Hey guys,

Its been a while since i've posted on here, but im starting something new and yet quite old, and figured theres probably a handful of people on here who might be interested in getting involved.

The Idea
Years ago I started building a site for the LFS community to help manage and organise events. The intention was to make the whole task much easier to manage, eliminate all the monotonous tasks which are involved, automate things wherever possible, and generally make their jobs so much easier so a tedious 1 hour task becomes a 15 second one.
It's basically there to provide a solid platform for people to run events, manage them without effort, and just let them deal with the things that cant be automated, such as dealing with disputes, writing news, and running the races.

A simple, but key part of the site is calculating the standings each round, something ive seen events big & small screw up along the way. The site would take the race replay (and qual), pull the results, assign everyone their points for that session, then calculate the standings.
Thats all initiated by selecing a MPR file to upload and saying which session its for, and once its uploaded the file it's calculate everything for you. If you think about the manual alternative, writing out the results, tallying up the scores from that race, updating each drivers standings and re-sorting them, and writing it all up to present it. Assuming theres no distractions or mistakes, thats a 1hr task at best.
Throw in additional complications, team standings, or even multiple classes or divisions, its something i'd coded in 3yrs ago, you dont even have to think about it.

Theres also an automated email system, or 'Booking In' system, which contacts the drivers asking them to confirm their participation status (and remind them of that status incase its changed and they've forgotten), reminds them days beforehand, and then anyone who hasnt confirmed their places become available to the waiting list. 24h before the race (or whenever the organiser specifies) all participants are emailed the lineup, time-table, and the server password.
No more forum threads asking people, they can see what events are coming up and confirm them, and receive email reminders for any which are close to deadline and are unconfirmed. Organisers gain by having fuller grids and dont have to go chasing round for info, Drivers benefit by receiving reminders and details sent to them without them needing to go hunt it down, and backup drivers get advanced notice if they're racing.

The idea is to take what we've had for so long now, and do it better, by providing the tools to do precisely the job required, jobs most events do by posting in the forum, such as race calendar, results, rules, standings, race disputes... all these elements will be catered for in a professional & organised manner.


I had started working on a public site where anyone could sign up and build their event on there and manage it with the ease that i did with LFS ProSeries, they just wouldnt have the 9mo+ it took me to build it all.
Right now it already does everything and more thats outlined above (LFSPS had it all back in Feb 2009) its just missing a lot of the behind the scenes admin features for organisers and myself.
Unfortunately i stopped working on that a while back, i'd lost enthusiasm for it because the LFS community just isnt as strong as it was when i first started on it, and for a while nothing happened with it and it got harder to find the motivation for it.

However, i've met a few people after bringing up the idea of modifying this project for another sim community (project CARS) and after some feedback and their enthusiasm its brought my motivation back and we're starting the whole thing from scratch and building it for any racing sim community who wishes to use it. It made no sense to exclude communities, and considering it was the LFS community which has provided me with all my competitive racing experience, and its these organisers who'd given their time for other people to have fun, it just seemed stupid and pointless to exclude them. The whole point of the site is kinda like a 'Thank You' to those guys, and the people who'll run future events like them, as well as making something that greatly benefits the people participating in them as well.
I wanted to do this back in 2004-06, i just didnt have the knowledge to create something worth putting out there.


Where we're at
Right now were at the early planning stages, I obviously have a lot of experience and got about 75% of the way on my own, however were restarting with a stronger foundation, a better core-system which will power the site, and it'll be a considerably better website than i ever could have made it.
Its a community built project for the community, i've got half a dozen people with differing degrees of experience, from professional software developers to trainees who'll benefit from working on a project.

Because its a group project, everyone has ideas and these will help shape what we do, new features to implement which i hadnt considered or simply couldnt do myself which made it impossible. We'll go through each aspect of the site in detail, and discuss what users need, how to present it and how to build it. If theres a good idea, I want to see it implemented when appropriate, and hopefully this will be driven by the whole sim racing community.


