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  • Running Commentary

    A blog-like running commentary of what is being done to keep the website running smoothly (well kind of) and what is being done to support the core services such as Teamspeak and Discord.
    Sitting-Duc
    This is an update for the COD2/4/5 admin teams as it concerns the admin portal.
    I have performed an update that allows admins to edit the ban reason on ban entries that they have claimed. This should hopefully mean that you can simply claim the imported ban entry and then edit the reason. You will only be able to edit the ban reason if you have claimed the ban and only for your bans.
    An 'Edit' link will display under the ban reason, clicking it will bring up a modal allowing you to change the ban reason: 


    Sitting-Duc
    This has been requested of me for a while from EDD and I finally found some time to see what I could do, for some fucked up reason there are no free sites for banners so I have had to use an open source PHP library and hack it around a bit to make a banner that fits onto the homepage. It needs to be added to source control and have some caching added etc. but for now it's looking OK. 

    Sitting-Duc
    We have always had the calendar system on our website but it has gone largely unused - I think this can be a very powerful feature for not just organising community events but also admin events. I have added in our XI fest events and will be encouraging admins to add server events to the community calendar and admin events to the admin calendar. 

    Sitting-Duc
    With the expansion of the moderator group support to all of our games I have gone through the permissions and created a moderator group for each, this should allow the easy identification of them on the website. They will display under a pink text on the 'staff' page: 

    Sitting-Duc
    This is an update for the admins only really, but I think it's good for everyone to know what goes on behind the scenes. This latest admin portal update brings the ability for admins to record when they have kicked a player, this can help build up a history of a player and if they have been kicked allot for causing trouble then a ban may be needed.
    Hopefully this will help keep track of the problem players and possible be useful if we use it for the new moderator group as well.
    You can add a kick to the player profile by clicking the 'Add New Kick' button and then enter a reason into the popup:
     
    Once saved this will display on the players profile:

    And you can also access it on the 'My Kicks' page:

     
    Sitting-Duc
    So this is a very behind the scenes update and has taken me a very long time to work on. I began about a month back to try and get some of the custom software we use a little more organised. Primarily this is concerning the behind the scenes admin tools that we use. We have an 'admin portal' website that allows admins to ban players from the servers, a 'rcon sync' service that monitors the servers and adds player details to a database and a 'ban sync' service that synchronises ban files across the game servers. 
    The issue that I had been having is that these three applications are so tied in to each other and if I wanted to make a small change to any of them I would have to build and deploy them all which was a headache. Now each has its own Build and Deployment pipelines fully automated. The database aspect has been pulled out and is now separate with all of the applications using a NuGet package with defined contracts to access it. I would like to move to an API based data access layer in the future though. 
    So what does it look like?
    Here are the builds in VSTS and below that what the release process looks like for the Admin Portal website:


     
    Sitting-Duc
    A new banner has been added for Rising Storm 2 on the front page, unfortunately the game is not supported by GameTracker and there are no good free sites out there so we have had to pay a premium of $12 to a service that allows us to modify the banner. It's looking pretty good though and hopefully should allow people to see that we are running a server. It's already doing very well and getting lots of traffic so lets hope that we can keep that momentum
    Sitting-Duc
    We have had issues with email over the past few days because of some of the firewall changes (which hopefully should now be fixed). However during this event people were reaching out by emailing the xtremeidiots domain directly in an attempt to get my attention. Also they were using the contact form which also emails out. 
    This was a bit of a problem because although we have these systems in place there isn't actually an email server that receives these emails so they were dead lettering. As such I have set the [email protected] email address up with Outlook Premium so we will be able to receive these support requests and respond to them. 
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