by kc-jake on Fri Sep 22, 2006 3:38 pm
Technically, it can be done...
Pretty much, to get a timeline for everyone's points, you'd have to get the game log of every game they've ever played and by looking at timestamps, you can effectively chart out the data. It'd be a mess and would need to be automated, but it's doable.
lack, is the game log available in XML format? It'd be much more efficient to graph everyone's movement through the rankings by grabbing XML data so that the entire game doesn't have to be loaded... I'm sure it'd drive you up the wall if someone was running a script/program that accessed 100+ games in rapid succession. Especially if it were being done by more than one person.
Although you could just obtain the historical data yourself by modifying the site's code to log any points gained/lost by anyone and then doing a one-time run through of all 70k-ish games in the system and combing through the game logs for points data and putting that into the database as a starting point. Of course, you'd need to announce that you're taing down the site for however long it takes to ensure that no one is in the middle of their turn... don't allow people to start a turn within an hour of the process starting... etc. It'd be a pain, but it could be done.
And did I mention that I'd LOVE some XML data?
I was a major back when 1600 was major. Now that I'm back, I get to easily win a bunch of games to get my rank. Thank the 'tards here who suck at this game.
imhot4jesus wrote:Literacy never hurt anybody.
Highest Rank: #154 (Oct 05 '06)
Highest Score: 1725 (Jul 18 '08)