How you can help
Im here hoping to find a handful of people who might also be interested in getting involved, its not a full time job, its a bunch of people contributing whenever they can, no deadlines, no hurry to get it done.

Coding: We're looking for people who are comfortable with PHP, HTML, CSS & SQL, an understanding of PHP OOP would be handy too.
Graphics: Anyone handy with graphic design would be a plus, we dont have anything in this dept yet, we'll need a site layout, logos, icons, odds & ends etc.
Others: There might be people who have different skill-sets or other ways they can assist, get in touch and let us know. Im also okay with people who just want to be involved in part of the process and think they can offer assistance with ideas but arent able to help building it.

None of these tasks are intended to be the responsibility of 1 person, hopefully we'll have a few people for each dept chipping in and working together to create something better, bounce ideas of each other, and take the load off each other too.

We have a forum set up for the development: http://esports-online.eu/viewforum.php?f=1
This is where the whole project will be discussed and planned, it'll be a done private developer & contributer only areas, however we'll still be providing regular progress reports and examples of whats happening so that people can follow our progress.

There's some additional information on the forum about the project and helping, if you think you might be interested then get in touch, or if you know someone who might give them a nudge in the right direction.
The more people we have helping, the more opinions & experience we have, and the better the site becomes, which will hopefully benefit everyone.

Paul

p.s. Hopefully this thread will be allowed to stay within the LFS Programmers area, while its not exclusively relevant to LFS, it's of significant benefit to this community, and its the programming folks who this is going to largely speak to, and its not inappropriately dumped here for maximum attention (general area would be better for that).

This thread is pretty close to that btw

I was discussing this idea with Victor some time ago. Bascially the plan is, that a new official LFS site would be created to be used for leagues & other events, where you could create leagues, add line-ups, signups, replays, results, standings, rules etc etc... anything related to leagues. Basically the same idea as you described in the first post, but everything would be official and therefore connected to LFSWorld and everything, and it would be more automated as you also mentioned.

This idea came to our mind while discussing stuff about the current LFS websites and their redesigning / updates at some point in the future. We would like to introduce this kind of site at some point, but for now, we focus on the current websites, and their overall look/layout and organisation (although everything is still in early stages). After the main websites are finished, we will likely move onto the new league site, so everything about the league site is in "ideas" stage now.

I'm sure Victor would like to see suggestions and ideas from other people before we start the actual designing process, especially from league organisers or people somehow involved in making leagues & events.

Cheers for the link Flame, hadnt seen that but i did head over to the spdo website straight after posting to try and see what Josh was upto, i'd spoke to him about the idea after the LFSPS series finished and my aim was to take that code, rebuild & refocus a lot of it, and end up with 'LFSEvents' as thats where the LFSPS code first came from.
He was suggesting going with a different build approach which was rather baffling for me at the time, he tried guiding me through it but was busy with his own stuff and i went back to my old inefficient method, and this new project is pretty much going to be how he'd suggested i did it back in the Spring of 2009.
I was hoping to have a chat with him about it, see if he fancied offering his wisdom and maybe getting his hands dirty, but i guess he's got bigger priorities as i cant imagine he'd let the spdo site slip without caring or looking for a solution.

As for the idea with Victor, thats certainly the ideal solution for a community, the devs over at pCARS are also saying they'll have event management, however it seems like its this horrible middle-ground where its a feature that isnt really sufficient enough for what the die-hard community are looking for, it'll do the basics fine, but anything more is tough.
The fact that you mention the things you've outlined, thats the sort of thing i'd want to be hearing, so thats good. We've been pretty fortunate with LFS that we've had pretty good support with competitive racing elements and features which simply arent stock features which all racing sims need, things like LFSWorld, Remote, Insim, pubstats, the skin downloader, driver changes... they've all been implemented, many way ahead of the competition, plenty still dont offer some of them let alone all of them.
The biggest shame is that the game, the fundamental part, feels like its been left behind.

