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Autoroster feature wishlist
remoDate: Sunday, 2015/May/10, 0:32 AM | Message # 1
Thursday, February 12th, 2015
Group: Administrators
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Now that the new award system is up and running, I'm thinking about that features come next. Here are some ideas in no particular order:

1. Adding a new attribute to store the members clan joining date. This is currently tracked using the uCoz system and should be easy to parse out from the uCoz database dumps and then import into LDAP. Thereafter this would be automatically filled for new members when we use the "New Member" form on the autoroster page.

2. Adding a new attribute to store the members last promotion date. This is currently stored using the uCoz "User Title and Rank" text field. This has been a bit of a hassle but I've managed to parse 299 of 306 non blank fields into valid dates. As such we can import most of these into the autoroster system. People who do not get a value imported would need to have a date set manually. Thereafter this attribute would be automatically updated any time the autoroster "Change Rank" form is used.

3. ConFed Credit System

4. Two new awards, one to be given for every recruit a member gets for the clan and another for even event a member plans and runs. The impetus here is that promotion in the higher ranks is contingent on both of these things and we do not currently do a very good job tracking this.

5. Automatic detection and highlighting of members eligible for promotion. Given #2 and #4, this is pretty straightforward logic. We would need to figure out how to indicate eligibility but I feel like this could really jumpstart enjoyment of our roleplay and lore aspects. It would also make things easier for officers, less to track down.

6. Get an icon for random players. Right now we have race icons for protoss, zerg and terran. Random players do not get an icon. This sucks.

7. Automatic issuance of service medals. Pretty straightforward, this would be contingent on having #1 in place.

8. Modal markup. Remember yellow inactive? Imagine if we could have a button or checkbox at the top which would allow you to turn on or turn off things like that across all displayed iframes. I think there are all kinds of things we could do with functionality like this but the javascript coding is likely to be a pita. I'm pretty sure it can be done but I'm not at all sure on the specifics.

9. Automatic backup system. Right now I take backups manually when I think to do it. It would be a sad day if the aws instance the autoroster system runs went poof. Likewise we occasionally pull backup zips of the uCoz site but it's kind up to our remembering to do it. I would sleep better if both of these were regular and automatic.

10. Automatic awards based on battle.net performance. Finish the campaign on brutal? Get an award! Play 20 lv1 ladder games in a day? Get an award! Get promoted to a new league? Get an award! Hit 1000 career games? Get an award! Win 5 1v1 ladder games in a row? Get an award! There are all kinds of things like this we could do.

11. Teamspeak activity tracking. I've done very little research on this but I would imagine it could be done. This could be every bit as important an activity metric as 1v1 games played and website login.

I'm interested to hear which of these features ya'll are most interested in. Also, feel free to suggest new features not listed here. Not all ideas may be practicable but don't let that stop your imagination!
 
TyraelDate: Sunday, 2015/May/10, 6:48 AM | Message # 2
Tuesday, 5th May, 2015.
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My quick thoughts.

Could 1 and 2 be expanded so that it tracks recruits and a bit more of a stretch, events held? On the old site you could go into someone's profile and see all the people they have recruited. If events could be tracked as well it gives members a one stop spot to see all their recruits and events held and again assists the officers in checking the criteria for higher ranked promotions. As you stated this would link into 5.

4. The confed star initially covered recruits as well as several other things back in the day whilst the service cross covered events. Personally see why this cant be the case now and save designing two new awards for no need.

6. Are the images embedded by us? If so I can knock up an icon without any hassle.

10. Personally not a fan of multiple minor awards, especially since that is covered by blizzard (Achievements, decals, portraits etc.)

11. You can use the TS3 server logs to extract when users come online and leave Which would give you the means to determine daily activity. But I haven't seen anything more in-depth than that simply cause it can easily be padded by leaving TS3 running.
 
remoDate: Sunday, 2015/May/10, 2:12 PM | Message # 3
Thursday, February 12th, 2015
Group: Administrators
Messages: 1010
Status: Offline
Quote
Could 1 and 2 be expanded so that it tracks recruits and a bit more of a stretch, events held? On the old site you could go into someone's profile and see all the people they have recruited. If events could be tracked as well it gives members a one stop spot to see all their recruits and events held and again assists the officers in checking the criteria for higher ranked promotions. As you stated this would link into 5.

4. The confed star initially covered recruits as well as several other things back in the day whilst the service cross covered events. Personally see why this cant be the case now and save designing two new awards for no need.


I really feel like these are best covered by awards because they are multiple valued attributes with a type, datestamp and text description. If I were to make them not awards I would be creating another basically identical system to awards but we just wouldnt be calling it awards. FYI, under the covers the autoroster awards system is a way of packing data using JSON into a single attribute. It is a bit of an abuse of the LDAP concept but it is an abuse of long standing. A similar trick is commonly used for the nisNetGroup triple as codified in RFC 2307 all the way back in 1998.

However, you say that the confed star and service cross basically are those medals. We might could add additional typing to the reason field such that a portion of confed stars could be recognized as for recruits and a portion of service medals recognized as for event hosting.

