Warhorn.net Blog

A few folks wrote over the last few weeks to ask why I changed the administrative game detail page to no longer sort players and judges by APL. The answer is because I was not giving any information about the game's waitlist - I figured it was more important for you to see attendees in the order in which they signed up. However, I didn't actually show you signup dates or otherwise give you any cue what was going on. So to most of you, the change looked completely arbitrary. And it pretty much was.

I just pushed out a very simple update that changes the page to sort players and judges by APL. However, the page now displays the signup date for each attendee, and it tags each waitlisted name with a red question mark. The printable version of the page is similarly updated. Now you can more easily scan these pages for APL groupings and at the same time be sure you know which attendees are guaranteed seats and which are waitlisted.

Posted by Brian Moseley at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By popular demand, player and judge info is now on the daily schedule, and clicking the scenario name pops up the window with the scenario details like you're used to.

I've also made performance improvements to some of the administrative pages. I think I have picked the last of the low-hanging performance fruit, and any further gains in that area will be dependent on getting new hardware and buckling down on some serious re-architecture. Next couple of months probably.

Other updates made today:

• The daily schedule now shows the number of tables, judges and players signed up and the full/waitlisted/judges needed/open seats for each game.
• The only time we don't show the signup link for a game on the daily schedule is when the event organizer has turned off waitlisting and the game is full on both players and judges. Previously if the game was full on players, you couldn't sign up as a judge directly from the schedule.
• The little popup window where you sign up for an individual game from the daily schedule loads a lot faster now.
• If you are logged into an event site and your registration is deleted, the next time you visit the event site, you will be logged out and redirected to the event site's home page. Previously you would have gotten an error page whenever you tried to access the site until restarting your browser.
• Some old URLs from past versions of the site that no longer work are now redirected to the modern pages. Those URLs that don't have modern equivalents return a "gone" response to your browser, which lets you know to delete those bookmarks (and search engines to remove those URLs from their indexes).

-- Brian (who is still recuperating from his Friday night birthday party)

Posted by Brian Moseley at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Thought I'd take a little survey: what are the features you most want added to Warhorn?

I get feature requests pretty frequently, and I have compiled a long list of things that I want to add, but the things I find most interesting might not necessarily be the ones that the community would find the most useful. So you guys tell me what you want. If a number of you ask for the same thing, it will move up my list.

Leave comments on this entry. One rule: don't ask for player info to be added to the daily schedule. We've discussed that one to death, and it's coming real soon now.

Posted by Brian Moseley at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In a comment on the previous entry, Stephan Kendall asks why Warhorn was so slow for him the other day.

Stephan, you were probably victimized by the antispam/antivirus software that occasionally runs on warhorn's server host. It really crushes the box now and then.

Sucks, but until I can afford to buy a dedicated machine for Warhorn (which is not out of the realm of possibility, given the donations I've been receiving) and the time to set it up and get everything migrated, we're sort of stuck with it.

If anybody out there is a capable unix systems administrator and wants to volunteer their time to help me do this, y'all would probably see a lot better performance, and more frequent updates too :)

Posted by Brian Moseley at 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just a quick update: I worked all day today on performance issues, and I'm happy to say I made a lot of progress. I haven't rolled any of this stuff out yet tho, cos the changes are pretty extensive and I haven't tested them adequately yet. These changes pave the way for adding player and judge info to the daily schedule, so I hope to have them in play real soon now.

To tide you over til then, I did make a few small updates:

• Rolled back to the old Nyrond skin now that the Imperium has apparently been crushed
• Updated the tagline on the front page of the site to remove "RPGA", as Warhorn is not affiliated with any game publisher or organized play association
• Tweaked the schedule grid page so that the scenario names are no longer linked, making them readable in all skins, and added a link to open the complete scenario list in a new tab or window
• Added slot dates and times to the schedule grid page
• Added an "About Warhorn.net" page (look for the link at the bottom of the sidebar on the front page)

I'll be taking tomorrow off to watch the Super Bowl and celebrate my birthday (32 for those who are counting), but I'll be back in the salt mines next week.

Posted by Brian Moseley at 12:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)