We had an awful time last contest because we couldn't control who "pushed the update button". We told everyone we could when to log out for mid-contest updates, appointed a player to push the button. Still, group members unknown were updating so that we never had a realistic way to tell who was leading the contest. It really disrupted the normally fun time we've become accustomed to over the last year.

Would it be possible to make the update button an administrator (password only) function? That would allow us
to appoint certain player competitors in our varied time zones to take care of the update when our hour comes around.

We'd sure appreciate any help you can give.

Cheers,
Tamarac Elf

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[img]runetrack.com/profile.php?user=tamarac+elf[/img]

Hi,

Firstly, I'm a bit confused by your statements. Pushing the update button updates everyone's stats - so the competition leader board will always be accurate to within the nearest 20 minutes (actually, I just recently reduced the time down to allowing an update every 15 minutes now). I really don't think that being off by just a couple of minutes would dramatically alter the rankings, especially if you're just taking mid-competition progress checks.

But if you need accuracy to the exact minute, an easy way to go about logging mid-contest updates would be to simply change the competition's end time.

For instance, say you are running a competition from March 1-31. You want to do a mid-contest update on March 15 at 6pm GMT. Log in as administrator to your tracker at 5:50pm GMT on March 15, and temporarily set the competition's end time to 6pm GMT. This will allow you to update as many times as you need before 6pm GMT. At 6pm GMT, the competition will appear over, and you'll have a fully updated leader board. Copy/paste it for your records, then log back in as administrator and set the end time back to March 31.

Hope that helps.

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Thanks Swordkill. I'm sorry if I was unclear. This is our experience.

Our monthly contest only lasts for the weekend. In reality each contestant's gained xp updates only to the last time they logged out of the game (Runescape Hi-scores only update to last log-out). I don't understand what you mean that the scores update everyone every 20 minutes. As long as a contestant stays logged into the game, their runetracker score never changes.

What was happening in our Old Goats perfect world, was that individual contestants (up to about 17) would work the weekend's skill, log out of game for a minute or so, then hit the runetrack update button (to pick up the latest hi-scores). We pretty much had the up-to-the-minute leaders and individual standings over the entire weekend. Old Goats loved it, lots of banter and fun in clan chat. It was great! This, [b]we did not realize[b], was creating bandwidth problems for you. We didn't mean to abuse, we just didn't know. We apologize for our ignorance.

We tried to coordinate among the participants to fit our contestant updates within the new parameter of hourly updates. Our problem is that anyone in our group, curious about standings, can hit the update button. We would do our coordinated log-out, the designated contestant would go to runetracker, and find that some unknown person had already hit the button--before we did our coordinated update log out.

We don't run month-long contests, just the one intensely competitive weekend once a month. We don't keep a separate file of the runetrack updates. I'm afraid constantly resetting the contest length of time every hour or so would result in a mess up that would leave us with nothing. I'm not unwilling to try, but working it out among the group (I can't play 24/3 straight) is problematical.

That's why I was wondering if the update button could possibly be an administrator task. It was just a try for a solution.

Thanks,
Tamarac Elf

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[img]runetrack.com/profile.php?user=tamarac+elf[/img]

Ah ok, think I understand now - I agree that this would be problematic with the hourly updates. This is why I changed that rule a couple weeks ago from hourly to every 20 minutes (and now every 15 minutes). Essentially what this means is that even if someone does click the update button a bit earlier (say at 5:55pm instead of 6:00pm), the official update will still be accurate (going with the previous example, you could then update at 6:10pm - I really doubt that anyone could gain that much xp in just 10 minutes to make much of a difference, so updating at 6:10pm would basically give you the same xp numbers as updating at 6:00pm).
Sorry if I was unclear on this - be assured that in no way were your Old Goats trackers causing any issues with bandwidth, no need to apologize. The "abuse" I was speaking of was that I suspected, from various bandwidth logs, that there was someone/some group using automated bots to maliciously pummel the tracker updates, in an attempt to overload the system (in other words, an intended server attack). Your tracker/members certainlly didn't have anything to do with it. Unfortunately, I had to counter this, which is why I initiated the new update interval system.

Anyway though - as it's been a while since then, I think I'm going to just try setting the update time down to 3 minute intervals, and see how that works out. This means that you'll be able to update your tracker every 3 minutes - so no one will be able to really prevent you from updating at any desired time, since you can update so often anyway. 3 minute update intervals will pretty much provide the exact same functionality as unlimited updates, which hopefully should solve everything.

In time I may relinquish the interval limitation completely if I feel it would be safe to do so.

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Swordkill, you are just super!!!

I didn't realize you had reduced the time to 20 minutes, much less 15 (our next contest is in 2 weeks). Three minutes would be heaven! We could certainly live with that if you need to keep the controls.

Thank you so much. We really enjoy having the tracker for our contests and appreciate your work.

Cheers,
Tamarac Elf

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[img]runetrack.com/profile.php?user=tamarac+elf[/img]

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