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Introducing... SoA's new Competition Tracker


Applejuiceaj

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Some may have noticed that lately when hosting some of our skill of the week competitions that there has been a second link in the post and the dropdown at the top of the forums - this is because we have been testing our new competition tracker to make sure it is working as it should.  We are happy to announce that all seems to be working as designed and this new system will be taking over all Spirits of Arianwyn competitions starting with the upcoming smithing competition starting on Monday.

 

What makes this different than RuneTrack/RuneClan?  Why do we need a new tracker?

The big difference is that this is a self hosted solution to running all of our competitions; this is running on our site (we own spiritsofarianwyn.com in addition to soa-rs.com).  In addition to this, if it happens to break we will be able to quickly get it fixed as its our code, rather than have to wait for a third party developer to fix it, which could take a while.

Runetrack hasn't really been itself since last Bonus XP Weekend in February; it was broken entirely for the month of March, causing us not to have a monthly competition or any skill of the week competitions, something we have been running for a number of years, and it still hasn't been quite fixed either.  Its actually currently broken once again recording all players as having 0 in all stats). and back in March we weren't able to run any competitions because it wasn't working.

Running our competitions isn't just for events purposes; 2 additional staff teams (Resources and Tylar Mentoring) heavily use the competitions we run (in addition to a few behind the scenes ones) to track activity of new members and existing members for use in determining promotions and retirements, so having a working solution was needed to ensure our staff teams could continue to get their work done.

When Runetrack stopped working we did investigate other means of tracking stats including Runeclan's clan competitions, but found that they didn't easily give the information we were looking for like Runetrack did.  Instead, we decided to develop our own solution.  This solution was developed by myself (Applejuiceaj), along with the assistance of Ythaar-Mej (who some of you may have met at Town Square Q&A or elsewhere), in our free time (remember all those times I seemed incredibly afk while training fishvention?  This was likely what I was working on).

 

Where can I find this tracker?

The new tracker can be found at http://competitions.spiritsofarianwyn.com; from there, you'll be able to see all of the current running, upcoming, and completed competitions.

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The overall site look-and-feel has been designed to be close to that of our forums, while the data presented in the competitions is displayed in a manner similar to that of Runetrack's competition interface, with a few neat additional features (both in terms of viewing and managing running competitions) and minor tweaks.  One of my personal favorites is that we can now update a participants display name without having that weird double-entry that resulted from not being able to change the name on the existing entry (in saying that, please don't change your names; the Resources team thanks you in advance :p).

Competition data still has to be updated by clicking the "update" button, though you'll find this now instantly loads the page and will grab the stats in the background (rather than leaving you on a page saying fetching stats, potentially requiring you to leave the page open for it to grab all of the stats), so you can check back a few minutes after clicking the button to see the updated listings.  Competitions still have to be manually started by clicking the start button after the start time, though an automated starting mechanism may be included in a future update.

 

We look forward to using this as our new method of running our skill of the week competitions, monthly skill competitions, and as our activity tracker for our staff teams.  If you happen to stumble across any bugs, please shoot me a forum PM letting me know what it is and I'll take a look.

Enjoy!

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Thanks for making the tracker, Jeff!  I know you put a ton of work into it and Runetrack breaking all the time really made it necessary!  :)

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Top work, thanks both :D 

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Looks great! Thanks for making it. :) 

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I know you've been working so hard on this Jeff, many thanks! You're awesome :D 

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13 hours ago, Applejuiceaj said:

(in saying that, please don't change your names; the Resources team thanks you in advance :p).

This x 4bazillionmilliontrillion. :D 

Thanks so much Jeff. I know you have put so much work into this. <3 

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You've done amazin job ,Jeff. Appreciate it - thank you very much! :)

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Thanks all.

Changelog:

  • Competitions will now automatically start; if the automated start fails, it will try again in an hour (or you can press the button to manually start it as before)
  • Competitions will now better detect that they should end, and will pull their stats as they end.  Previously, an ending competition was triggered by that competition's page being loaded.  This process too runs once an hour.
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<3 much love

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22 hours ago, Applejuiceaj said:

Thanks all.

Changelog:

  • Competitions will now automatically start; if the automated start fails, it will try again in an hour (or you can press the button to manually start it as before)
  • Competitions will now better detect that they should end, and will pull their stats as they end.  Previously, an ending competition was triggered by that competition's page being loaded.  This process too runs once an hour.

Very cool! 

Thank you!  

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Is there a way I can recolor this / font change, my chrome extensions aren't working.

:o

 

Edited by B2A
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great job Jeff, I look forward to winning on this tracker as well !

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