I would feel much better about adding subtypes to awards than adding a parallel award system we just wouldn't call awards. I think this compromise resolves your lore concern and my duplication of effort/code concern.

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6. Are the images embedded by us? If so I can knock up an icon without any hassle.

I think the images come from uCoz. Didn't I hear crunchy say you were already working on an alternate set of icons? I would be happy to use them as soon as they are completed.

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10. Personally not a fan of multiple minor awards, especially since that is covered by blizzard (Achievements, decals, portraits etc.)

Yeah this is a good perspective. It is probably just clutter. One thing I wish we could do but can't is detect when clan members have played against each other. Unfortunalty the api information for match history looks like:

Code
{
     "matches" : [ {
       "map" : "Coda LE",
       "type" : "CUSTOM",
       "decision" : "LOSS",
       "speed" : "FASTER",
       "date" : 1431280718
     }


And does not provide any way to figure out who the opponent was except maybe through the unix timestamp which would be dubious at best.

Quote
11. You can use the TS3 server logs to extract when users come online and leave Which would give you the means to determine daily activity. But I haven't seen anything more in-depth than that simply cause it can easily be padded by leaving TS3 running.

My understanding here is that we are not running teamspeak ourselves but are using a canned hosted service and do not have programmatic access to said logs.

From our teamspeak host's FAQ:
Quote
How do I view the server log in the control panel?

You can view your server’s activity log from the ‘Search Log’ page of your online Control Panel. Once you are on the Search Log page, you can adjust the Start Time, End Time and the search criteria that you would like to view results for. Once you are finished selecting the search criteria, click ‘Search’ to view the results directly below.


It would seem that I would need to use screen scraping and this would probably violate the typefrag terms of service.

I don't see any mention of an API on their website. To do this we would probably need to buy a virtual server somewhere and run teamspeak ourselves. It is certianly more bandwidth than I can use on an aws free tier instance. I think it is eventually inevitable that we buy a proper virtual server at which time we can look into doing this.

Tyrael, thank you for your thoughts. Keep em comin'
 
TyraelDate: Monday, 2015/May/11, 10:11 AM | Message # 4
Tuesday, 5th May, 2015.
Group: Forum Visitor
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Unfortunately I have no knowledge of the code and jargon you just used so I can't really comment about them.

Another look at the rosters and the award section of it and I see it would be easier to track recruits and events through the confed stars and service cross' via the description for it being issued. Establish a template for descriptions and users can easily use the search feature to look for the key words.

Example: Confed stars awarded for participation or for recruiting could be "Participated in arcade night" and "Recruited X". All a user would have to do is type 'ctrl f' and search 'recruit' or 'participate' and the user would be able to quickly see they have 2 recruits and attended 5 events.
Same thing for the service cross "Hosted X" can be searched via host. combat pins could be searched by 'win' or 'victory'.

I think this sort of covers our points and would require no further coding to my understanding, yet would allow users to very easily track their 'stats' and no doubt be quicker for officers who could check the awards quickly to see if they have what is required. Obviously for people with few awards the search method above isn't needed but for those with more medals and if the higher definition awards become integrated, it will save time trying to scroll.

Re. the icons I have not been approached or spoken to regarding replacing them etc. I don't think they need replacing as why waste time on something blizzard has designed and what everyone already knows. Again having a second look and keeping to the theme, we can grab the random dice used in game to show random.

Re. TS3

Any server admin or group with relevant permissions should be able to view the TS3 server logs within the client just like any client can currently view a list of clients, the time that client was created, when it last logged on and how many times it has logged into the server.
These two features which on any server I have been on have always been accessible client side and can be used to gain some indication of activity. Permitting as I said before figures can be skewed due to people not logging off however you can edit the server to have a idle timer in which when users have idled for a set time, they have kicked from the server.
(Client list is under 'Permissions -> list all clients' and server log is 'Tools -> server log' )


Message edited by Tyrael - Monday, 2015/May/11, 10:17 AM
 
remoDate: Monday, 2015/May/11, 12:31 PM | Message # 5
Thursday, February 12th, 2015
Group: Administrators
Messages: 1010
Status: Offline
Quote
Unfortunately I have no knowledge of the code and jargon you just used so I can't really comment about them.

Another look at the rosters and the award section of it and I see it would be easier to track recruits and events through the confed stars and service cross' via the description for it being issued. Establish a template for descriptions and users can easily use the search feature to look for the key words.

Example: Confed stars awarded for participation or for recruiting could be "Participated in arcade night" and "Recruited X". All a user would have to do is type 'ctrl f' and search 'recruit' or 'participate' and the user would be able to quickly see they have 2 recruits and attended 5 events.
Same thing for the service cross "Hosted X" can be searched via host. combat pins could be searched by 'win' or 'victory'.

I think this sort of covers our points and would require no further coding to my understanding, yet would allow users to very easily track their 'stats' and no doubt be quicker for officers who could check the awards quickly to see if they have what is required. Obviously for people with few awards the search method above isn't needed but for those with more medals and if the higher definition awards become integrated, it will save time trying to scroll.

