Since I work on the site almost daily I'd like a way to update everyone on what is being fixed, improved, or under construction. Posting updates in the news for tiny fixes or updates is overkill sometimes. The complaints/suggestions forum is the most appropriate place for this.

Here, updates will still be visible by those who care to check in on status reports or interesting features being developed.

For now I'm the only coder on the staff but in years past we have had multiple coders working on projects. So more than likely I'll be the only one posting updates.

If you have a suggestion on how to improve the site we are all ears. Please remember that coding takes a long time so if we don't get to a suggestion that is approved enlarge by the community it's because we are busy elsewhere.

Tonight I fixed a date formatting bug in the recruitment module which was causing everything to be sorted by month. As a bonus we'll be tracking the time with the same stamp whereas before we weren't.

Now the Pending Applications section in the recruitment module show only those with Pending or Recruit status. All applications which were Denied or Approved are not visible.

I removed the arcade module and centerblocks module. The arcade wasn't working anymore just like the last arcade from years ago. The module stopped tracking scores which made it itself worthless especially for a site with a ton of competitive gamers. On the bright side removing the centerblocks module reduced the amount of queries on the index to under 50. The index is running almost a 1/2 second faster.

Added a new feature to the Donations module. It tracks all donation totals per month and displays them in a nicely formatted calendar view.

Got the top donors and donations working today. Also displays total value now and not rounded to the nearest dollar. Always nice to show the cents too.



Also added a Yearly total to the Donation Stats (calendar grid). Now we can view all totals by day, month, year. That pretty much covers all the stats we could hope to display.

Today, Zero made the first live donation and the IPN failed because of 1 single missing variable. I fixed the variable but it triggered a lot of other issues. On the bright side, all the error logging I added worked brilliantly. I was notified immediately of the error and exactly how to fix it.

Paypal only sends back the amount and fee charged. They leave it to webmasters to figure out the net gain (amount - fee = net). It's simple enough but I didn't know that because of all the duplicated variables Paypal is posting.

Spent most of the night changing variable names and moving around a lot of data. Because of the amount of changes made tonight I don't feel comfortable setting the module to live again without more testing.

Had to move around some db fields and revamp the module installer. Added in all the donations to the installer so if I have to reinstall it over and over no data has to be re-added. It's right there from the start.

Came across an odd error in the Private Messages template. Added the user_override_style = ''; so the template variable isn't missing. It's a looooong lost variable having to do with the default forums, .tpl templating system, neither of which we use anymore. The error cropped up last week sometime. This should at least stop filling my inbox with error logs every time someone reads a PM.

Private messages went down once again because the legacy board config is required for default values. Even though we are using a different forums now we still have to keep the old one installed because it requires config variables. I could port everything over but that would be like trying to take out windows explorer from internet explorer. Private Messages and the original forums are embedded into the core so much that it's too much effort to take them out. Only thing I can do is hope my fixes work and that things don't break again. I'll keep fixing it until it becomes more efficient for me to code my own PM's module. Because this is the 2nd time PM's have broken in the past year I'm almost to the point of revamping it. It seems as if the site is slowly breaking down like old age. The more it breaks the more I fix. If I continue doing this then I'll probably have my own CMS out of necessity.

I mucked around with tons of stuff just for future info. I tackled some core includes, private messages module, your account module, ya blocks. Private messages were scruuuuuuuuewed up bad. It had something to do with the board config or date format not being set. The underlying cause of the whole deal is still unknown. Suffice to say if I have to revist PM's in the future there are going to be some major changes.

Dweller submitted an application today and the timestamp was php inception date 1969.


OK so I forgot to change a few things that would allow the new timestamps to be input into the db correctly. Hopefully the DF_Recruitment module is all squared away concerning timestamps.

If you choose to have the site popup a notice whenever you have a new PM you'll notice it's working again. It was broken for a few days. Thanks to Dorkboy for alerting me to the issue. Apparently because I was an admin I couldn't see the issue which is really weird. So I went in and hammered a few queries with by repeating them instead of in a big loop. It's inefficient but I didn't want to spend more time than it was worth just to get things working again.



I plan on going back in and revamping the notification popup so it looks nicer and more in line with the rest of our site's style.

Since we have the nice big PM icon in the header there's really no need for the additional popup notification. We'll still offer the option to those who would rather be given notice in a more visible way than a color change in a header icon.

The Donations module is working ok now so I'm beginning to work on Subscriptions. We do have members that actively have subscriptions and the feature was requested otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. Subscriptions is such a PITA I can't even begin to complain about it.

Not even 1 day into coding the subscriptions I ran into a bug stemming from Paypal. They confirmed it's their fault and will work on a fix. I've seen how long it takes them to fix simple things. Sometimes days, weeks, or months.

I literally cannot go forwards from here without that bug fixed. I could test it live by sending $1 at a time then refunding it. If I do that I ask you, WTF IS THE POINT OF PAYPAL SANDBOX?

Added a new feature to the GameTracker module. The ability to join through either XFire or Steam. This is a feature we've had in the GameQuery module but missed adding to the new GameTracker module.

It's not intelligent though. It won't detect if you have the game or if you can actually join the server. That part is up to the user to figure out.