of global BZBB members available the section "BZinfo" contains a new item called "BZBB Members". Here you can look for some BZBB top/flop statistics and callsigns that are or were in use. Beside finding good old friends the search form can also be used as an indicator of players using multiple BZBB accounts.

The BZstats own list server got some small enhancements which were helpful during the latest down-times of the official BZFlag list server. For those who told me some servers were missing during the last weeks in the BZstats server listing: In this version of BZstats the fallback list server can not compensate the official one but reduce potential issues in case the official one is not available.

Additional to the other stuff there were a few bugfixes too.

All recent changes were behind the scenes...

After a long time of inattentive use of my server query code I invested some time to make sure even the information of current development server builds are parsed correctly. Unfortunately, there were some development steps I missed during the last months. :o)
I fixed that issue. As a result all 2.99 builds from protocol version 0027 to 0083 are supported correctly now.

As one of those who are responsible for the 1vs1 League (which is tied to many BZBB features) I've access to a daily updated global BZBB user list. I'm using it for BZstats now, too. Beside running a history of callsign, forum rank and deposited user website changes I use these information to update the shown callsigns of all BZstats registered users. Reason is the confusion of those who asked why they still saw their (sometimes very) old callsign here. (I don't get callsign updates from any other source - that's why.)
Additional to that you can find an information in all player profiles with a global registered callsign. That doesn't mean the player on the server is necessarily the global user (server doesn't send a global BZBB identifier) but it might be.

And again, a quarter went by like a lightning...
...but I wasn't lazy...or...not as lazy as I could had been!

Most work was invested into the 1vs1 League. I changed the whole player management. Instead of using players' callsigns for identification the global BZBB bzIDs are used now. This allows to enhance player tracking, avoid some (not all) kinds of cheating and recognize callsign changes. All in all it's another step towards automation, comfort (for players and league authorities) and data consistency.
In my eyes the 1vs1 League isn't far away from a maintenance free league that's living from their players' fun of playing BZFlag only...wohoo...

If you are a regular user you might have noticed the new player/team & server activity graphs on the welcome page. You probably found the player activity graphs in the player profiles too...? Latter ones show online activity correlation bars splitted into team colors.
Reason for these additional stats graphs is a request of AlliedArmour who suggested to add some more information about player activity in the player profiles. The intention was as simple as comprehensible - finding players that would be good candidates for a league team (GU League in this special case). After some correspondence about the details we found a usable solution. I hope it'll be helpful for other players too - or at least interesting.
I don't want to conceal that (beside AlliedArmour) also Saturos and [dmp] were involved.

Thanks to you guys for the initial idea and further suggestions!
In case anyone else has good ideas too, feel free to contact me. :o)

Some of you (regular users) might have noticed the unavailability of this site. Luckily this wasn't a result of a server downtime, but a DNS problem. What I want to say is that the BZFlag statistics were running through all this time and there are no gaps! *wohooo*
:o)

In case someone wondered what I did the last days/weeks/months...
...catay and my humble self worked on the functionality of the new (already productive) 1vs1 League bzfs plugin. While catay did the whole plugin I took care of the other site of interaction. We are somehow happy that everything seems to work fine...till now...
If your interest awoke - join a 1vs1 League match server and type the command "/ovso" to check some of it's features!

This service (better, the whole server) was down from 2008-09-20 01:00 UTC to 2008-09-21 10:35 UTC. I'm very sorry for that outage. At the moment it's not clear why all this happened, but I hope/guess it wasn't a drama for the BZstats users (...you)?

However, I'd like to point out once again, that the BZstats site and all its BZFlag data gathering code is running on [dmp]'s web server for free!
Since the BZstats are somehow resource-intensive this fact isn't a matter of course. So...a big THANK YOU to [dmp]!