So the good news is I think it’s all back working. It’s hard I can’t be bothered to test fully without simulating a whole competition – I ask for everyone’s patience and to report anything weird to me so it be fixed immediately! The items in the drop-down list on the guess form ARE the items that appear in the year’s calendar, so you may start strategising now! Guesses will open in a few days, unless you want to go ahead and guess your new PIN 🙂

The various website systems being broken wasn’t a problem that wouldn’t have occurred back in the first running of competition – sixteen years ago (another one of those “wow, I feel old” moments) in 2003. The story is told on the 2003 page and goes something like this – I had a Boohbah Advent Calendar, bought for me by me, as I remember¹. I cannot think how that escalated into a competition to guess the pictures but evidently it did – I do however remember how it was run. The thirteen players comprised me, my eight closest neighbours at uni, a girl™, two of my family and randomly, a friends mum².

And it was a very manual process that year – those that lived in my block at uni could just tell me, and I would otherwise take guesses by phone and by email. I would manually update the website each day and them inform each player if they had scored. I would request guesses rather than leave them in place. I would update everyone on how it was going rather than just leave the onus on the players. I couldn’t last and it was the only year which operated this way. By 2004 the code that still largely (albeit tweaked) runs the website today was written, and I haven’t looked back since.

I was going to write about how the 2003 running panned out, but I’ll leave that for another time. The fact that the code remains largely that I wrote 15 years ago frustrates me a bit, but as I have previously written here – motivating myself to rewrite the code out-of-season is a bit of a push when it comes to motivating, and once it is the season I am using the site so feel less inclined to play with it. The solution is developing a new site alongside with a copy of all the data, obviously. I’ll try.

The site look remains that of my website at the time – which is essentially aping the F1 Digital service’s onscreen graphics (the service existed from 1996-2002 in various countries around the world, but only 2002 in the UK. These graphics existed towards the end of its life). Blues and yellows and greys – in fact here are a few screen grabs I’ve cobbled together from YouTube. Look familiar?

I’m slowly letting go of these but I want to let them go completely. I envisage a more Christmassy coloured site, but more importantly than the colour scheme I want to get away from the things it’s locking in. The “messages from competition control” for example. I am 100% convinced that I could show data items currently shown here in a better way, for example. I also want to overhaul the stats pages a bit and not having a “graphics template” to work to will, I hope, allow me greater freedoms.

Maybe next year then? We’ll see…

¹ I didn’t even know what a Boohbah was then, and frankly couldn’t explain very well if you asked me now! But that wasn’t important…
² A theme that went on to be repeated in future years, though for some reason they never seem to last!

Expected news first: I haven’t found time to even start re-writing the site, so the creaky cobbled together version that has been in use since forever will be needed again – I’ll complete some tests to ensure it all still works in the next few days, ahead of a launch sometime in the last week of the month. I have also found to time to acquire the Advent Calendar and I now know what objects will be appearing this year. I might do a post to “unveil” them as if they were celebrities on a reality TV show over the weekend!

Here in the EU (technically still correct) a thing called GDPR came into effect in the last 12 months. I am not a data protection expert by any means but I hope I am sensitive to it. A friend for whom GDPR caused a considerable amount of work advises that I am all good and compliant here so that’s great, but it has got me thinking about what data I hold on all the players and if there are any issues as a result.

So all players willingly gave me their details in order to play – that’s important. I’ve never sent emails to non players, and if a player ignores their “welcome email” one year then they don’t receive another until they themselves ask to play again. I’m happy with this system especially as it is entirely manual – there’s no chance of this website sending rogue emails. At all.

Email addresses aren’t even stored in the website database – they are all in my Gmail contacts book. So yeah, in theory a breach at Google could cause problems, but I’d say that that problem wouldn’t be mine. But I think I could possibly do better with what data I do storeL I’ll explain. Here’s a snapshot of what I have for each player:

The two id numbers are assigned by the site for administrative reasons so don’t represent any meaningful personal data. Forename and surname though do, and it has always been a policy to change these upon request – hence why, for example, “Lord Byron” was a player last year. I’ve debated changing to online handles but I like the names thing – if you prefer your real names not to be used then get in touch and we can come up with a suitable alias!

Gender is stored and is essentially binary (the field stores either F, M or X) – its only use is for the news feed to determine whether  player has changed his/her/their guess. I think this is unnecessary data (albeit arguably harmless) to have stored and will remove that before the competition starts. Nationality is an odd one and dates back to the first couple of instances of the competition where the website, aping F1 on-screen graphics, displayed a player’s nationality. That’s all it did. Unless you played on those first few competitions the data held against you in that field will be blank in any case. Will definitely be removed for this year.

The final bit of data in the database is star-sign data for each player – this has long been the basis for a “teams championship” and I guess is somewhat traditional now. I really don’t know where I stand on this data – it would help narrow down a players date of birth to within a month but not any particular year. It absolutely does represent personal data and arguably data I don’t need too, but (based on the fact that it has to have been volunteered willingly) it’s data I think I can argue I need and I am happy to keep it. Obviously I can and will delete it on request – the site already handles the data not being present and so there’s no major dramas here.

