Racquet Network Technology

We’ve been trialing a reward system for a couple of months now and I think it’s here to stay so I thought I’d write a quick note about it.

Basically, clubhouse members are rewarded for contributing.  You can earn points for any of the following:

• Joining – 100 points
• Uploading a gallery (video, audio, photo) – 30 points
• Sharing a link – 30 points
• Uploading an avatar – 20 points
• Creating a new forum topic – 20 points
• Posting on a forum, group or profile (comments and replies too!) – 20 points
• Completing a friend request – 10 points
• Voting on content – 10 points
• Joining a group – 5 points
• Sending a private message to a friend – 5 points

* reward configuration subject to change

Most importantly, you can use your points to cash in on Racquet Network products and services.  Read this article for more details.

You can monitor the points you collect from your profile page.  Beside your name, you should see a points total.  You should also be able to click on the ‘Points’ tab of your profile and see a listing of each transaction that has ever earned you points.

Hope you like it.

I have been trialling some new functionality that allows players and groups to manage links.

It’s fine to throw up links on profile and group activity pages, but if you want to keep track of them and list them prominently on your profile or group profile, I would highly recommend giving this a try.

You can create new links from your personal profile or from group profiles that you belong too.  In each case you can click on the ‘Links’ tab for that profile, then click ‘Create’.

When creating your link, the system will do it’s best to scrape the external web site for content that it can use as preview material.  Of course you can decide what (if any) content you would like to attach to the link.  In general, the more content you attach to the link the better, as long as it is relevant.  You will have a selection of thumbnail images to choose from if the system was able to scrape images from the external site, and again I would recommend including one as long as it is relevant.

When you create the link you can add it to a number of categories.  These categories help users to browse all links from the main ‘Links’ tab.

Remember that when you create links, they will still be posted to the appropriate activity stream as if you had posted them there yourself, except they will have a wealth of extra information attached to them AND – unlike simple activity posts – they will remain prominently available for easy retrieval later and for easy discovery by others.

Hope it helps.

I’ve decided to show all activity in descending chronological order.

This may not sound new to you, but I’ve been particularly annoyed by the fact that replies aren’t treated as events in the same way that posts are. If someone replies to something that’s a couple of days old, it may not get noticed by anyone because it doesn’t get bumped to the top of the list as you might expect.

Many other social sites treat replies the same way, but I thought we’d try and be different in this case and show all activity (including replies) in descending chronological order.

Hopefully it makes sense, but if it causes mass confusion I’ll revert back.

@shar also asked for this one.

Ever post something then realise immediately after that you mispelled something, or didn’t get a link right, etc?

Now you can edit posts after you’ve made them (rather than having to delete/repost).

Beside all of your posts you should now see an edit link.

When you click that you should be taken to a new page with an edit box.

Make your adjustment and click save. All sorted.

Hope it helps.

I’ve been meaning to get this in place for some time. I think it’s going to be very useful for sharing content.

Ever notice on other social sites you can often post a link and the site automatically converts it to a video player, or an image, or some preview text/image combination?

@shar was asking about posting youtube videos recently and it reminded me of this very useful feature. Notice this post which used to just have a link to youtube, has automatically rendered as a video playing widget! Of course it’s a link too, so you can still click through to youtube if you prefer.

This means you don’t even need to copy past embed text from other sites. Just paste the link in your post and RN takes care of the rest.

Here is a list of content that will be automatically converted to embeds for you:

YouTube
Blip.tv
Vimeo
DailyMotion
Flickr
Hulu
Viddler
Qik
Revision3
Photobucket
Scribd
Wordpress.tv

Hope it helps.

The continued growth of our RLP group has brought to light some real performance issues with the supporting software that currently allows RLPs to calculate league-wide rankings. So much so, that for @roys‘s typical use case (a calculation of rankings for the top 100 Squash players over the past 300 days), calculations were taking as long as 4 minutes!

When I started investigating Roy’s use case I learned that the situation was even worse. For the entire 4 minutes that he was waiting for his results, all player and scorekeeping queries – system-wide – were being locked out. This meant everyone accessing the Player Pages, RLP Pages, or Box League Pages would have been waiting unnecessarily. How embarrassing.

Alas, RLP Pages – Version 3.

Still calculating rankings (Version 1).

Still deeply integrated with Player Profiles Pages AND still allowing dynamic calculations based on ALL RLP search criteria (Version 2).

NOW calculating rankings faster (Version 3)!

Results for a few different calculations:
- rankings for past 7 days – 5 sec (from previous 8 sec)
- rankings for past 30 days – 7 sec (from previous 17 sec)
- rankings for past 300 days – 30 sec (from previous 4 min!)
- rankings for past 999 days – 35 sec (from previous timeouts!!)

We’ll continue to look for improvements moving forward, including a potential move from shared hosting to a private dedicated server.

In the meantime, I hope these changes help.

@david highlighted an interesting difference between activity streams and forums today with this post on the Racquet Network Support / Technical Help group home page.

The activity streams are quite useful for nested conversations because they allow players to reply to posts and to reply to replys to posts. And so on, and so forth.

Forums are a bit different in nature. I have seen nested discussions on forums, but the typical implementation uses the idea of quotes instead. I suspect the main reasoning is to keep the most recent posts at the top or bottom of the thread (rather than somewhere in the middle).

I’ve added a couple of new features to our forum pages that may help. First, I’ve added a ‘Quote’ link beside the ‘Edit’ and ‘Delete’ links for each post. Clicking the link will pre-populate the post box at the bottom of the screen with a backlink, so that you can reference any content in the discussion. You can have multiple quotes in a single post which is useful also.

As well, I’ve added a series of buttons that provide some visibility into activity steams that occur outside of the forums but reference posts within the forums. You can view the activity streams by pressing the ‘View Activity Replies to this Post’ button. You can ‘Favourite’ or ‘Like’ the post, and by clicking ‘#’ you can view the entire activity stream on a new page, where you can post replies in a nested fashion.

I hope it gives us the best of both worlds.

@brunod, Mark Cole, and Mark Hiebert have all reported issues recently with our report sequence. Scores seemed to be doubling up on save, so I decided to take a look.

The application was written some time ago and was not written according to best practices regarding saving form data. After the final confirmation step, the sequence was loading a script called save.php. The script would perform the save and then display a message indicating success.

Best practice tells us that the save process should be completely hidden from users so that the save logic can not be executed twice in the case of a page reload or back button press. In both of these cases the report sequence was doubling up score reports.

I’ve updated the sequence now to redirect from save.php to success.php so that the save script can only be invoked by a button press on the confirmation page. Since the user can no longer be left on a save.php page, the opportunity for this page to be loaded twice accidentally (causing the duplicate scores) no longer exists.

Hope it helps.

Hello Racquet Network Players,

Welcome to the Racquet Network Technology Blog!

We hope to use this space to share information with you about updates to the site.  At the moment we are using a pleathera of tools, both custom built and open-source, to manage and provide content for players and we want to keep you posted as we evolve and integrate them over the coming months and years.

Please feel free to post comments about features and bugs discussed on the blog so that we can better understand what’s working and what isn’t working.  I only have a few hours a week to work on the site, so I may not be able to respond to things quickly but will be sure to incorporate feedback into the backlog when I can’t get to them straight away.

Thanks for reading, and be sure to stay tuned for updates.