Donations / Account Upgrades

**deathtongue** · Posted: Thu Jun 08, 2006 4:00 pm Post subject:

Can you give us a complete list of upgrades with their cost in points?
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**JCirri** · Joined: 04 Feb 2006 Posts: 4576

If I could do that, then they would already be listed on the store page. I still don't know exactly what I'll be adding yet.

One thing I've noticed is that the userstats page (that's responsible for generating the dynamic signature images) is receiving a huge amount of load now from all the places people have linked their images. To reduce this load I may make the images available as an upgrade rather than to everyone freely.
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**SkepticalMario** · Joined: 01 Mar 2006 Posts: 310 Location: Minneapolis, MN

That's a good idea.
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**silencer** · Joined: 07 Jun 2006 Posts: 93 Location: Orlando, FL

To save bandwidth, why not offer a very simple black & white image for the signature stats? Surely you could display the same info at a fraction of the file size.. drop to grayscale & only show what's necessary.. the stats.
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**JCirri** · Joined: 04 Feb 2006 Posts: 4576

The issue isn't really the bandwidth required to transfer the image (it's only ~28kb in color).

The load on the server is being caused by the massive number of requests querying the database to retrieve the statistics to put in the images.
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**silencer** · Joined: 07 Jun 2006 Posts: 93 Location: Orlando, FL

Gotcha.. couldn't you cache stat images daily instead of having them be updated on the fly? Seems like that would save a bunch of querying and having daily updates would be fast enough for signatures..
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**JCirri** · Joined: 04 Feb 2006 Posts: 4576

I have thought about caching the images before. The problem with that is the dynamic nature of the stats. The shown statistics would not be accurate at all times if I store copies of the images. Even if I were to update a user's image each time he/she submits a score, the ranking would not be accurate as it depends on others' score as well. The solution to this would be to update all affected images each time a score is submitted, but this seems to be worse than the current implementation.

I could have some process to automatically update all images at certain time intervals, but I prefer to keep them 100% accurate at all times if I can.
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**blind51de** · Joined: 27 Feb 2006 Posts: 58

What do you need donations for? Most of this site is text. This isn't exactly 4chan.
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**JCirri** · Joined: 04 Feb 2006 Posts: 4576

**Ivy** · Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 4

Well, crap.

At the very least can we have some sort of official banner that we can still advertise Score Hero with and then just link to our Browse Scores page?
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**deathtongue** · Posted: Wed Jun 14, 2006 4:48 pm Post subject:

At first I was annoyed that my dynamic ranking signature was taken away, but after reading this thread I think having it as an account upgrade is a fine idea. It should reduce the load on the website significantly, especially now that there are so many registered members. I'm guessing that most people are only casual scorehero users anyway, and don't really need the dynamic stats signature. I also thought 20 points was a little steep at first, but I guess it's just another way to keep this privelege out of the hands of all but the dedicated members, and keep the load on the server low.

I consider having my ranking banner as a reward for the numerous cutoff score contributions I have made over the past few months, a service I was more than happy to provide. Thanks for the recognition! Keep up the good work on the website guys!
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Goal: 5* Hard
FOP [X]
PP(LL) [X]
OFTR [X]
6 [3.6]
TH [4.0]

**Matt** · Joined: 04 Feb 2006 Posts: 3780 Location: Bethel, Vermont

**Genga** · Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 2474 Location: Glasgow, Scotland

As soon as im up on my feet financially, ill sort you out with about £20 or such. That works out to just about under $40. But it will have to be next from pay day, its my birthday this month and i gotta sort myself out

But yeah, ill do my bit

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**JCirri** · Joined: 04 Feb 2006 Posts: 4576

I appreciate everyone's support.

My intention was not to take away your privileges to the dynamic images but, as deathtongue mentioned, to offer it as a reward to dedicated members and lessen the server load so that the site navigates faster for everyone (I'm sure you've noticed the increased performance over the last few days).
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**Genga** · Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 2474 Location: Glasgow, Scotland

i have, also wondered about my stats pic not working

yeah, sometimes i dont read all the topics Mr. Green

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