Your last line, about hearing opinions & ideas from the people who'll ultimately be using it, thats pretty much what were looking for too, particularly for other sims infact, as I know LFS and what sort of events we had, limitations and things like that, its easy to build the site to LFS's requirements, but i dont know any others and what their communities are used to. We need coders & a couple designers, but we also need opinions, ideas & experience.


Vic, if you happen to read this and fancy getting involved without getting your hands dirty (or with), by offering ideas, solutions & guidance, or even just as a silent onlooker for ideas to implement on LFS World, let me know and i'll add you in. It obviously limits our impact on the LFS community if theres something that exists doing that job just like we are, especially via official routes, but this is for the communities out there and whether or not we're providing the tools or someone else is, the main thing is they're available to anyone who wants them.
If you dont read this, not interested, or whatever, if there ever is a get-together of ideas for this planned area, someone feel free to PM me and i'll see if theres anything i can suggest to consider implementing.

I currently am using a league manager software at revolutionaryracing.info
Its built for another game, but using it on our lfs series also. Its bare bones, drop menus, points calculator etc. But everything only needs to be input once and then the results only after that.

Yeah, theres probably a handful of tools out there which can do bits of the job, but still require the user to do a fair amount too.
Even if there was tools that did each aspect, they wouldnt work together seamlessly. Say you had a replay parsing tool that gave you your results, it provide that data in a manner where you could transfer it straight into an app which gave those people the right points for the race, and that data wouldnt then be able to pass straight to something that calculated the driver standings etc etc. Throw in teams pts/standings, multiple classes (GT1 & GT2 etc) or divisions, and then formatting it for presenting it to people (most likely on a forum)... theres certainly options to lighten the load, but nothing that really lets you put your feet up, just leaves you with the jobs that no automated process could possibly do.

Thats pretty much our goal, to create a more complete solution, something that knows what people want, how their leagues work and can consider and complete all the minor details in its stride. If the site cant manage something that an event organiser can contemplate doing, particularly with a traditional style event, then i'll be disappointed, and our goal would be to make it possible. Theres no point in doing something where people have to make compromises, with this project it either does exactly what is required or its failed IMO, and i'll be working to correct any failings.

The site goes beyond just adding a few things up though, it gives you a location to display it and promote the information in a professional manner with next to no effort required, and all of this removes work they'd need to do, it fee's up their time to spend elsewhere, whether they chose to run multiple events, work on other areas to make their event even better, spend time with friends & family, take part in other events for a change, or kick back and do absolutely nothing.
With the LFSPS site, provided there was someone to upload the MPR files for the session, and tell it which session it was from, the entire site ran itself. Its quite plausible that we could even do it without an MPR file, at least in LFS as it stands right now.

The key is making tools that helps the community, whoever does it, as long as the community benefits. It might sound daft, but i'd always prefer to have my own site (we'll be talking about API's to allow the data to be displayed elsewhere at some stage) but theres tons of people who dont have the time or skills to, but they could still run a series as well as anyone else. Hopefully this will give them the power to do so.

Well that site was designed for a game that exports the results into a .txt document. For that game all u have to do is copy that document into a text box on the site and your done, whats what we need for lfs

Fair enough, if it works for you thats nice, although i suspect with how you've put things its not something everyone can use, but a private tool on your site. Eitherway its not really something im interested in discussing and taking this thread further off topic with what you can/cant do.

If you (or anyone) feel you need to tell me about alternatives, PM me, but from here on lets not discuss things irrelevant to this project/thread and drag it off topic. Im here looking for assistance in building something which is designed to benefit the whole sim racing community to a considerable extent. We want to put powerful tools in anyones hands allowing them to do complex events and present it professionally without having to do 90% of the manual work normally involved, we want the people taking part to be able to interact with it and have access to features which benefits them too.
Theres something there for everyone who has any interest in organised events, and we're looking for people with a bit of spare time who like the idea of helping a bunch of like-minded people who want to give something back.

Thx.