The last thing I have a silly 200×200 profile picture for competitors, stored off database in a folder on the web server. These were brought in to make player profile pages a bit less intimidatingly statty, but otherwise serve no real purpose. They aren’t present for every player and are several years old for some. Ashamedly I think I acquired them without consent in many cases so I think I know what needs to be done here. They’ll be removed before the start of the competition this year.

If you have any opinions or worries regarding the data I have on you and how I use it, please do get in touch. 16 days to go!

There are two months to go until the first window of the 2018 Advent Calendar Challenge Advent Calendar is opened, and time to update you on things, I guess!

First up: if you have recently browsed into the homepage for any reason in this off-season you might have noticed a mild redesign – I started with the intention of trying to closely match the template this blog uses but it wasn’t as straight forward as it seemed… long-term I want to make it a bit more Christmassy looking – there is no mental template but I assume at this stage it’ll be purples and greens and reds and whites but we’ll see!

So anyway I got to the stage where I had mimicked the blog template slightly and this is what you see now, but then reason two for wanting a redesign came up – the code is not well written (it’s essentially the same code as I wrote for it in 2004 that has over the years had things bolted on as the need to came up). A ground-up rewrite is the order of the day I think, and so that is the task I will endeavour to undertake between now and the end of November. It’s been 15 years in the making though, so I wouldn’t hold your breath, but in the interests of progress I’ve taken a copy of the database for testing purposes. I’ll keep you informed!

In what was an Advent Calendar Challenge first yesterday, I completely forgot to open the advent calendar before the end of the day. I say “first” – there have been other times when I’ve failed to open the window in time but that was emergency surgery related back in 2009, and, luckily, just before the end of the competition so it was reasonably easy to sort out.

I am currently on a whirlwind tour of my home county visiting various friends and family members for a sort-of early Christmas and yesterday was one of the busier days. My challenge obligations totally passed me by and it wasn’t until I woke in the night that I found a message from Andrew Chilcraft (regular player and 2013 champion) enquiring as to the status of the competition that I was able to rectify my mistake. I only partially did so – I failed to add the item to the list of opened windows which meant that the current standings table retained the position changes from the day before. Luckily, no-one scored on day 17 so the effects weren’t too pronounced…

The regulations state that the competition is automatically suspended if the window isn’t opened on time, but luckily it is not until the suspension has lasted 24 hours that special arrangements for the restart have to be made – I just about got away with it this time, but I realise this is probably not something I should repeat too often. My sincere apologies for this foul up – I won’t do it again!

Today’s window will be opened before the end of the day. On time. Like it’s meant to be. Let’s crack on!

Something that has been missing through the ages (annoyingly so) is a go-to list of every Advent Calendar Challenge champion, so my task for the past couple of days has been to make one. I am pleased to announce it has now been launched and can be found here.

When I set out to make it I envisaged something akin to an honours board in a sports club – a list of years and winners. I was going to expand that to have winning team and best “rookie” alongside it too, so it would have been a simple row-with-three-names structure – but along the way things changed a bit. First off I decided it would be nice to make use of the profile pictures I hold for some players (click a player’s name to see them for anyone. If you want yours added, removed or updated then let me know!) so I decided to work those in. This immediately caused a more 2D approach to be taken, with the huge year number you see on the final version and names listed vertically within each year.

Secondly there has been one year where there was a three-way tie for the win as all three leading points scorers had exactly the same scoring days throughout so there was no way to separate them. I needed a way to be able to list multiple winners in this case so the ability to stretch vertically was necessary for this too. In the end I settled on the top three for each year, as top threes are often acknowledged in competition anyway.

(As an aside, I’ve always been annoyed that unbreakable ties are possible but at work today I came up with a way to finally break them that isn’t arbitrary. I’ll be making use of Article 2b of the official regulations and going back to do just that in due course…)

The other hurdle I encountered was that whilst players have a unique ID number that the website uses to track and reference them throughout, the teams championship system was a bit more rough and ready so I had to build and implement that almost in full for the “Honours Board” script to work properly. This was complicated only slightly more by the fact that the teams championship basis has changed a few times since its inception and I don’t hold data in the back-end of the website for who was in what team for the older iterations of it. It’s easily reconstructed from the static html tables on the history pages, however, should I desire to do that for the future (I could, however, retrospectively work out who’d win the starsign championship all the way back to the start, if I wanted…). The honours board script in any event doesn’t add up the scores for every year manually every time, there’s a separate database table with final points and finishing positions stored in it so a simple lookup rather than lots of maths is all that is required.

So in the end after a few niggly bits of coding we end up with rather a simple page – huge year number, and a picture of the individual winner (or, for now, one of them at random where there was a tie) and the year’s top three, best rookie and winning team. Where the individual, team or debutante score record was broken that year, that is shown too (WR, TR or RB) along with a small label if that person or team was winning for more than the first time.