Removed text "Discover the realism of racing simulation..."
Updated events today on main page (using new calendar info)
Leagues:
FIX: Stream start time was not stored when first adding a round
Stream start time is now shown on round and season pages
Calendar:
Changed section name to Events rather than Leagues
Default page in Events section is now Calendar
Limited height of images (for taller aspect ratio images)
Replaced (some) links in description text with [link] to reduce length
Still to do:
Make calendar show current week as the top line by default
EDIT: Is it true that there is no way to DELETE a round of a series?
Small bug happened very recently with Upcoming Events section in LFS Entry Screen: you can see that on front page and Events-page, that the first event today will be this: https://www.lfs.net/leagues/412/season/1196/round/4942
However, while it did appear yesterday on LFS Entry screen in the Upcoming Events section, indicating that it will start tomorrow (today), it has today vanished from LFS entry screen. Instead the second round of that season (when you scroll down), is shown, even thought that first round is supposed to continue today.
First session of that round was held two days ago (while other sessions will be held today), and during yesterday it did show up properly. It's only today where that problem has shown up.
Thanks, the in-game entry screen only showed events whose first round was less than 36 hours ago. This allowed for 24 hour races and two-day events, but not three-day events.
I've increased that limit to 3 days instead of 36 hours, so the second part of your multi day round of one of your concurrent series now appears in the in-game calendar.
EDIT: Also added the option to delete a round. At the bottom of 'edit round' page (like deleting a season).
I hope all the time zone stuff works properly, it's always confusing to implement and made my day's task a lot harder. Especially when we are dealing with things displayed near day and month boundaries, and must be placed and displayed in the correct day slot, and the viewer can be in any time zone, at any time, and select any month or week to view.
I'd obviously like to know if there are any errors with time zones.
A simple test is if someone could compare the in-game event browser with the website calendar and make sure it looks correct. Hovering over the event time should show the UTC time, in case that is useful.
One test I should do is set my timezone to somewhere far from UTC and confirm that some events fall into a different day or month on the calendar because of the time zone of the observer. But I'm a bit tired now, probably will test tomorrow.
I don't plan to do any more on this stuff for now except for any fixes. Really it was some holiday work but has gone on 4 extra days and we all know what I really have to work on now.
I hope the calendar and league section improvements are helpful.
I found one problem. When you are editing details of a round, it will automatically think that track for all sessions of this round will be BL1. Thing is that if you don't notice that and you update your round after, let's say, uploading a thumbnail of that round, it will also change your track to BL1 in all sessions used in that round.
This shouldn't happen when editing an already existing round, especially when all those other details of that round don't change when you start editing that round.
Thanks, I can reproduce that and will check it out tomorrow. I didn't realise the leagues system had quite a few bugs in it! Apparently in this case it prepares that list of tracks but doesn't specify which one is selected, so that information is lost when you submit the form.
EDIT: That is fixed now. This bug was newly introduced by me. It was caused when I changed a short track name function to display correctly on the calendar (e.g. SO2R). I didn't realise the same function was used internally for track name comparisons. I've restored the old function and added a new one for the calendar.
I think the signup system Victor made is quite good and has a lot to it, but unfortunately it is rarely used, partly because it misses a few features (discussed earlier in this thread).
I was able to add this CSV output quite simply. The other thing that seems important and simple is for the race organiser (league admins) to be able to send a PM to all signed up racers.
For anyone unfamiliar with this, you can see in the attachment, you can add any required fields. Then there is an on-site signup and everyone can see who has entered.
Questions, to anyone who might use the on-site signup, now or if it is improved a bit more:
- Is the CSV output adequate for your needs?
- What other features are necessary to make this system more convenient than your existing methods?
In CESAV.es we have our own registration system, but for us, and I can imagine that also for some others, it would be interesting to be able to create/update our own Events using the Rest API. So far, we have to create it twice, once in our website and then in lfs calendar, and then remember to keep both places in sync.
Another thing it could be useful to improve attendance to events is implementing a way to retrieve the upcoming events using the Rest API. It would allow to promote those events in other websites or using discord/telegram bots to promote the event, currently the only way to promote events is to do it manually.
As I don't know anything about REST, and I'm not even a web developer by trade (and Victor isn't an active LFS developer at this time) that is way beyond the scope of what I could do. My question is more about if there is something I could add in an hour or two, for league admins who could nearly use our on-site signup system but it's just missing something small that they need.