Two questions:

1. What are you going to be using for an SCM?
   
2. What are your qualifications in the areas of Programming, Design & Graphics?
   

Hey Dygear,

Im not really the person to be asking the fancy questions to be honest Im used to working on my own, doing whats in my head and scribbling notes for things i think of to do later.
Florian/Flanna who i met in the pCARS forum is going to be the one pulling a lot of the strings. He's a software developer, and could do the whole thing by himself if he had the time, unfortunately im the one with all the time, he's the one with all the knowledge.

I know you're on the WMD forum, so you can have a read where we've spoke a little about things, but even then theres not much. http://forum.wmdportal.com/showthread.php?8062
I was quite tempted to give you a shout at a much later stage, given the amount of work you've done for the LFS Community and your thread for pCARS, and those are the only 2 communities i know, you may help more of them.

If i understand your 2 questions:
#1 we'll be using Git i believe.
#2 mine, nothing impressive. Paper quals, none. Florian has 10yrs experience as a professional software developer for web apps.

I could send you all the code to the LFS-only test site i was working on and you'd not be impressed however i've built a good 75% of it and it did everything this new site will do, it was mainly missing some of the admin area features, however it was poorly coded and i'm sure it could be compromised without much effort, and it wasnt as user-friendly as i'd like for an organiser.
I've created all the functions i felt were needed to fully replicate every LFS event i've seen onto the site, but it was effectively a house of straw. Florian basically offers me the bricks to build it far better, and all our helpers will help rethink the purpose of each page and provide new ideas, as well as build it.

Im bringing tons of my time, experience & passion for building exactly the site were building (ive spent at least 6yrs specifically working towards such a site), i know PHP, SQL, im learning OOP right now, and i've obviously had to do all my own graphics work, css, and everything else thats gone with it. Its nothing impressive, not even a 'Jack of all trades', im Jacks eager understudy

Florian will be building the core, and he's familiar with everything thats required for working together on a project in a professional capacity.
We'll be co-Projects Leaders if you like, I'll probably be more visible because i have the time to be that person, but his role is absolutely essential, i'll need him to guide me so i can oversee things because his limited time will be better spent on building etc. If we find people who can help spread the load, even better. If im unable to guide the project sufficiently then we'll address it somehow, im just going to *try* and do the job because i have the time to do so.

The only thing we have right now are a handful of notes for planning & coordinating various features of the site, and a basic HTML + CSS layout to use until we get an actual design. Hopefully this weekend Florian will have a version of the core-system which will allow me to insert the HTML to render the pages.

Quote from PaulC2K :

A simple, but key part of the site is calculating the standings each round, something ive seen events big & small screw up along the way. The site would take the race replay (and qual), pull the results, assign everyone their points for that session, then calculate the standings.
Thats all initiated by selecing a MPR file to upload and saying which session its for, and once its uploaded the file it's calculate everything for you. If you think about the manual alternative, writing out the results, tallying up the scores from that race, updating each drivers standings and re-sorting them, and writing it all up to present it. Assuming theres no distractions or mistakes, thats a 1hr task at best.
Throw in additional complications, team standings, or even multiple classes or divisions, its something i'd coded in 3yrs ago, you dont even have to think about it.

How are you going to deal with endurance races or results which require penalties to be added to them? That is one flaw in the spdo db, it just reads the replay and spits it out. Maybe instead of accepting a replay, some sort of .csv/xml input could be allowed so that external programs (e.g. the tracker) can export the results for use in your standings generator.

The booking in system could be good, but as above you would need to be able to export it - again, the tracker takes in .csv input of a list of teams/drivers so that will be something to consider having.

