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!

This night I fixed a bug in the BZstats-own list server script which is used as fallback system for the official one.
Many thanks to [dmp] who noticed and reported the bug!

As you can see, I'm writing down news entries since a while. Until now I was too lazy to display them, but I used the chance of some free time to let you take part of my literary flowings...

Today the BZFlag list server wasn't reachable because the servers hard disk drive was filled up. Fortunately, the BZstats site can temporarily work without the official list server without losing its functionality...yeah! :o)