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@Matt: Ah yes thanks! Changed that to match.
@Tim: Thanks. :) That IS a good idea, I might do something with that once the back-end rewrite is complete. Still a ways to go there. The current beta version with a half-working backend is useable at www.pfstracker.net, it is running a older database though so recent scenarios and users are not in the system (yet) and I tend to break the beta environment every once in a while. ;)
You can see you are in the beta by the huge colorswap of the menu. :)
Venture-Agent, Netherlands—Utrecht
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Probably been asked already, but maybe not: Could you make a feature where I list an X amount of people to see who of them have played scenario Y? I'd like to know how much certain scenarios have been played without going into each player's history. For instance, I'd like to know how many people from a 20-player group can still play Mists of Mwangi. It could technically be done by looking at each individual person, but if I want to compare multiple scenarios, I feel this could be much faster.
Not sure how difficult this would be to do, I guess. Sounds pretty complicated to me, but I don't know anything about this. >_> Maybe it could just work by toggling a check mark to not filter out scenarios when they've already been played, so "toggle played info" could be used.
Venture-Captain, Minnesota
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Probably been asked already, but maybe not: Could you make a feature where I list an X amount of people to see who of them have played scenario Y? I'd like to know how much certain scenarios have been played without going into each player's history. For instance, I'd like to know how many people from a 20-player group can still play Mists of Mwangi. It could technically be done by looking at each individual person, but if I want to compare multiple scenarios, I feel this could be much faster.
Not sure how difficult this would be to do, I guess. Sounds pretty complicated to me, but I don't know anything about this. >_> Maybe it could just work by toggling a check mark to not filter out scenarios when they've already been played, so "toggle played info" could be used.
Quentin --
Isn't that how it works already? I can enter in six people, and then see what unplayed scenarios they all share. If none of them have played Mists of Mwangi, that scenario will show up in the list of scenarios that the program generates.
Hmm
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Hmm isn't that indeed whaty can already be done? Hilary Moon Murphy is right in that you can select a bunch of players to compare and it will filter out all options. I have an inkling what you mean, but it isn't quite clear to me. Some more detail maybe?
As for new 'features', I am still working on changing the entire backend. Pretty much all of it is working except that filtering and some password recovery/registering stuff.
Oh and still moving so no changes for a few more weeks. :)
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Venture-Agent, Netherlands—Utrecht
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Probably been asked already, but maybe not: Could you make a feature where I list an X amount of people to see who of them have played scenario Y? I'd like to know how much certain scenarios have been played without going into each player's history. For instance, I'd like to know how many people from a 20-player group can still play Mists of Mwangi. It could technically be done by looking at each individual person, but if I want to compare multiple scenarios, I feel this could be much faster.
Not sure how difficult this would be to do, I guess. Sounds pretty complicated to me, but I don't know anything about this. >_> Maybe it could just work by toggling a check mark to not filter out scenarios when they've already been played, so "toggle played info" could be used.Quentin --
Isn't that how it works already? I can enter in six people, and then see what unplayed scenarios they all share. If none of them have played Mists of Mwangi, that scenario will show up in the list of scenarios that the program generates.
Hmm
I mean I'd like to see a feature where played scenarios don't get filtered out. Say I want to see from a group of 20 people who of them have already played a certain scenario, to see if it's possible to get another table going. Right now the only option is to look at each individual player and see if they've played it or not. I'd like to see a thing where I input a large amount of names and see how many people of that group have played that scenario.
Okay, maybe worded a bit differently:
When I use the tracker, I see a binary result: "have all these players I just entered played this scenario or not?" But I'd like to see "how many of these players have played this scenario?"
I've made a quick picture to illustrate my point (quick and dirty edit).
In the current system, this scenario wouldn't pop up as being available. But say I really want to run it again, and look if it's possible to get a table together. Now I know that there are at least 10 more people who haven't played it yet.
I'm sorry if I wasn't clear enough, it's difficult to explain concepts. >_>
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Very much will join others in that would be something that would be highly useful. I had to recently go through flipping people from GM to player spots to attempt to figure out who could play vs. GM to make tables fire for things people still needed to play.
Perhaps something similar but also helpful would be a visual output of things. Something that looks like the reporting page, but would have the scenarios as rows, and players as columns and show who's played vs. GMed.
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Alright! I have progressed really far into rebuilding the backend. I have also been informed my certificate on tracker.campaigncodex.com will be running out september 4th. I could of course just renew it, but I rather not do that and already have the new version up and running on www.pfstracker.net
So I have been coding a lot. All features should be in with two caveats:
1: I turned off player progress overview. I have a better idea for that for when I have some time.
2: You cannot properly filter players/GMs yet. This is a big one I know, but it is also something that is taking a lot of time to get to work again.
Because of time I am looking for some proper testing, because there are sure to be some bugs, of the new version.
The URL is: www.pfstracker.net
The database is a older version of the production database from back when there were 425 members. You passwords from then should work, if you changed your password since then you will have to use password recovery. If you do not have a account, the register option should also work.
I also made several improvements for useability, you should note them when/if you test.
Any test reports can be posted here or send to my email (see the 'known issues' page of the tracker).