Penalties arent a problem, at least not for display purposes. With my discontinued version, i had the option of applying both time and lap based penalties, and everything after that also followed how it should (displaying results, assigning pts etc). I even had the ability to give a reason to the penalty so people could understand the nature of it.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/20670693/penalties.jpg
Heres a screenshot of the LFS ProSeries results, round 6 race 2, which was the only time we needed to apply a penalty to a session.
The top part your seeing is the MPR based results, theres then a 30sec penalty applied to Hawku/Jaakkolas time.
Below that is the results with everything taken into consideration. You'll also note theres the small box between them which allowed me to enter DNS entries and DNF drivers including what car they used and how far in they got before they quit in whatever manner, and theres also a DQ to disqualify the person too.

edit- Here's a further modified penalties screenshot for the same race, Dave's just been handed a 1 lap penalty, and Phil was looking at me funny, so he's got a 15sec penalty
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/20670693/penalties2.jpg
edit 2- damn, and thats exposed an bug. consider that conclusive proof that i built it Dave's got the right outcome, but its not displaying 21 laps, having been docked a lap.
edit 3- yeah, the -1lap is counting, its just not being docked from the displayed/stored value, but it is considered when sorting them. The negative time is because his finish time is before the new winner, it should say '-1 lap' or similar i guess.

Yeah, At the moment i havent put any effort into the live tracker aspect events like MoE utilise, there is the possibility we could eventually encorporate a tracker into the site, but i'm certain that for something like MoE we'd go out of our way to ensure line-up data could be exported.

A few years back, 2008ish, i was using MoE data on an earlier attempt, to test certain features, mainly the class based racing, where i'd create GT1 & GT2 class groups so it knew which entries were in which class, then displayed and scored them appropriately.
I also have team groups, where you'd group drivers to a single team entry, so you could have 5 drivers from the same time, 2 in team A, 2 in team B, and 1 in team C with someone else, and they'd be the team entries use to calculate a team standing.
I also had divisions done, i didnt do too much with them, i think they worked with team groups too. I think those 3 cover pretty much every type of standing, although i also had a 'privateer' one too, for anyone not in a team grouping, this was an optional standing.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/20670693/MoE.jpg
Thats an example of the series homepage, with its own theme/style, and user defined shortcut tabs on the right hand side for easy access.

Thats all old, discontinued stuff though, but its all stuff that has been considered, functions correctly, and was all built by myself without any training or qualification in anything remotely programming based, just passion and determination. So im really quite excited to see what we can create with a handful of people all pulling together.

Or have it be parsed and then allow for the league managers to manually correct the results.

edit: interface very similar to my site

Thats exactly how it is, the league admin (organiser) has access to an admin area to manage their site, and thats just one of the pages

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/20670693/superadmin.jpg

The process is fairly straight forward for the organiser.
- Enter Upload & Parse MPR area, select the MPR from your HDD (im also hoping to pull it directly from the race server too, considerably faster) and which session its for.
- After 2hrs, or whatever your rules are for incident reports (complaints), you review the reports, and come to a decision on any action to take.
- If there are penalties to add, or modifications needed to the result, you'd head over to the Modify Results page, add penalties as needed, add in any DNF results due to disconnection, spectating, any DNS for no-shows, and disqualifications (thinking about it, they'd be '/ban' actions, i dont have an option to disqualify a result post-race).
- Relax till the next round.

Theres the Points System area which allows you to create a ton of scoring types, for example MoE's 1.5x & 2x points for the 12h & 24h race. IRL the V8 Supercars have iirc 5 different sets of points, different races have different value, but the maximum pts achievable from a round is always the same. I can do the same here, by specifying what pts every session should use, so for the 12h MoE race i'd select the '1.5x pts' set of points which i'd already created. It means i can create a qual pts set and award them pts too such as 5/3/1pts for top 3.
Team settings and Division & Class Settings were described earlier as 'Groupings'. The rest is fairly straight forward i guess.

Just going back to what Boothy was mentioned, it reminded me of something i'd suggested for another part of the site which might be possible to do for exporting data.

One of the fairly complex parts to design is the season schedule, organising it so that the user has everything available but isnt completely overwhelmed with a complex process.
Considering the amount of data a season needs, such as; date, time, timezone, session type (qual/race), cars allowed, race length, track, weather*, gametime*, restrictions, grid order, points type to use etc
*where available
You want it all within arms reach, but dont want a wall of options for every single session, for every round of the season.

One solution i've suggested as an alternative process, is something most of us would be familiar with from forums (BBCode) or a HTML style code.