I have never made an event and I don't know how it looks on the backend, but some events are missing description, when you open them in the calendar. Maybe there is a separation "short description" and "description as in the mod system? You could do [if description is empty, then show short description], so it doesn't stay blank and so people could read the entire short description, because it's obvious that they are shortened with ellipsis.
In the weekly calendar overview, if the event description is missing, the season description is used, if that's missing too then the league description is used. https://www.lfs.net/leagues/810
I don't think the on-site signup system itself needs anything more, as league admins can always add more text fields. I did think about possibility to add skin as image when signing up, but CSV format doesn't support those.
But there is one thing that got into my mind, that would probably help league admins. There is always a possibility, that during a season, one round may have different rules to that signup. Good example can be endurance races: it's possible, that you are allowed to have up to 3 drivers per team in one round that lasts 6 hours, but up to 6 drivers per team in another round that lasts 24 hours.
Now, league admins may find it confusing that do they need to adjust that form just for that one race or not. Not to mention that users may not be aware when signing up that the rules for this individual round have changed.
You can see, that description is actually the same than the season's description. I personally found it initially bit confusing, that the individual event detail page does tell description that is actually season's details. Viewing an individual round description does hint me that I would be able to add a description for rounds individually and not needing to rely on season's description. But it's not possible.
So league admins might need the possibility to add a description for each round individually. Especially if rules for that one round are significantly different compared to the others. So, the possibility to add a description for each round individually would solve most needs.
I think the way it should work, is that LFS would check if the individual round does have its own description. If it has, then it would display that on calendar (and LFS Entry Screen). If it doesn't have, it would then display season's description, and if that also doesn't exist, then that league's description.
Thanks for the suggestion. I've now made it so that if there is no season description, then the league description is used.
Close but in fact rounds don't have a description field, so it's just season description, and if not then the league one.
This is a good idea but I haven't yet graduated to adding new fields to the database tables. Of course, Victor could be called upon to add an optional round description, or I could in future when my skills are up a little more.
This got fixed, while I was posting it: Not sure, if it's a bug or they just forgot to remove the tags. But in this specific event, in the description there are HTML tags <br /> which are used for new line. Just sharing, because maybe descriptions used to allow html tags or maybe not, dunno. Event: https://www.lfs.net/leagues/412/season/1196/round/4942
About the Database, adding a new column to an existing table is way easier than you think. Though, i'm not sure, if your using SQL or NoSQL, but as the website is a bit older, I would bid on SQL. In this case, you just add a new column with a proper name and select a type, which for description could be a type:TEXT or type:VARCHAR. Since this descriptions are probably restricted to XXX symbols, then you should do VARCHAR with limit of XXX, as that is the most performance wise. Another thing you can do is to just inspect the existing columns and recreate them. Trust me, it's not that hard, especially if you have visual access, like in MySQL.
About entering races using our on-site entry system, there is one 'feature' I think is missing.
If I enter as someone who is not a league admin, I can't find any way to remove my entry. I can edit it, and remove extra team members of a team entry, but not remove the whole entry.
As a league admin I can remove a whole entry from my season or round but I think this quite important option is missing for non-admins.
Happy to help. BTW. Don't be intimidated to ask, if you have any questions. That's what this forum is all about. We all have some knowledge is some areas. Since we have a community, you could always ask us stuff. And if you get to a point where you don't want to wait Victor, since you already know the database name and the table name. You could use this query:
ALTER TABLE table_name
ADD new_column_name varchar(1000);
This query adds a new column named "new_column_name" with a type "varchar" (1000 is the limit of characters) to an existing table called "table_name". Varchar limit is 65000, but I woundn't suggest going that high (performance wise). You can always change the column type later without losing any stored data. (except in the case - you drop the character limit, for example from 2000 to 1000)
1) When you set your sign up setting either to "No sign-up required" or "Invite only", and then (after saving it), try to edit your season, the page displays that sign up form, even if that option being selected should not show those required sign up details. Just clicking either of those options makes that form disappear. And if you try to save it without clicking that option, it doesn't make that sign up appear, so there's no issue in functionality. Just a minor (cosmetic) issue, not critical at all
2) If that sign up setting is set to "Invite only" and you then look your event at LFS Entry Screen, it doesn't indicate anything that event is invite only. It just has that clickable "Sign up" button, but no indication that event is invite only. Only after clicking that "Sign up"-button, and then looking closely at the Signup-section, you can see it is invite only type of event. I was wondering, should there be a text "Invite only" next to that button or make that "Sign Up"-button not appear at all (or non-clickable)?
