Server Stats removed after 30 days?

[DaynNightGaming]

I got an idea, you know the server stats on the website? the problem whit the server stats is that when you upload info, it will only stay there for 30 days.. This makes me think it is no idea of uploading it cause it will just get removed after 30 days AND, when it gets removed ALL the players you have found on the server is gone!

If we could make the stats not disappear after 30 days, then every time someone uploads something, it stays there FOREVER but now you may think "but if we dont remove the stats then we cannot see when players delete characters or change server or when they are inactive" but then I got another idea, what if you could import server stats from warcraftrealms.com to you Censusplus? and then every time you take new server stats, then new characters will be added to the total number of characters on the realm, not only what YOU have found, and the same goes whit purge, if you can see the last time the characters on the server where seen from the imported data, then you can purge all the characters not seen whitin 30 days.

also some other ideas
If we could make all registered members of the site fill in how many characters they have on each realm, then we can see how many PLAYERS and not characters there are on each realm

also, the info saved on Censusplus data is stored in the "WTF" folder, the problem whit this is that many players delete their WTF folder cause of bugs or just because hackers or anything like that aint gonna see what account name they have, If we could make all the saved data from Censusplus be saved outside the WTF file, then we can have the data on our computer forever, no need to "Take" new server stats everytime you delete it.

Hope this really works cause then Warcraftrealms.com would be 10 times cooler than it is .

[1974ER]

Ummm... the data on individual characters is saved, it doesn't expire. The 30 day limit on server stats serves to keep the data fairly up-to-date, which is actually a good thing and also helps to limit the amount of data stored.

At least for me, the number of characters on a realm is not static and also, the censusplus users form a very small portion of realm populations, so such registration would be fairly useless, in my opinion...

Rollie/Hybuir/Balgair and others... more opinions / explonations, I had to leave some parts without comment (at least for now)...

[Balgair]

The whole point of removing the server stats data after 30 days is to give an idea of the CURRENT state of the server. No good seeing a server saying it's got say 20,000 Horde when 5,000 are inactive and another 10,000 transferred off in that free transfer 6 months ago! All the individual character data remains permanently, it's only the server overviews which are pruned after 30 days, simply to give an up to date idea of the populations and activity levels.

The idea of registered members saying which characters belong to them doesn't help really, since you'll find no more than 5-10 people per realm are actually members of this site, in most cases - you only need to look at the number of realms with 0 census submissions at all to realise only a tiny tiny fraction of the WoW population actually visits this site. So that one's a no-go - it'd be nice indeed to see how many actual players there are, instead of characters, but it just can't be done.

Data being stored in WTF folder is the way WoW works - it cannot be saved anywhere else, period.

[Kosh]

Others have already covered the basics, so I will just reiterate that the purpose of the Server Stats pages is to present the current information about the server. Rollie chose a 30-day window to filter the census information in order to pick up even fairly casual players on a server, while trying to minimize anybody who is no longer active.

One way you can see much farther into the history kept in the database here is to check the history on your "claimed" characters. I see you just joined this site, but if you have been playing WoW for quite a while, you can claim any of your (level 10+) characters here, and can generally see most of your level and guild changes for the history of that character. This obviously will be more detailed on a well-censused server, since at least one person needs to have "seen" your character during a census scan at each level for it to be in this site's database. For example, if someone saw (ran a census while you were on) your character at level 24, but nobody happened to see you again until level 26, then your history here won't show you at 25.

I wouldn't be happy with "making" members do anything, and has been pointed out, only a very small percentage of a typical server are members here. One thing that might be interesting, though, would be for Rollie to pull some stats from the database on how many characters on average are being claimed by members, and how many members haven't claimed any characters, if it's significant.

As mentioned, the add-on has no choice on where the data is saved. If you are not interested in why this is so, then you can skip the rest of this post. In case you're curious about the specifics, though, what actually happens is that the add-on specifies that certain variables need to be saved between games, and when the add-on is being shut down (when logging out or reloading the UI), the game saves these variables into a file at a defined location (the "saved variable" file for that add-on). When you're logging in, the game "sees" that the add-on specified that certain variables were to be saved, so after loading the add-on, also reads the saved variable file to set those variables to what they were before.

The intent for this was so that add-ons could "remember" things like user settings, so they didn't need to be set each time. This website takes advantage of the fact that the saved variable files are in a (fairly) readable format, and that each add-on has it's own file, so the proper file containing the (large, complex) variable holding all of the censuses you've collected with the add-on can be uploaded here, to then be parsed and added to the database.