I would really appreciate any help trying to get this all done before start of september. :)
In the meantime I am going back to coding the player/GM filtering.
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Venture-Captain, Minnesota
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Will there be an URL redirect??? I've given that URL out to so many people in Minnesota that if it changes they'll be lost.
Hmm
PS Thank you again for this. Our pre-Eyes of the Ten group is using this to find scenarios that we can all play together, and I've also used it for planning high level tables at my venue.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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I'll echo Quentin's request. Say I'm interested in running Haunting of Hinojai in Utrecht; I'm sure some people there have already played it, but if there are 4-10 people who haven't, it looks like I might get a table going. However, finding out if that's the case by looking up all people who play in Utrecht one by one is very tedious.
This feature would be very handy to combine with defining groups of people. I'd define a group of people, say "Utrecht". Then I'd get a list of all scenarios, sorted by % of play, and for each scenario a (dropdown) breakdown of who has and hasn't played it yet in that group. (Even more ambitious: a local VA could maintain such a group for use by GMs in that location. For example Tineke probably has a better overview of the players in Utrecht than I do. This would require a way to share defined groups.)
The current all-or-nothing setup is very good for one use case (finding a scenario for a "to be determined" slot with some players signed up).
But the proposed features would be for the other way around: I have a slot to GM in and I want to put up a scenario that'll get people excited about signing up for it. So I need a scenario that's been played very little, with a larger fuzzy group of potential players.
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I already agree with a lot of feature options, but right now I have to get the rework of the backend finished before I can do anything else.
Filtering on players sort of works, but it is REALLY slow at the moment, like 4 seconds worth of slow compared to half a second or less. So working on that first atm. :)
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Just wanted to say "BRAVO Simon!"
The speed of entry is the real winner here, plus the nice filtering (+1 to Quentin's idea as well). (In)Direct paizo import would be even more amazing, but that would probably be a one-time thing, so speedy entry for maintaining it is just as important. Probably going to ask my local store group to start using you.
I was thinking about the impact of everyone using your site vs. locally maintained sites with your code. That would certainly ease server strain (slow with 700 players vs. 70,000 players?) However people do move, and travel. So if you determine you can't be the primary host, perhaps you could implement a "add player info from other site" feature. I imagine it would temporarily download a particular player's play/gm record from another (specified or selected) site, but not retain it.
I realize this would be complex, but would provide a lasting benefit *if* you don't think your site will be able to handle 10k players of info/use. I could easily see you growing to that within 2 years, it's just too useful.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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I do think as the number of (geographically distributed) users grows, you may need to tighten the mechanisms to make people take good usernames. I've seen some people use the name of a character instead of their own name, or an abbreviation.
I can see that some people will be sensitive about using their real name. Use of PFS numbers sometimes helps, especially if people also use them on Warhorn; that's the most unambiguous one. Sadly not everyone fills in their numbers in Warhorn.
The nationality flag has been useful as well, but you haven't made it mandatory to pick a flag.
I think the easiest (although not exhaustive) solution would be to put very visual emphasis on the user name field during initial signup, strongly urging people to pick the name that others are likely to use for searching (i.e. the same as on Warhorn or other local planning platform).
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Ha I fixed the slowness. It is now filtering blazingly fast, though still some bugs. Thanks those that PMed and mailed me.
@Tineke: You're always guilty of something.
@Carla: You? Cheerlead? I find that hard to believe, pictures or it didn't happen.
@Majuba: I have looked into my server logs more closely and I think I could manage a lot of users. The thing is that they are not concurrent. Which means the only reason it would slow down is if my database cannot handle 10K records. It can. Since everything in the tracker limits the amount of names you see (usually 5 when suggesting who you are trying to select) that would be fine. The main reason for the rework is that PHP is really rather 'heavy' and takes my VPS a lot more resources to run properly then NodeJS is. NodeJS is very 'thin' while PHP comes with a lot of bagage. Another thing is that so far Node is being at least 100x more efficient. :)
@Lau: Usernames are not unique, pfsnumbers are. The reason that usernames are not emails is, indeed, people having the choice to go for whatever they want. I haven't made it mandatory to pick a flag for the same reason I have not made it mandatory to chose your actual name, some people just don't want to display it. As for making it clear that you use a name people can search for, at the moment it says this on the register page: "Your username does not need to be unique, use the name that your fellow pathfinders know you by." I could tweak that if you have a more specific text in mind?
PS: I see improvements from 500ms loading when selecting one player to 90ms loading when selecting one player. Good stuff.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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@Lau: Usernames are not unique, pfsnumbers are. The reason that usernames are not emails is, indeed, people having the choice to go for whatever they want. I haven't made it mandatory to pick a flag for the same reason I have not made it mandatory to chose your actual name, some people just don't want to display it. As for making it clear that you use a name people can search for, at the moment it says this on the register page: "Your username does not need to be unique, use the name that your fellow pathfinders know you by." I could tweak that if you have a more specific text in mind?
I think it should be more explicit that it's the name fellow players know you by - not the name of a PC pathfinder that you play. Perhaps a suggestion to use the same name as you use on Warhorn (or whatever platform you use).
