This is an old, old project.
I don't update it anymore - I can't update it anymore.
I'm not going to fix it, it's too much effort and I get very little back from it.
I'm proud of it.
I learned a lot from it.
I started it here long, long ago.

Initially I scraped the entire official Leaderboard "manually", one page at a time in Firefox, copying and pasting it into Notepad and then using Find/Replace to narrow it down to useful data and putting that into spreadsheets (CSV). Then I made a database out of that data, made a very plain and ugly front-end with in searching, sorting and filtering, and occasionally made updates by hand. Remember, in those days players would level up very slowly. I think R6 was a top-3-percent kind of deal and every player above a reasonable level was included in the Leaderboard.

Eventually I got sick of that and made a better system- I made a PHP script that scraped the pages for me, iterating through each page by itself and doing a butt-tonne of PHP RegEx to get the details I wanted and spit 'em into my database. Way better. I made a new front-end which mimicked the Auction House front-end. Those were good times. We started having so many high-level players (or rather, so many high-level alts and bots...) that the Leaderboard stopped showing lower levels. Eventually there were almost no players below R7 in the Leaderboard, so all those players who "fell off the rader"... I couldn't scrape their new details. They were just stuck, unchanging, in my database - even if they did, in fact, change in level/class/guild etc.

No histories were kept in those days, when I uploaded a new CSV of scraped data it would find a username/server combo and just update it. I always wanted a running history, but every time I thought about how I would have to change my behemoth legacy system... Well, I just couldn't do that to myself, it would be huge.

Of course, I eventually added histories, sort of. I basically re-made the whle database and ported over the old data (allowing for blank spots which weren't in the old one). Clicking a player's name would show changes to their level/guild/class in an awkward sort of way. As my notes pointed out, there was basically nothing below 160 anymore in the Leaderboard. I added better sorting and filtering, more search options, and a just a cleaner interface (shedding the old Auction House layout, even though I'm really darn proud of how that turned out).

Then they changed something. Not sure what, but my scraper stopped working. I tried to get it going again but it wasn't cooperative. I spent a few evenings on it and couldn't get it going. By this point I had been perma-banned on the forum by some idiot (thank goodness it's gone!) and had long-since given up on the game itself, so I'm not giving it any more time.

I added a header to my page recommending this fantastic tracker by Wantmytip, as it did a great job of player stat tracking and it actually updated still. Aaaand then the site went down, someone reported this fact, and then one of the worst mods we ever had just flat-out killed the thread because they're a sad and lifeless vulture who can't even find an avatar of their own. A real champion of the people.

So now I'm back to being the only game in town (that I know of), and I guess that means I'm the best again. Sad little king of a sad little kingdom. Even though the site's dead and defunct, it's the only one left so it's the best by default. Sad.

And you know what? People still use (or... try to...) my stat tracker, very occasionally; I see it, I have logs of the searches made (eg. what name or class or guild they searched for), click >here< to see it in action if you're interested in that kind of thing. It kind of hurts to see people come, try it, and leave - probably not having a use for such outdated information. T_T

So... Farewell I guess. I'm unlikely to try and fix this tracker. Unless: Off-Topic returns, Baell gets fired, Hawk gets fired (or fried, w/e), Sandboxie returns or native multi-clients is enabled, buffs are made into toggles(!!), min-max normalization (force a soft-max which can be broken but with diminishing returns) is added to keep errant outliers in check, they fix the darn "ho" bug in guild names and shop names, and they un-ban my damned forum account. Maybe after ALL THAT, all those things I fought for so vehemently prier to my perma-ban, I just might take another look at it.

Alright everyone,
Keep on trollin' :')

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