As you have probably noticed I have relented and removed the gradients lol, they didn't go down well so I figured we would just go back to the solid colours. I actually quite like it but I do sort of miss them (at least the header gradient). I implemented the 'flat' mode as a theme for the site so when I do add theme selection it'l be an option for anyone who did like it.

I also upon advice from feedback and playing with the stream list settings decided to reduce the default preferred width for the streams. This resulted in an extra column in most of my tests of different window sizes, even with gapping enabled.

Potential changes to defaults

I am also probably going to go further however and change the defaults to those shown in the right. The new stream list options system allows for a lot more customization than the old ones did, so if you haven't checked it out you should have a play with it. If you have any suggestions for different options I should add let me know as the new system for them is pretty simple and flexible.

After some feedback on the new update I had a play around with them and I think these are prolly much better defaults than the 'Wall of PoVs' we launched with. It goes back to the old sort of style and look of HasRoot and I do think overall it is more functional, easier to read and just better. I started the streamlist update with the idea of borders = bad, and may have went a little too far.

I do think there are some people who would prefer the wall to wall POVs and this is why I added a lot of configuration options. So all you would have to do in that instance is just turn off all the gaps and above/below POVs. I really should add some presets so that people can try different groups of settings but that wont be immediate.

If you prefer the 'classic' look over the 'wall of PoVs' or vice versa let me know via the feedback function or on discord.

Hope you are all enjoying the site and thanks for putting up with the random changes going on.

All the best,
ScottishRambler

So as I am sure you have all noticed by now HasRoot has changed. It is the largest visual update to the site so far and includes a bunch of new updates to the streamlist. In this long blog I will touch on some of the reasons why I made the changes and what issues I was trying to address. If you would rather just jump straight into the new update be sure to check out the new streamlist settings (especially preferred size) and side panel!

So why a new site update?

Over the years HasRoot has grown from a one page site to a much larger project. As things went along more functionality and pages have been added and we now track far more servers than I ever even considered, we now also track over 11k streamers. I am not a designer and have often thrown my hands up as far as design goes and trying to make things look good.

Recently however I had been working on a a prototype project for a future collaboration, the functionality was all there and I had some ok ideas but my execution was awful. After some sobering feedback I reached out to Lilly who is a HasRoot Team member who has design and art experience. Since joining she had always helped me out with suggestions or looking at some new small thing I was working on and giving feedback but this time she really helped beat some basic design sense into me. The result was light years better, the same original concept just better execution and from that experience I gained some confidence (perhaps foolishly).

As things with that project slowed down for awhile I decided to use my new found confidence to try and tackle some of the things that have long bothered me about the HasRoot site.

The issues I wanted to address

The menu bar kept growing in complexity and was getting more clunky, it wasn't touch/mobile friendly and with HasRoot constantly adding more servers (and games) it was an ever growing issue. Partially because I was lazy and partially because of...

Just a quick blog, I have added Rust RP to HasRoot to track OTVS's The divide server. I sort of knew there was a lot of hype around it, rust is a game we have been considering adding for months (but I never got around to finding servers for it). We then got a server addition request on discord and well that is the main way to get me to add a server :P

You can check it out at https://thedivide.hasroot.com/

I didn't realise there was also a 2nd server, we will be adding that soon but I haven't propigated the DNS for that (yet) so watch this space.

Also a large new visual update for the site is now in 'public' beta testing. I have put a lot of work into it and I am super excited to launch it.
WARNING: THE TEST SITE WILL DELETE YOUR CURRENT SETTINGS.
You can check it out here https://test.hasroot.com

You also will be taken to the live site if you go to server specific pages, such as characters and streamer activity. Those pages haven't been changed much but protip if you use ?server= you can override that on the test domain.

https://test.hasroot.com//history.php?server=1
https://test.hasroot.com/characters.php?server=1
https://test.hasroot.com/streamers.php?server=1
https://test.hasroot.com/serverInfo.php?server=1

Most of it is functional but it isn't 100% finished yet, but if you want to check it out and give feedback on things that could be improved let me know. There will be a big blog when I post it (prolly). I think it can be finished off soon, its more polish left right now than functionality.

Also if you know of any other Rust RP servers we should track let me know via the feedback form or #addition-requests on the discord!

So it has been a long time since my last blog, infact I never even wrote a blog about adding RDR2 RP to the site and the new menu bar changes. I assume everyone is fairly aware of those changes by now though. I do not currently like the new menu bar and I have heard from some users they also don't like having to click on a page after changing server and such. Rest assured addressing these concerns is high up on my TODO list.

POV Viewer - See who was online and their approximate POV from clips and VODs!

I imagine some of you may have noticed by now but we have a new beta POV viewer which acts as a landing page for the history page. It shows the thumbnails of the time associated with a clip or moment from a vod (the page takes either a clip parameter or a server and date time). You can search by titles, streamer names and character names on this page in the same way you can on the history and stream pages. All our clips features and user scripts now link to the POV Viewer so check it out now! Here is an example you can check it out from the Chang prison riot.

Streamer Settings - Login with Twitch to edit your characters!

I have been talking about this one for a long time and it just kept getting delayed, there was a lot of reasons but it is finally here. You can now login to the site using a twitch account, currently this functionality is only useful for streamers who play GTA or RDR2 rp. When you login you can see all of your data, edit or add characters and change your fallback page. There is a description of the features on the page for our tracked streamers, if you are not a tracked streamer you can request to be tracked. All of the changes will require approval for our team to prevent abuse and maintain standards. You can...

I am still working on launching RDR2 RP tracking (and other changes, see previous blog for some more info). I have currently gotten sidetracked with rewriting the clip processing part of the backend java app. Despite all my best efforts of optomisiation on my home pc I was only able to process 100k clips an hour without noticeable impact on my pc / the test website. I had completely rewritten everything I could to eke out better performance when I decided to check the root of the issue. Turns out my local MySQL settings were pretty awful, only allocating 8mb for the inno db buffer. (How much ram of a specific table type could use as a buffer at a time).

This obviously was very minuscule amount but I had been suffering from ram issues for awhile, I have an old i7 920 pc and it had 6 gigs of ram total. I bumped it up to 80mb, this helped a fair bit but obviously was still rather low. I decided to finally bite the bullet and buy some more ram, it is something I have been meaning to do since I originally built the pc. I originally built it around 10 years ago and cheaped out on the ram with the intent to replace it / add more later. I never thought it would be 10 years later however.

Regardless, I bought 12 gigs of ram and installed it today. I then unleashed MySQL and it is currently eating 6gb of my ram but is it blazingly fast, I went from being able to process 100k clips an hour to 200k clips a minute. Not only that I was able to use my pc without it randomly freezing and crawling to a snails pace. Definitely something I should have done along time ago but money and other factors delayed it. I have spent today playing with MySQL settings and the performance is night and day. Everything is beyond insanely fast, I had to actually whip up a quick request throttler as Twitch only allows around 800 requests a minute and the backend end was doing 800 requests every 20 seconds.

To the point, I am still working on things and preparing a deployment plan as there is...