Style
This site should radiate action. The things you can expect when you enter a league. Close racing, the fight for points … or just plain fun!
Because in essence we just have one thing here : leagues, we have plenty of physical room to work with.
I think the main page should give people an overview of the latest league actions. News, results and new leagues. There can also be a calendar or plain listing that indicates this week’s / month’s races. Bit like the forum’s current leagues calendar.

Pages
-Main page should be an overview of all leagues?
-League sign up page
-League profile page (edit)
-League search page
-League information page (view profile + what’s happened lately)
-League results (specific race results)

The main challenge here is to make this as accessible to league admins as possible and to make it engaging to the public. Otherwise it won’t work and it’ll become a dead site.
It should provide easy access to a league you are looking for and when a league is running this could be a place to view live results.

We can go far with what leagues can administer on this site. We could even include forums where people can discuss things. League sign ups and race confirmations should also be part of it, making it a place where people must go, to participate in leagues. That will keep people coming back, as long as there are well running leagues. We can help with that by providing all the features leagues need to run themselves.
Important here is that we make integration with people’s already existing league system possible. If a league already has a sign up system for example, then sign ups done on our site should be forwarded to the league’s system and vice versa. Another important aspect to integrate is results exchange. It should be as easy as possible for a league to submit results. There are several ways in which to do this and all should be employed. (mpr upload / xml / json / manual / what else?)

Didn't really get where to post this but I suppose this is relevant to this topic.

Spdo database has been there for years but its quite obvious to most of us now that Josh clearly doesn't have the time or will to keep going with keeping it up to date or adding anything new to it.

What I'm asking is have you Victor had a chat with Josh of getting some of the old statistics back to the so called 'Official LFS leagues' section because surely most of us would like to keep the old statistics, afterall for some it's been years and years of racing - and up to date probably the only website where such a huge number of statistics can be found within few clicks.

Also PaulC2K has been working on a league website before and supposedly started to work on it again (But you're aware of this already). Will this be make his work pointless because this will have better interest since its created by the developers of this Sim, or have you been talking with Paul to get his involved to this project so he won't be doing something all alone which could end up being quite useless since same stuff are on the other league website that is used more actively than his?

I'm just curious, no hard feelings or anything of taking over someone voluntary work, just wanting to ask a couple of things and hopefully to help more in the future ^^

I have not had a talk with Josh about the data. But I can imagine that I could incorporate it somehow, if he choses to part with it and not continue his site himself.

It was his site going down that triggered this forum section. That and the fact that I've long wanted to update all the other sites. Including the new leagues site now feels very natural. It is not my intention to step onto anyone's toes. I'm instead trying to expand the world of LFS with a feature that has been asked for many times over the years. Also this site should become a base for all leagues - not just for stats, but to setup, arrange and run leagues as well. Plus if it runs on our servers it will run there until the end of LFS.

Quote from Victor :

It was his site going down that triggered this forum section.

QUICK!!! everybody shut down your sites

Spdodatabase was sure good, but far from optimal, if you could get it integrated with the subforums already being here fx; Click New Dimensions Racing->LFSCART-> Results, and then it would get you to race results, team standings,(obviously that's something they have to do themselves)and so on.

I never like spdo so well, it needed some big attention and awareness of people 'exploiting' with just making league's for every race, and surely it should be a championship standings board or individual. and not biased against one single team

tbh I thought there wasnt much wrong with spdodatabase, it just had the potential to be even more. 1 thing which could have been better was how in long endurance races you had the tracker to keep track of the results even after time outs, but there was no way to integrate that into the spdo site. Also things like average lap(excluding laps that are more than 103% of the fastest lap) etc werent there, which would be good if they were. I don't know if that is easily possible to do straight from an MPR through the site or what the best way would be to do that but meh. Some leagues obviously have the tracker and could take it straight from there but obviously it has to be same for everyone. Another was how you had to download the replay to actually look at the laptimes they did etc. It's nice to have the MPR there, but surely it should be not so hard to be able to see the times straight from the website, I mean every race gets a result on the lfsworld website already so...

Just my opinion ofc, I would guess some of that overlaps into the stats website too though.

Quote from IsaacPrice :

1 thing which could have been better was how in long endurance races you had the tracker to keep track of the results even after time outs, but there was no way to integrate that into the spdo site

^This^

One big thing that would improve off of the SPDO Database would be if admins could view the results and manipulate them. It can take me up to 3 hours to run points standings, complete results, and compile race statistics from a single race. In fact, I started putting together race statistics pages on the World TBO Championship Series seeing that SPDO was falling behind and this has statrted taking up more of my time. It would be nice if league admins could submit a replay, have the results spat out into an online document. It would be really helpful if we could edit results in ways such as knocking off the first "X" laps for pace laps (from lap count, race time, and average speed), and applying penalties.

