Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Greetings all, I've just added a major new feature to the site - a player finder. You can view it by clicking 'Player Finder' in the header (duh!)

To get the most out of it, you need to have an account and be logged in. Go to your profile page, edit your profile, then in the right hand column you can fill out all of the needed info to get listed on the player finder. The map will update every hour or so.

You can send contact requests to people who play games that interest you in your area (or any area you might be travelling to). You can filter by age to ensure that you are not going to get a creepy old person meeting up with a schoolkid, and can stay in your age group if that sort of thing is key to your gaming fun (booze!)

Have a play and find some bugs! There are bound to be loads as I've only done a moderate amount of testing. I might need to take it offline in a week or so to optimise it as there are some very heavy database queries linked in to it, but we'll see how it goes.

The game list is maxed out for now. We might add more later, but I cant add more for a while until I get a good feel for the amount of server overhead this part of the site will take up.

Enjoy!


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Other changes to the site today include:

1. More facebook 'like' links if you are not signed in (sorry! It is a great way of building traffic and interest alas)
2. 'are you sure you want to mark all threads read' confirmation on click (to prevent mobile fat fingers)
3. 'delete selected' button for PM page at top as well as bottom when removing PMs
4. add 'block all emails' for any given user to completely disable email sending if you want to get a full block on mails
5. added rotation detection to gallery uploads to make phone based pictures work better and easier
6. fixed duplicate stores being non-clickable in store finder
7. disable word 'kitchen' in subject of forum posts
8. registration page tweaks
9. user profile editing page redesign
10. various minor fixes and tweaks

Map's a bit small.

First US player listed.

Looks like a neat feature.

Aww, who will fulfil our kitchen needs now?!

What OS and browser are you using Breotan?

I was having the map appear small, but now that users are listed on it its appearing at the correct size.

Is there a possibility for an other field to list custom values, or would that be cluttering up the system too much?

Ah might have just got in before some bits had loaded properly after the restart then. Let me know if anyone else sees the same - could be a javascript loading related glitch.

When the map is fully zoomed out is there supposed to be a large white space beyond the poles? The map boundaries could perhaps be limited a little. ^^'

Looks like there is a minor bug with the distance calculator as well, but should be easy enough to fix as I can see what the problem is. Dont worry about it not showing the number of players near you perfectly at the moment, it is just a display issue and I'll get it sorted before the end of the weekend. Ah the joys of real data


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Wyrmalla wrote:
When the map is fully zoomed out is there supposed to be a large white space beyond the poles? The map boundaries could perhaps be limited a little. ^^'

Google maps setting combined with the relative size of your browser that is mostly out of my hands.

I'm seeing the map in a Google ad type format !


Also, when I go onto the forums theres a triple hazard line...

Thanks, what web browser and OS are you viewing it on?

I've made a small tweak that may or may not help a bit?

IE9 and Windows Vista

Map looking good now, but still seeing triple hazards at top and bottom of page - going to do a restart as need to pop up the chippy for dinner

I was using Windows 7 and Firefox but as others have said, the problem corrected once people started entering their data.

Breotan, did you see the problem corrected before you listed yourself?

Partially. I saw the map corrected once other people started listing but before I listed myself. I was able to get more data shown on the screen (not the map) after listing myself. A few refreshes later I saw the pin on the map where I live.

There's some heavy caching involved which might have borked it at launch, but if it is ok for everyone now then that's great. I've not been able to replicate that problem on any environment just yet.

Looks good, though I am the only PP player in Northern VA.

Forever alone...

Looks neat if populated by enough people. Anyway to not have it try and contact myself looking for a game?

Thanks. The counter for your local area includes you, but if you send a contact request, it will skip you and send to anyone other than you that fits the criteria. I'll get around to tweaking it so it doesnt include yourself in that count, but it is an extra level of server load as it makes the database queries much more complicated.

I see 9 hazard stripes at the top of Dakka now, on a Windows phone (so explorer).

So, it appears to be IE9 that's causing me grief here - did a restart and cleared the cache but to no avail, tried Chrome and all appears to be working again...

Comparisons - Player finder


General page view in Forums

I also see a black line / gap above and below each post (on either side of the subject line of each post in this thread). No biggie though

Yup, thanks for the info. I am able to replicate the IE9 bug so I can get that one fixed over the next couple of days at least.

 legoburner wrote:
Thanks. The counter for your local area includes you, but if you send a contact request, it will skip you and send to anyone other than you that fits the criteria. I'll get around to tweaking it so it doesnt include yourself in that count, but it is an extra level of server load as it makes the database queries much more complicated.

seems as simple as " and user.id <> session.user.id " ? as long as what you're querying against is indexed it should be pretty fast.

(lmk if you need any query help, one of my hats is dba)

 legoburner wrote:
Yup, thanks for the info. I am able to replicate the IE9 bug so I can get that one fixed over the next couple of days at least.

Great, thanks Lego. I know I could just use Chrome or Firefox, but out of habit I always go straight to IE...

The user ID is not pulled in to that query so it involves adding an extra join that I want to avoid until I see how it performs with real data.

This is quite the release - impressive.

Your missing Battlefleet Gothic for games. But other than that it looks good

I'm seeing black 'gaps' between posts too (IE11),

and the adds etc on the top of the page are all messed up/missing

Are you seeing that on all pages or just on the forum related pages?