This post is directed at everyone rather than one person, despite the quotes coming from Bones, but hopefully everyone can see the logic behind what I will be saying:<br /><br />I completely understand the desire to have the following working, and I want them as well. There&#039;s one serious problem we face though that could easily make the IDL never happen again with the following requirements:<br /><br /><br /><br />[quote]1) A working website that has an active maintainer in the event of any issues. Ladna was great at this job, until he got busy.[/quote]<br /><br />We need an HTML or PHP developer who is familiar with MySQL or some other kind of SQL database. The only people in this community would be Jenova or Collision as far as I know... maybe Devastation? Rosking is also a veteran website designer; but I think none of the above have the drive to do so for such a big undertaking with no known reward for their work (I&#039;ll define reward later on). I do know some html/php/mysql (newbie at these 3 though for now), but I will cover this later.<br /><br /><br /><br />[quote]2) The website needs to have the ability to process demos for stats. There is no way I can continue to do stats the convoluted way I have been doing them, and nobody else wants that responsibility. Believe me.[/quote]<br /><br />This requires #1 to be in place, and then a coder (like myself) to develop the backend to do stats. The problem is that this requires both a website (to know how to output the data in the end and how to format it, make it expandable and make it integrate with the website so if HumanBones ran it again he would literally not have to click a single button ever on the site).<br /><br /><br /><br />But now we enter the infinite loop predicament which fucks everything up:<br /><br />- To run the IDL again, we want a website, and a demo/stats parser<br /><br />- To get a website, we are stuck with someone from this community who will want to see their time and effort not go to waste, so they will want to see another season<br /><br />- The coder will require the website to be done, so this depends on them as well -- and since it&#039;s a big undertaking, this person will want to see the website operational<br />[i]In addition[/i] this requires a port to be determined for what will be used by this point as well, so this person directly depends on selecting a port and staying with it (a port change mid season would result in a massive setback for demo parsing)<br /><br /><br /><br />Thus, IDL requires website/stats, people won&#039;t make a website/stats without the IDL having set to start, but it can&#039;t start until those are done... and thus never happens. Therefore we are royally fucked now... almost.<br /><br /><br /><br />There are two solutions here that can work.<br /><br />[b]First solution[/b]: Get a website designer for a basic website for free or pay him (I doubt anyone here is going to want to fork over hundreds of dollars for a guy&#039;s time to set up a website). The problem is if you spend money on a cheap coder, you&#039;ll get a cheap website riddled with bugs and possibly errors. This would make my job if I code the backend a complete pain in the ass, because I want to be doing something I enjoy, rather than fixing another guy&#039;s mistakes or what-have-you.<br /><br />[b]Second solution[/b]: Get someone set up the old 2008 IDL website with the ticker... have them restructure the site so it&#039;s straight forward and have someone give me a few tips on how to set up an account system/streaming demo uploader.<br />From here, I can take the website, and present it to the board. If it gets okay&#039;d, then the board will need to at this point decide on the port. When the port is decided on, then I can add in modules that cover all the stuff we need. From there a season can happen.<br />A proper web designer can probably create the site within a day using the old template, and then I can do the rest. I just need a template for each page (Main page, players page, stats page, games page, demo pages) and I can make an online executable file do the rest.<br /><br /><br /><br />The reason a port needs to be decided on is because if I&#039;m to do it (because I don&#039;t see anyone else doing it, if someone would like to step up, be my guest), this requires the port to be known and set in stone in advance. The demo parser will require a LOT of work because not only will I need to understand the demo format inside and out, I will need to make the software expandable so it can handle demo bit/byte upgrades, but also to handle any weird errors that occur. Then when all that stuff is ironed out, then it needs to ensure it writes to the website properly. This will require more testing and will need an active team to generate a few games with trying as weird cornerstone in game actions as possible. Odamex would make my life easier because Sean is active and the demos are not complicated. Zandronum would definitely be a bitch to do because of all the extra crap, but it is doable. Zdaemon would rely on log based parsing.<br /><br />Such a system is basically required at this point for parsing demos because HumanBones is sick and tired (and anyone here would be too) of having to deal with demo stuff. I envision this awesome interface:<br />- Players upload demos<br />- Demos are parsed upon uploading for each game (only one demo per team per game) and stats are done automatically, Bones will literally never click a button ever again for stats<br />- The site will accept team time input, therefore Bones will never have to schedule a game again, and will only intervene when someone cannot provide appropriate times<br />- Playoff maps will be entered into the website by captains. This will be determined by the site so once again, Bones does not lift a finger<br />- For fun, its possible to make a bot alert everyone in #idl when it&#039;s game time based on the website times<br /><br />Demos currently go like this:<br />[b]8 steps:[/b] [DEMO FILE] --&gt; [run through port (Odamex)] --&gt; output raw text file --&gt; edit raw text file --&gt; run program to convert text file into JSON file --&gt; Upload JSON file to website --&gt; Run JSON parser --&gt; stats<br /><br />My method:<br />[b]3 steps:[/b] Player uploads demo file --&gt; Site parses demo w/ executable --&gt; Stats<br /><br />The only work the commissioner would have to do would be enter in the team names into a list and upload them at the season start.<br /><br />Since the data would most likely be stored in a database, there&#039;d be an interface which could edit erroneous values. This is a complete pain in the ass for Bones right now because if a mistake happens, the only way to fix it is through PostgreSQL modification and/or website HTML/PHP/Whatever (python?) modification of the website documents. This is just not feasible for him because he doesn&#039;t do programming. A new system would have things like this in place so they could be easily edited. Since the site would be simple, if I wasn&#039;t around, it would be easy as hell to find someone who could go in and fix whatever.<br /><br /><br /><br />In short:<br />The league needs to power down for a while and let people starve a bit for CTF. With the interest of IDL rumoring to come back in maybe a few months to half a year, by then someone will have decided on what to do with the website. A port has to be decided on by then for reasons above, because doing this log parser bullshit by hand is 1988 stuff. It is the easiest to do, but for the sake of the commish&#039;s hair line, we need to move to having automated demo parsing.<br /><br />Now the question is, do we see this actually happening?<br /><br />Because myself and many others will not want to work on something so complex, so huge and interconnected if we have a risk of being told &quot;sorry there&#039;s not enough signups&quot; or &quot;we won&#039;t be running this, something happened&quot;. This is why there needs to be a preliminary evaluation of what players would play based on my checklist... because if we intend on running it on a port (and this could be ANY port, including Zandronum) which will get barely any proper turnout, there&#039;s no point anyone wasting their time making a website or making the backend. As you can see, the ball now rests heavily on someones shoulders for ensuring the future of the IDL is not a dead one before any of this can be done... which will most likely require a port to be chosen immediately first.