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really liking the work your doing here, I was working on something similar and then I saw you have the Paizo import there, although it dosent seem to be working yet.
Looking forward to seeing more of this.
After the backend rewrite (which should be done in like 2 weeks, 3 tops) I am getting back to making that import actually work.
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Alrighty! I have the test version with the new backend in a build that I am happy with. Which means I shall be migrating the tracker.campaigncodex.com site to www.pfstracker.net next week.
I will try to keep any actual downtime to a minimum, but I will at some point freeze the database so I can copy it over. At that point you can still search, just not make any changes to the underlaying data. That is no new reporting, no character tweaks, not even logging in.
I hope to be able to do the change in an hour or two, but I have marked the entire week as 'spotty availability'. So if you REALLY need to do some searching right now, do so. I will begin the migration on monday.
Once it is over tracker.campaigncodex.com will point to www.pfstracker.net. It will also be at least 30% faster on average and lighter for mobile devices to download. Overall it should be a more responsive experience. Security has also been upgraded and you can stay logged in for a longer time, on more then one device at a time.
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Can you drop me a PM with some info? Old site? New site? pfsnumber. If you could open your developer console in chrome or firefox by pressing F12 and telling me what the errors say (if there are errors), also useful.
I just tried updating my own profile in both old and new site, no problem. So it has to be a scenario I have not tested yet.
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The new version is live over on www.pfstracker.net. I am just waiting for the tracker.campaigncodex.com domain to start redirecting to www.pfstracker.net, but you can use pfstracker.net (and it has entries for the newest scenarios).
I will get to adding the modules that were announced yesterday asap as well. They should pop up later during the day.
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Simon, I know you removed the overview page on purpose and want to replace it with something better later.
Now when I report say for season 1 I get the bottom "back to overview" when there is no overview.
Another 'issue' I now have is that I reconciled my personal excel file with the tracker. I did this by first looking at the overview page. That gave me a quick and easy way to see if the number of scenarios played / GM'ed matched per season. If they do: all is fine. If they do not: time to further investigate.
Can you keep the latter in mind when you design the new and improved overview?
Thanks!
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You make a excellent point about the 'back to overview' button making you go back to a empty page. I can change that until something new is ready. Good point.
The new version will definately have the same stats as before, but layed out in a better way. Unfortunately I cannot give you those numbers back right this instant, because it depends on code that I have not (yet) written in the new backend.
It should be a easy enough fix though. Overview is only a view on data and does not actually change much that could make the data go corrupt, thus I can sneak it in relatively fast. :)
PS: Feast of Dust and Ire of the Storm are now in.
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No rush, i just wanted to let you know why I appreciate the overview page
Another minor nitpick: the loading symbol turns when the page is loading, which is great. However the symbol stays visible when it does not load.
To me that seems wrong; I would expect not to see the symbol when the page is not loading and a turning symbol when it is loading.
Edit: and hovering over the button also shows a pop-up "Loading" when it is not....
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Interesting user experience question there. I guess a lot of tools do only show the icon when it is loading. I am thinking of most computer games that only show 'saving' when it is saving, or even the newer Pokemon Go that shows a loading/grabbing data icon when it is loading.
I might change that, gonna think on that for a bit.
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New site seems to be up and I can login. At least once I figured out which email address I used. Small suggestion, email as login is kind of annoying for anyone with more than one email address. I much prefer usernames. Not a deal breaker, just a suggestion.
However, in the area of larger features, the next big new feature I'd like to see is associating played sessions with PCs. For this, keep in mind that any scenario/module can be played more than once by various means.
The other thing I'd like is an easier way to share my overview page with people. I can understand wanting the option to be private, but the option to enable a URL like /status&PFS_ID=55247 would be great.
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It has come to my attention that hotmail is (once again) blocking password recovery mails from the tracker. I am on the case in trying to teach hotmail the emails are ok. In the meantime if you are a hotmail user, you can mail me and I will mail you a link to reset your password that should work.
@Michael: Lets hope so, because otherwise there is still a bug lingering around. :)
@GinoA: I might allow username login later, but the main reason for email is that so many online applications use it, it is very well known as a option. There are a few more reasons. Will think on it.
As for the sharing of the overview page, you are correct. That is exactly what I have in mind. Instead of a 'report' page a players search and each player has his own page. The option won't be private, because it has always been public knowledge and by definition I need your played data to be public or people cannot search on it.
The idea would be that everyone gets a hard link (www.pfstracker.net/#/user/number probably) so they can link people to it easily. You would also be able to access your own overview through your logged in menu in the top right.
First though, to bugfixing!
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Alright update for the hotmail users. pfstracker ended up on their blacklist because of some settings in the test. I got it off the blacklist. Right now it still does not play the best with their spam filter though. So you WILL recieve password recovery mails at the moment, but they will end up in your junk/spam/unwanted folder.
It would help the tracker's spam reputation if you could flag it as 'not spam'. I will continue to try to get them to accept the recovery mails without problem, but for now I am already glad they are not auto-blocking anymore.
So hotmail users that wanted to change their passwords, go ahead!