New OARS?

[Chas Argent]

Nat-

I tried emailing you but never heard back; I want to transfer my old OARS rating to the new setup; how do I go about doing this? Thanks,

Regards,
Chas

 

[Anonymous]

Because of the change to a new hosting service, OARS v2 doesn't work. Very few people liked it anyway, so I'm in the process of re-creating OARS v1 on the new site. It should be up sometime this weekend.

All of the OARS v1 ratings will be moved and available. All OARS v2 battles registered, and new OARS member will be put into the OARS v1 system.

I don't have access to the actual data though, only what's publicly available, so people will have to fill in the blanks through the online forms.

You can private message me here until OARS comes up. I'll have a contact page on the OARS site once it's up.

Nat

 

[Fred Ingram]

So Mr. Croome finally sent you his source code ????

If so - why did he withhold the data ??

 

[Nat Mallet]

Nope. I did a wget on his site, and I've been making changes to the source code, an put it back up in its new location.

It does leave me with one problem, and that I'm missing a lot of information. I don't have any of the player info other that their names and ID, I don't have scenario details, I don't have the battles, etc.

However, I do have a web site:

http://oars.asl-forums.net

It's not quite done yet, but people can give it a try. Once it's fully operational, players should at least update their personal information and scenarios. I'll update it with the information I have.

I'll also update it with the OARS v2 data, so nothing is lost.

Nat

 

[Fred Ingram]

I really wish I knew why this Croome guy is so uncooperative

At least the combo boxes for players and scenarios fill up - so you must have that data

If that means everyone starts over for a rating - so be it

At least this site was fully fnctional and did not rely on people reregistering, minimal scenarios to choose from, etc

Great job

 

[Fred Ingram]

Stupid human question:

If you have the player ID and scenario data to fill up the combos, how come you are missing the battles

I would assum all of this was in the same database (or maybe the combos get filled up from standalone text files)

Just curious

 

[Anonymous]

Actually, it's all smoke and mirrors. The site is *not* connected to a database, nor has it ever been connected to one (at least not a "live" one).

When a user enters a form, a cgi called formmail is run which packages the HTML variables into an email, and sends it off to the maintainer. The maintainer then updates the database.

I don't know how his backend was setup. I'm guessing he either collected the data in his inbox, then updated the html by hand or he updated a database, and ran a site generator from it.

My goal is to keep the front end, but replace formmail.cgi with a live database link. I also want to provide some kind of searching or browsing for users and scenarios, because right now, the site has to pull down all 700 users each hit. You actually know when that data is being pulled down, because the browser sort of hangs for a second or two while the names are being pulled down.

Nat

 

[Fred Ingram]

Well - that was pretty crude !

It does not take much coding to do proper SQL inserts and selects to/from a DB - unless the hosting company does not support the backend services necessary for database calls.

With this amount of data and the number of simultaneous connections, even Access could be the backend DB

 

[Nat Mallet]

I don't know what the previous site's backend looked like. There may not have been a database at all.

You're correct in saying that the SQL isn't that hard. The difficult part is manipulating that data. There's a lot of validation to do, such as generating unique User ids, insuring a player doesn't register himself twice, figuring out the proper calls to generate reports, formating the reports, updating player ratings, etc. It's a bit of work, especially considering the additions I'm planning.

Even so, the site was crude. The HTML pages were generated from Microsoft Word (at least, that's what the meta tags say). Each individual tag has font formatting on them. I'll be optimizing those files so I don't go over my bandwidth limit, and adding a bit of JavaScript to validate the forms, adding a live backend so the site maintains itself, etc

It'll be a few weeks, but at least it works for now.

Nat

 

[Fred Ingram]

Have fun !!!

I was not being critical of your efforts

You are definitely on the right track now