Is something missing from the site??

[drklrd]

this is definetly not a Complaint (I work in the IT field and know how much behind the scenes work has to go into an endeavor like this.

but I need to make sure I am not in the twighlight zone

have some entries in the site been lost. It didn't allow me to log in, bu tit did allow me to recreat my id as if it was new. but I don't see any of the previous posts I made.

I jope I have not done something wrong and been not only banished but erased as well ( LOL )

also Many thanks for having a site like this where new people can find information and experienced people for help.

 

[peterk1]

Yeah some of the posts right on the boundary of the move appear to have been lost.

 

[Klaus Fischer]

It seems there was an overlap between our backup and the real deactivation of the "old" site.
So as far as I can see about 2-3 days of posts have been lost. Additionally during the first day it seems the profiles were not correctly working as I was logged on, but couldn't read my message box.
But now everything is working properly.
Sorry for the lost content.
Klaus

 

[Fred Ingram]

Actually - the real lmissin gthing is the new and updated OARS (Which was why this site originally was created and the forums were to be a side light)

Maybe HOB can contact David Croome and get his code and data (he said he was interested in passing the torch)

The original OARS is much better technically and user friendy than the current attempt (no matter how well maning the attempt was)

 

[Anonymous]

Klaus is right. There was a 2-3 day period between the last backup and the old site shutdown. Anything posted in that period has been lost.

There was also a problem with log ins, because the site went live before the domain name was propagated around the internet. If you connected to the site through the lunarpages.com domain, your login wouldn't stick, as it was looking for user information on asl-forums.net, which was not up.

As for OARS, we've run into a serious problem. The new hosting provider doesn't have the database library I used in the OARS implementation. So I have to re-write the whole thing, in another programming language.

As for getting David Croome's data and code, I'm considering that a dead attempt. I've had several people send him mail on many occasions, and 6 months later, I've yet to get anything.

As for the new OARS, I consider it more user friendly and technically better. It requires no attention from maintainers, changes are live, etc. I am obviously very biased. But then again, I haven't had any feedback on it. I requested that people send me suggestions for improvement, but I haven't received much feedback on that front (OARS sucks! isn't useful ).

Here are the complaints that I have received:
- OARS doesn't display any message when an error occurs (fixed)
- Logging in with the ASL-Forums login doesn't work (not implemented)
- Double-entry system is confusing.
- Slow (network/hosting company issue - out of my control)

I don't claim that OARS is perfect; far from it! So if anyone has any suggestion on how it could be improved, I'll make the changes. It will take some time though, for reasons described above.

Nat

 

[Fred Ingram]

Nat - I would not bother writing it in another language till you get a good design figured out (the GUI was difficult, little data was selectable as lookups from the database, etc). I can help you with this - writing software specs and administering databases is my full time job.

If you still want to invest the programming time, I would suggest that it would be more productive to contact the current ROAR guy and offer to write a little backend player rating calculator DLL or something which could be plugged in to his front end. That site has everything you ever need to collect the data (scenario names, players, scenario ratings, played date, etc) it just does not calculate PLAYER ratings. There is no need to have redundant packages floating around (especially when the committment to actually mainting these things over the long haul is somewhat suspect (like the OLD OARS)

As far as recundencies goes, the Southern California ASL club took over the Coastal Fortress site and they already had a good facility for entering and archiving AAR's including a search engine. Encouraging people to post AAR's here just fragments the data and makes it more difficult to actually find an AAR when needed.

 

[Nat Mallet]

I'm a back-end server engineer, and it shows in my UI designs. I can build the most horrifically complex engines to serve data, but somehow, that translates into my UI.

If ROAR maintains scenarios, players and the games they've played, then it should be trivial to add ranking calcs, regardless of what's behind their server. A few have suggested this already, so I'll look into it. Stay tuned for the results...

Nat