In that case, well, no comment, just:

Are the new tarpits implemented by ident-key or by user id?

My experiments show it is tarpitted by username (account). Even if you generate three keys and use them one after another you must observe the 5 seconds delay rule.

Okay, thanks .

(Ironic - 'Short' has more chars in it then 'Long', at least 'verbose' lives up to it's name on a char length stand point.)
Short explanation: It's tied to the account, not the key.
Long explanation: It's tied to the users account, where the key acts as a symbolic link to the account, working effectively as an alias for the users account.

Is the 'teams' function broken at the moment?

Try this: http://www.lfsworld.net/pubstat/get_stat2.php?version=1.4&idk={identKey}&ps=false&action=teams&c=0&s=0

Edit: I started getting unexpected output around 2 weeks ago (February 24th), but that could be at my end as I made some changes to my system around that time.

works again.

about unexpected results, I'm doing a big teams cleanup, so there are atm around 200 less entries than before. Dunno if that's what you meant (getting less entries)

Quote from Victor :

works again.

about unexpected results, I'm doing a big teams cleanup, so there are atm around 200 less entries than before. Dunno if that's what you meant (getting less entries)

Oh yes! I just came to post to say that lots of teams have disappeared!

What's the reason for the clean-up just out of interest? Is it due to people deleting their teams from LFSWorld or what?

Edit: Members of the deleted teams still have the tag shown on their profile page, just fyi.

The reason is people NOT deleting their team entry when they quit.
And I could've sworn I'm also deleting the tags - grrr

Could you let us know when you've finished? Our site keeps claiming that everyone's left the team :P. (And actually that almost every team has ceased to exist.)

shouldn't be long - I've gone through the oldest entries first, so there were the most to delete. I've still a couple hundred to go. But there are still 846 teams in the database atm, so they can't all have ceased to exist

EDIT - 831 teams - i think i'm done, though you should always expect teams to disappear coz I'll be doing this from time to time.

Quote from Victor :

shouldn't be long - I've gone through the oldest entries first, so there were the most to delete. I've still a couple hundred to go. But there are still 846 teams in the database atm, so they can't all have ceased to exist

EDIT - 831 teams - i think i'm done, though you should always expect teams to disappear coz I'll be doing this from time to time.

Well if they're gone from LFS World then that should sync up on my site, which is fine, but earlier on I wasn't getting any drivers for spdoRacing, SK, F1RST, #low or any of the teams I tried, even though they're still listed on LFS World.

I'll try again now and report my results...

Edit: Working fine now

To be honest, I'm not amused. :arge:

Victor, how did you decide on which teams to delete?

I know of 3 teams that have mistakenly been deleted (because they have active team members).

My own team including ...

• Hell on Tyres (ID 137)
  
• Rising Suns Motorsport (ID 509)
  
• Majestic Dragon Drivers (ID 478)
  

I was the one with administration rights for Hell on Tyres.

Please bring them back to life again!

Kind regards and many thanks,

Timo

If a team can't even keep their URL working, it's not worth being on the teams list. So I've removed about all of those teams whole URL failed in any way.
Feel bad about that? Just keep your entry current and it won't be deleted. Quite simple.

Well, the URL (the one that can be found in my sig) in fact worked until a few days ago, when the team hosting organization (the german gamers club) changed it's servers.

Believe it or not, it was just today that I learned that the URL was not reachable anymore. (Because I already assumed that you had used this as selection criterion).

So apart from the coincidence factor which comes in here I really do not see why a wrong URL is a reason to delete a whole team entry in LFS World. What about teams not even having any URL?

I think the activity of the the official members of a team is a criterion which is much more significant.

And even then, when it is found that all members of an existing team had been inactive for a while, it would be good idea to contact the team administrator before deleting a team.

If you get no answer of the adminstrator in a short time, it might be justified to delete a team.

Of course this is not as easy as looking at a URL, but I wonder how many other racers out there will find their team being deleted.

At least I would have appreciated some kind of announcement from your side, so that people have the chance to check their URL.

As for Rising Suns Motorsport, their homepage has been hosted by a free-of-charge provider which seems to be down meanwhile. The responsible person is inactive since a year, but many team members are still active but do not have sufficient knowledge or permissions to handle the situation immediately.