We could let the user build a season using a user-friendly layout, then export that season structure to a re-usable code, similar to above, which then produced a 2 round season with each round have 1 qual and 2 races.
At the same time, anyone comfortable could quite quickly follow the above and in a matter of seconds produce a basic structure and edit in the rest.
We could include more detail within that, or let the user stick to a simplified version.

I think we'd be able to export other data, letting the user design the way their information is exported for them, based on their needs. You'd provide a template for the data, we'd build your file based upon that information.

Something along those lines, so you'd receive an xml/csv/txt file with exactly what you want. If we implement a stat you like you can include it or you can ignore it, and we wouldnt need to build a script for everyone who wanted to export data for something we cant (or can) support.


Things like this are what im hoping to come up with, giving people the power to get what they need from it, not just build something that does something in 1 way very well, but if your needs dont match what we have then your making a compromise, convenience vs your ideal event.
I doubt we'll make something perfect, but i certainly want to eliminate as many compromise scenarios as we can think of.

I've just started reading this and the other thread, and I'm not yet ready to write my opinion / thoughts, but as I read here about results uploading and xml, I figured I'd mention that people can already upload race results to lfsnews as well. This was with the idea that news and league info could eventually be combined that way. The same way you can submit a leage at the news section already, which could later on be merged into a separate leagues section.

There's a bit of documentation about the results xml format here : http://en.lfsmanual.net/wiki/L ... results_to_your_news_item
It's not all encompassing and I've never finetuned it to become that, as it's not used much (almost never, and that provides even more room for improvement), but it shows how i thought it could work. I agree with your <season> addition btw. That way results for entire seasons could be submitted.
The only problem I think here is that many league admins don't have a way to produce the xml. On the other hand, the big leagues probably can make it happen. Smaller leagues could just upload a replay for each race.

More later.

Hi Victor:

Has JSON ever been considered as a data format alternative? I know when LFS World stuff was written initially, JSON wasn't popular at all, especially in other languages.. however now it's become increasingly popular compared to XML. PHP has native JSON support with json_encode/json_decode and can decode JSON into generic objects, or into a associative array.


Dustin

(Geraldine unbanned me over last night.. I'd assume she has talked to you guys about that. If this isn't the case, then that's fine. I just don't want you to think I did some crazy hacks or anything, because that's not the case.)

If people would prefer JSON over XML and if that would make people use the results feature more often then I have no problem implementing a way to upload results with JSON. But if people can create a result dataset witj JSON, I would imagine creating it in XML wouldn't be a difficult challenge. But I have nothing against any of the serialization methods and would happily support all of them, like with pubstat.

I just find JSON is nicer, especially for usage of data in multiple places. For instance, I could create an endpoint of /leagues/leagueId/latestEvent and that could be parsed in JavaScript by my leagues website very easily. Along with providing an effective way to submit results too. (Ability for league results to define a Cron task to hit that endpoint the morning after each event as a possible LFSW feature?)

Just been some thoughts I've had. Unable to say them, but with my job as a developer.. I've learned that JSON is super powerful and can be used almost anywhere now natively.

Guys, any chance this can be done in a separate thread, rather than taking over mine?

I'm looking for help from people to help build something that'd benefit this community and many others too, i've been trying to do it all on my own for something like 8yrs on & off and realise its too big a task for me to do on my own without there being problems or a worse end product.
I wouldnt have thought i'd need to ask twice for people not to derail my thread, particularly from a developer

Sorry, just came to me cause they were talking about formats for results and that JSON would be a good format to use. Didn't realize it would be derailing that much.

I don't really have the time to devote to help out with this (I wish you luck), but I do have a pile of MPR parsing code written in javascript (for the browser) that you're totally free to use (uses the HTML5 filereader API and jspack to pick it apart). It's unlikely I'm gonna finish what I had planned as I've had it sitting around for a while. I've cleaned it up and put it up on https://github.com/theangryangel/lfs-mpr-js-parser (A very quick video demo at http://youtu.be/u_seAK2rmuo).