I think we are pretty much on the same page here. I would probably add two new options to the add award form for our two special cases then put handling for them in the server side code to add a special sub-type key to the json dict but otherwise treat them as regular awards. As for award counting and display this wouldn't change anything but it would allow me to easily count the number of awards for recruitment and awards for running events so that i can display a handy counter on each users detail div on the rosters page. This should all be pretty easy to do.

Quote
Re. the icons I have not been approached or spoken to regarding replacing them etc. I don't think they need replacing as why waste time on something blizzard has designed and what everyone already knows. Again having a second look and keeping to the theme, we can grab the random dice used in game to show random.

I wasn't talking about the race or league icons but the award icons. I could've sworn crunchy had already shown me some of the work in progress. Maybe that wasn't you or maybe I've lost my mind and am talking out of my ass.

Quote
Any server admin or group with relevant permissions should be able to view the TS3 server logs within the client just like any client can currently view a list of clients, the time that client was created, when it last logged on and how many times it has logged into the server.
These two features which on any server I have been on have always been accessible client side and can be used to gain some indication of activity. Permitting as I said before figures can be skewed due to people not logging off however you can edit the server to have a idle timer in which when users have idled for a set time, they have kicked from the server.
(Client list is under 'Permissions -> list all clients' and server log is 'Tools -> server log' )

Yes, you can click automate a windows desktop app. However, the roster stuff runs on a unix server, not a windows desktop. If i wanted to do this I would need to run a virtual machine on the existing instance, instal windows on it, pay for a bleedin windows license, pay a ton more for the instance because running a paravirt vm is computationally expensive and then id need to write the click automation. All of this is a real hassle and certainly not worth the trouble. It would be easier to run our own teamspeak than setup a windows vm for gui click automation.

I really do want to get the teamspeak activity information automated but it doesn't look likely in the near future.
 
remoDate: Monday, 2015/May/11, 6:56 PM | Message # 6
Thursday, February 12th, 2015
Group: Administrators
Messages: 1010
Status: Offline
Quote
I think we are pretty much on the same page here. I would probably add two new options to the add award form for our two special cases then put handling for them in the server side code to add a special sub-type key to the json dict but otherwise treat them as regular awards. As for award counting and display this wouldn't change anything but it would allow me to easily count the number of awards for recruitment and awards for running events so that i can display a handy counter on each users detail div on the rosters page. This should all be pretty easy to do.

Ok, I had some extra time today and went ahead and did this more or less as described. I testing adding these new awards on [ConFed]PhYsic there at the bottom of the CFS Clark. Everything seems to be working.
 
TyraelDate: Monday, 2015/May/11, 9:58 PM | Message # 7
Tuesday, 5th May, 2015.
Group: Forum Visitor
Messages: 416
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Appears we've transitioned from race icons to medals somehow, Yes I am working on the medals at this time.

For TS3 I was simply referring that the activity can be checked via the client which is my bad since you are referring to having it done automatically whilst mine is manual. Only time I've seen it automated was as you mentioned above, hosted on a virtual machine however I don't think that was even 100% automated nor 100% reliable.

We could do it manually until such a time its possible for it be automated, a google drive spreadsheet could be created with all users and once a week/fortnight/month etc. a person or a couple would either use the server logs or the client list and could add it number of times they connected and the last time they connected. Happy to assist if this is utilised.
 
remoDate: Monday, 2015/May/11, 11:11 PM | Message # 8
Thursday, February 12th, 2015
Group: Administrators
Messages: 1010
Status: Offline
Quote
Appears we've transitioned from race icons to medals somehow, Yes I am working on the medals at this time.

I'm sorry for the confusion here. You're making award graphics and crunchy is making a random race icon. Totally separate projects.

Quote
For TS3 I was simply referring that the activity can be checked via the client which is my bad since you are referring to having it done automatically whilst mine is manual. Only time I've seen it automated was as you mentioned above, hosted on a virtual machine however I don't think that was even 100% automated nor 100% reliable.

I think this will be pretty straightforward to do once we have access to the raw logs. I'm confident I can parse them and do all of the appropriate statistical analysis. We just don't have a virtual server that can handle it.

Quote
We could do it manually until such a time its possible for it be automated, a google drive spreadsheet could be created with all users and once a week/fortnight/month etc. a person or a couple would either use the server logs or the client list and could add it number of times they connected and the last time they connected. Happy to assist if this is utilised.

I think for the moment this would be more hassle than it would be worth. We already have some pretty good activity date, this would be supplemental. As such it doesn't seem working tasking a person to manually do it. It's something we want but only at the right price and even free volunteer labor should be highly valued and used sparingly.

In other news, I got the cfPromotionDate attribute up and running and everyone imported that I can. Between this and the two new award subtypes, there is nothing standing in the way of automatic promotion eligibility detection. It's a decent bit of if/then code to type up but nothing actually complicated or difficult. I will try to get around to it sooner than later.
 
remoDate: Thursday, 2015/May/14, 8:01 PM | Message # 9
Thursday, February 12th, 2015
Group: Administrators
Messages: 1010
Status: Offline
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5. Automatic detection and highlighting of members eligible for promotion.


A simple first version of this is working.
 
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