Results such as these are easy to make, but very time consuming: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/19870 ... kwood%20200%20Results.pdf

The calender on these forums is not very user friendly. It would be easier if we could create a schedule of events and enter the date and times of each event using a drop down list rather than entering them as separate events. Then the events should be automatically placed on the schedule. The current calender likes to destroy entries that are very complicated or long for some reason too

Taking the 2012 WTBOCS schedule and getting each event to display as the event name in the current calender would be almost impossible to do and quite simply I didn't have the time to do it. Also, events are a uniform 3 weeks apart, because otherwise it would take forever to enter these event into the calender.

A tool which could create pages such as this would also be very helpful, though it would not be vital: http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=80102

It's great to see that Live For Speed is looking into taking steps to assure that it's sites are improving the state of it's leagues and racing in general

Quote from Hahmo :

[snip]

Also PaulC2K has been working on a league website before and supposedly started to work on it again (But you're aware of this already). Will this be make his work pointless because this will have better interest since its created by the developers of this Sim, or have you been talking with Paul to get his involved to this project so he won't be doing something all alone which could end up being quite useless since same stuff are on the other league website that is used more actively than his?

I'm just curious, no hard feelings or anything of taking over someone voluntary work, just wanting to ask a couple of things and hopefully to help more in the future ^^

Just to clarify what I'm/we're working on, my *original* goal so many years ago was to build a site exclusively for LFS. However what im working on now is for multiple communities, so LFS would be included but so would all other sims, under one roof.

Victors project is basically what i'd tried to do, just done better in a dozen different ways, and made official, something i could never offer.
If the right features are there, and ofc they will be, theres very limited avenues we can go to offer something LFS officially wouldnt, at least for our initial launch, however theres a few things we're discussing beyond a basic scope which are either entirely new (at least to my knowledge) or exist already but not all under 1 roof.

Thankfully it wont be useless to a wider audience, theres a dozen communities now, and in the future, which wont have the same sort of Dev access & dedication we have with LFS. While there are devs uninterested in providing such a platform for the organised racing community, we'll hopefully have something to support their userbase.
One problem im trying to wrap my head around now is exactly how we'll support the LFS users. With an official site doing the same things, it means we'd have to offer something quite monumental in order to convince event organisers to use our site (both) to run & promote their league.
If we get nobody giving a damn about our site from the LFS community then we have an LFS area which would make Chernobyl look like NYC in rush-hour on Xmas Eve That then reflects poorly on the LFS community if it looks inactive.
If we dont have an LFS area, it begs the question why we have a dozen sims and yet we've opted not to bother supporting LFS. LFS users will know why, but anyone looking in probably wont.
Its pretty much a lose/lose situation, neither option reflects well on LFS, and one questions our sites support for it.
It seems unlikely people will want to double their workload by running their events on 2 locations, the original goal was to significantly lighten their workload, this lightens it then hopes they fancy duplicating it elsewhere when realistically they've got no real *need* to do so.


As im guessing you've seen, after posting my plans i was told Victor was on the fence about starting the project were now discussing here, I said i'd happily provide access to our private discussion area (covering pretty much the same stuff) if it'd help this community, he's not commented, but apparently read the post so hey-ho, the offers there
The whole point of our project is to benefit the sim racing community in an area thats not really well supported right now. I genuinely believe organised racing plays a significant role in keeping the online community strong, active users encourages an active community, and giving people a reason to commit to being active it stops them finding something else to do and contributing to the community slowly evaporating.
Regardless of how the communities get their support, officially or unofficially, the aim is to give people something to improve the whole experience. As long as Sim Racers benefit, who can complain.


Unfortunately i dont think i'll have too much free time to closely follow & contribute to the progress on here as much as i'd like to. Theres been a 10yr window where i'd have happily put in as much help as i could, and up until about 4mo ago i'd have dropped what i was working on to help, however now its quite difficult to contribute to what is almost the same project done entirely differently without getting the 2 mixed up. I'll get overwhelmed with my project, let alone being able to separate 2 and contribute without getting my wires crossed
I'll certainly try and chip in if i see something where i might be able to help offer some direction, but i suspect with the sort of community we have here it wouldnt be too long before someone figures something it took me ages to figure by myself.