The benefit here would be that you'd only have to send the data you need from the MPR, rather than the whole thing (so a few hundred KB, rather than a few MB - the larger the race the larger the MPR, but you still only want the header! ). The negative is that only modern browsers support the FileReader API

The only warning I probably need to give you is that the example is written with Angularjs, so it might be a little tricky to follow. The main magic is in js/controllers.js and lib/mpr.js

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

Sorry, just came to me cause they were talking about formats for results and that JSON would be a good format to use. Didn't realize it would be derailing that much.

Yeah, i dont mind mentioning things in passing, i just dont want it leading to a complete change of subject being discussed, which is what was happening.


Mr Angel - Cheers, i'll take a look at it. Im hoping that uploading the MPR via the user would be the secondary route, that we can offer direct upload from their gameserver to our server, making it infinitely faster to process. I'd hate to have to upload an MoE type MPR file just to get the header data at a typical ISP upload speed.
Having the full file does have its up-side though, it allows us to offer it to visitors wishing to download and watch the race. I built an extremely basic media area for streaming video, downloads, things like that, and it'd be found under there and also on the results page for the session.

It may be beneficial to offer your version as a 3rd alternative though, so i'll grab that and post it in our development forum for later along with Josh's.


I got an email around lunchtime today from the lead developer on the project, he's uploaded the core for me to take a look at and get my head around it all. Over the last couple of days the information he's given me about the core-system, im genuinely really impressed at just how capable it is and the level of work thats been put into it already. I really underestimated what he was working on, i just had it down as being a handful of useful functions or something, just something to start with and build upon and eventually end up with a website. So it seems we certainly have a solid foundation to start with, hopefully we can build something impressive with it too.


If anyone gives a damn, http://www.qazwert.com/index.php, thats basically as far as id taken the site on my own. A lot of it is dynamic content, some is fake, some is hard-coded to a specific series_id so it'd always be fixed on the LFSPS data.
Theres also driver & team areas, their sidebar shortcuts were removed but the areas are still there, largely faked data, and barely started.
results modifier mentioned earlier: http://www.qazwert.com/seriesadmin/modify_results.php
calendar (HC on MoE 2010): http://www.qazwert.com/seriesadmin/racing_calendar.php

Dynamic gamecards & userbars etc http://qazwert.com/public/gamercards/paulc2k.png it'll take any username as the filename, ie scawen.png however if your not in the db you'll just get empty data.

Its obviously unfinished, built by scratch learning as i go, and badly coded to be fair
Feel free to have a nosy and change things like the results, see the adjustments directly impacting the standings etc, just try and keep it relatively tidy at the same time. it's all for the recycle bin anyway.

Sorry, I've got no time and willingness at the moment to read all the posts in this thread, but I've read the first post and I like the idea of this site. I think it would be a nice addition to this community and perhaps, other gaming communities also. I am definitely looking forward for the site and if I get my personal things a bit more organised in the next few months, I might be able to help you guys with some stuff perhaps.

Anyway, keep up the work and good luck!

Mr Angel - Im back, i just had a watch of the video you included, i really like what you've done there, very impressive, makes far more sense now too, and i figured i'd give it/you the credit it deserves

It shouldnt be hard to take your script, let the user parse the file and opt to upload it to the server too if they want. You'd have the results data instantly uploaded to the server to be displayed, and then the MPR file could be uploading at the same time, rather than waiting for it to upload and then parse it.
If the user doesnt care about making it available, its instantly uploaded. win-win really.

Thanks


Thanks andRo, feel free to follow things on the forum, hopefully it wont be too long till we have something to show & talk about. I'll be adding a 'contributor area' on there for people who'd like to offer their opinions, suggestions, stuff like that but either cant help with developing or havent the time etc but can still be able to have a voice and put their ideas to us and make their case for including it. It makes sense to try and listen to as many ideas as possible, especially from people who've organised their own events in the past and had ideas they cant implement, but maybe we can.