So all this seems to tell me: Life isn't always as easy as looking at a URL and concluding that a team is no longer existing if the URL is invalid.

I appreciate your work Victor and I'm trying not to be too offensive here. But I had to say these things and I hope you understand my point.

Yours sincerely,

Timo

I guess you were unlucky then. Statistically I could have known that of the 200+ entries I would be deleting some false positives, but frankly you cannot expect me to mail over 1000 teams and strike off all the ones that reply.
The next cleanups will be based on both url-validity and last-activity, as I'm now recording last-activity-time as well. So that should be more precise.

Also I can't be bothered at all by people 'not knowing how to administer the team-entry on lfsworld'. Ignorance is not an excuse. If they have a question about something, they can simply ask me and I will answer.

Just apply for the team to get it listed again in your case and then add the members again.

You'll need to register the team again. I won't be adding any back automatically.

Thank you for your understanding, Victor.

Clearly, writing a message to 1000+ people (and getting a few hundred answers in return and checking them all) is a huge task and I can understand that this might not be an option.

So I'm now happy when you will consider activity as well in the future. And if the process of team clean-up is on-going you might also be able to send a few messages - not requesting an answer but simple a note that says something like "Hey your URL is wrong and/or your team members are inactive for several weeks now. Be aware that your team will be deleted by ... if until that point in time your URL is still invalid and no member are active in the mean time".

Nevertheless I would also have appreciated a forum announcement regarding the mass-deletion of teams.

So, I will now register the team again ... file closed as far as I'm concerned.

Kind regards,

Timo

EDIT: Registration has been send.

For each member in the team (&TEAM) list, find last activity time (&PST) of that member. If grater then 6 months, for each member, inform the teams admin by auto email. Use IMAP to check if you have gotten a reply from the registered email from the teams admin, you can even read the contents of the message and make a choice based on that.

Message to send team admin:
Your team appears to be inactive. Please reply back with a 'Active' if your team is still active, or 'Inactive' if your team is still inactive. If you fail to respond from this E-Mail address within 4 weeks (28 days) your team will be deleted. Optionally you can send an email to [email protected] for support if your team is active but you no longer have rights over the email account.

I would also recommend showing the 'up for deletion' status on the LFSWorld website, with a link to email [email protected].

Sorry but my english its too poor
I wish show this trick in my team blog (www.satteam.blogspot.com) but dont understand de explanation.
If possible victor or any who know this gadget explain to me how place in my blog.
Again sorry my english

This means that it will do something if the file cache.txt is older than 6 seconds. The "something" is it will do a lfsw request with my IDK... Victor, you said, that there is 1 request per 5 seconds allowed. Why was my IDK banned for 15 minutes then? I don't understand .

EDIT: Hmm, now I see it aren't seconds. I printed it on screen and it wasn't realistic. After about 1 minute later I tried to reload it and it outputed about 4100 seconds, which is stupid. What is it then, if not seconds? Milliseconds?

Quote from Drift King CZ :

EDIT: Hmm, now I see it aren't seconds. I printed it on screen and it wasn't realistic. After about 1 minute later I tried to reload it and it outputed about 4100 seconds, which is stupid. What is it then, if not seconds? Milliseconds?

I used to make the same mistake by not explaining what 'it' is. It's best to not use the word 'it' so much, but replace 'it' with what you actually mean. Because atm I don't know what you mean.
The tar pit works as expected. One request per 5 seconds is allowed. You can easily test that by doing a manual request to pubstat in your browser and reload it once per second. You'll see a result is only returned once every 5 refreshes (once per 5 seconds).

My suggestion is to check your stat function and if it returns values you're expecting.

Ah, sorry. I meant output of $now-$file in the script. But now I found that it really outputs seconds, so I don't know :/.
EDIT: Yes, you were right. Everything is ok, + there is something in the script that it won't find sometimes server name so it will show off it's offline. Will contact the creator.

The format character 'U' of the date() function returns, Seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT), also see the time() function.

Yes, I already found this. But there still something has to be in the whole script, because I have no idea why it outputed that the server is offline.