Post #49282
November 21, 2015, 04:28:13 PM
Recruiter Page Updates
With the recruiting contest going on, I've made some updates to make the recruiting system more usable and efficient:
1) The recruiting page will only show a maximum of 1000 nations at a time, which should make the page load faster and be more responsible. As you recruit nations on the last, older unrecruited nations will be added to the bottom of the list if there are any to display.
2) The Activity stats have been redesigned so that it's a little easier on the eyes to read and understand.
3) The system will now remove nations that have ceased to exist, particularly those that have been deleted by moderators because of their nation name or rule violations.
4) The system will now attempt to track the activity of nations on the recruitment list, and will now rank them in order of last activity instead of latest founded nation (noting that being founded is counted as an activity). A nation founded six hours ago that just changed their flag is probably a better recruitment target than one founded three hours ago that's done nothing since.
Technical Note: At various times changes 3 and 4 may only be partially effective, especially when nobody is on the recruit page. When someone is on the recruit page, the update script runs once a minute, but otherwise it runs every 15 minutes due to restrictions on cron jobs from our host. Since the NationStates API is limited to returning so many events, if there were more events in the previous 15 minutes some will be cut off...for example, during game update when many nations are being deleted. I've partially accounted for this by splitting things into multiple API calls, but until a better solution comes to me I believe the changes are still beneficial.
