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. ^^

This weekend some maintenance stuff has been done - such as refreshing the leagues' match server lists or setting up a page for the current ZELO rating formula of the 1vs1 League.

Behind the visible elements I redefined parts of the database model for the current BZstats' successor. I hope to run a prototype of a new master server query element within the next two weeks. Since BZFlag has only one primary server list, this isn't that spectacular or useful, but I'll run it for other games (with more master server lists) too. This includes work on an algorithm to calculate a list of the next game server(s) to be queried, considering last state, current player activity, common attractiveness and so on...

That's it so far, so: Live long and prosper!

The bzflag.org DNS change (moved sites, replaced [sub]domain names) cause a few updates. Beside the obvious - replacing http://my.bzflag.org/bb/ by http://forums.bzflag.org/ - the BZXleague has been removed finally. Now, the old list server and the new list server are queried to pick up old servers too which weren't restarted by there owners.

You might notice some temporary disappearance of a few servers. This is the result of some short service downtimes. These downtimes seem to occur in non-regular intervals. Please don't be confused then. :o)

Not sure anybody noticed but ... the BZstats' data history covers a range of 5 years now!

Well, the current activity of BZFlag and the handfull of BZstats improvements within the last year aren't a real reason to end up in encomium or any other kind of extraordinary celebration. For those of you who read this message and want some stats:
#players: 436,208 (by callsign)
#servers: 8610 (by IP:port)
#player sessions: 14,256,371
#storage in bytes: 2,576,934,195

Have fun playing this wonderful game! :o)

The BzMatchBall League closed its doors due to inactivity with the 1st of August.

This league was the result of the BZFlag World Cup which was inspired by the footbal world cup. So it came up with a completely different game style - only 1 flag to capture. Furthermore, it had not only teams but also so called squads. While players could choose the team to play in, the squad membership was set automatically on players' league registration. So whenever it wasn't possible to play official matches between teams, there still was the chance to match with the two squads.

Well, goodbye league #10...

One of the new features of 2.4.0 is the possibility to know who is responsible for a server (as long as it appears in the official public server list). So I used that chance to grab this information too. That means the server owner and a link to BZstats' BZBB member search is placed at the bottom of the block with "common server information".

If you know further new features that could be included into BZstats - you are welcome to let me know. :o)