Massive posting of minor changed maps

[TseTse offline]

[Bytor offline]

[Nefilim offline]

[Mccannon04 offline]

[Slamscape offline]

[DaltWisney offline]

[Bytor offline]

[DRunkdRiveR offline]

i myself really like the top ten downloads list, but since these ten maps get so much exposure, they get much more downloads than the say 11th most downloaded, and im afraid that soon, it will be very hard for new maps to "Break in" to the top ten.

Although i must admit, the top ten user rated table will help break this mold, as it will give the "under dogs" (such as zear :P ) the publicity he needs *cough*

sorry about taking this post away from its original direction im refrain from pluggin my own maps if that helps

[PJ offline]

I have an idea that might help keep the list from being abused. I'll mention it to Bytor.
-PJ

[Star offline]

I don't know too much about this technical side of the issue but maybe you could have the site log the ips of the people downloading from it. In this way, you could make only different ips count toward the download counter. Although, my limited knowledge of this kind of stuff also hints at programs that can alter or change your ip address. Tell me I have a hint of what I'm talking about here.

[Bytor offline]

Ya, it's a tricky issue. Some people can change their IPs at will. Most dialup ISPs are like that. You just reconnect and you have a new IP. On the other hand, cable and DSL users generally have the same IP for months, if not permanently.

Right now, I don't log every download. I just keep a counter for each map, so only totalling the number of unique IP downloads wouldn't be possible. However, I am considering logging all downloads so that I can show the top ten downloads for just the last 30 days, instead of since the dawn of time. This would make old maps like Glacier no longer dominate the top ten list.

The reason I haven't done this yet is because it will be more CPU intensive to show the download count for each map, since the server will have to do a query on a large table of records in the download log, filter them by date, then add them up. We'll see.

[DRunkdRiveR offline]

Since the dawn of time

[NecroBones offline]

On the top-10 lists, I'd think you could do it in a way that would have negligible system impact if you calculate the download totals only once a day. It could be run at a low-access time of day, such as 4am.

And to those who would make variants of my maps- please please PLEASE modify the readme AND the loading-screen text to acknowledge that it's a third-party VARIANT of my map, and take credit for what you changed. If you improve it, take pride in your work. If you screw it up, then take responsibility for it. It's that simple.

[Bytor offline]

Actually, I thought of an even better way. I'll update the total downloads for each map only when the map is actually downloaded. That will use the least amount of server resources. So I would only need to look at individual records in the download log when I'm building the "Top Ten Uploads In the Last 30 Days" sidebar, which I could just do once per hour.