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]!

Some of you might have noticed the improved accuracy in the server-ip-2-country association (e.g. for bzflagr.net:5154 which was assigned to Uruguay instead of the United States). This is the result of a yesterday's changeover from the geo-targeting provider Hostip.info to MaxMind. While Hostip.info is an open project and offers its free data via many different and easy to handle ways, MaxMind has more accurate information (even for the free sources).

However, many thanks to Hostip.info for 11 months of providing the BZstats site with very useful information for its users and myself... :o)

Since the 1vs1 BZFlag Contest 2008 is over I felt free to remove the section "1vs1 Contest '08" from the leagues' page. Beside a few hurdles, I guess it was a real success.

I want to use the chance to honor all the involved and participants, especially deviltank (organizer), catay (prize sponsor, server and plugin maintainer), kierra & family (server and prize sponsor) and all the ones I forgot...

During the last news entry I felt free to add a few things:
- league overview in section "Leagues"
- all (regularly implemented) slash commands with in-game descriptions at "BZinfo" > "Commands"
- player and team activity graph for the server details in the section "Servers"
- "myBZstats" > "myBZsettings" option to set the period under review for the activity graph
I hope you find some of these additions somehow helpful. If you don't...feel free to ignore them. :o)

1vs1 BZFlag Contest 2008
After two years of 1vs1 contest abstinence deviltank organized another one. 53+2+1 tanks are registered and split into eight groups. Everyone wants to earn fame and glory on the battlefield (o: and probalby the prizes for the best three :o).
A new league, called "1vs1 Contest '08", has been created in the leagues section allowing participants to find their opponents easily.

Some BZstats users seem to have exhausted the maximum number of allowed myBZbuddies...again. :o)
So I decided to increase it by 20 up to 100 (as default setting). Furthermore I added the myBZsettings option to hide offline myBZbuddies from the list.

The query scripts needed an update since BZFlag servers with protocol 'BZFS0059' and higher don't support the players 'email' field any longer.
Jeff told me he (resp. the BZdevs) will implement a different field instead. This is planned to come into the code before the 3.0.0 release and will be more 'dynamic', i.e. the new fields content could be changed during a player session (e.g. by a plugin that sets the players team name on a league server). This allows the server owner to check and control the text. As usual I'm very sceptic, but I also see the advantages.

Beside some smaller changes and bug-fixes during the last time I decided to add the BZSoccer League (requested by 'Tank 52'). If you have never heard about it, feel free to give it a try!