Vox Contribution Points (VCP): The Remix
About 4 years ago now I created the original VCP system that every Raider since then has participated in. Overall I've been very pleased with the functionality of the system and have enough confidence in the merits of the system to continue using it in the future for roster management needs.
That said, as many of you are also aware, the original website design suffers from a number of issues, in large part due to it being tacked on to the (now defunct) kAuction website, even though those services really have nothing to do with one another. In addition to the administration side of the old VCP site being a pain to work with, the software was written when I was far worse at programming than I am now (and also written in PHP, a language that is going the way of the dodo), and even had occasional bugs that have to be manually adjusted for to get the proper numbers.
Most importantly, as I discussed in the original Warlords of Draenor plans outline, the biggest failing that I've come to recognize in the old VCP system was a total lack of transparency. While the mechanics of the system are very simple and easy to understand, users must simply trust that the information from one week to the next is accurate, since there was no way to verify the integrity of the data short of manually tracking points raid to raid or week to week.
With that, I am pleased to announce the beta launch of the new VCP website!
https://vox.contributionpoints.com
I have been spending a great deal of my spare time lately creating this entirely new system from scratch and I believe it is now stable enough to open it up to the public for testing in a beta-style capacity.
I am still adding features and finishing up a lot of the holes in areas such as documentation, but please feel free to explore and report any issues or bugs here. You can find the beginnings of the documentation in the help pages in the top right of the site or even a bit of behind-the-scenes info in the dev wiki if you are interested.
To be very brief, here are some of the basic features:
- Account authentication via Battle.net -- More details here, but the gist is the site can pull your wow character information when you register and associate all your characters appropriately.
- Battle.net API integration -- Character information (for owned Characters) can be queued up and will be performed in the background, pulling data from the Battle.net API and updating the records on VCP accordingly.
- SSL encryption -- While only arguably relevant for the transmission between Battle.net and the website, all transactions are encrypted (Note: your browser may indicate an untrusted SSL certificate, but clicking for more info will show that the encryption is still in place. This is simply because I haven't paid the ~$60 to have my certificate verified by an outside source.)
- Cross-realm/cross-guild compatibility -- Characters and even guilds from any region or realm can be added and used in the system, particularly useful for cross-realm VCP standings during recruitment or cross-realm raiding.
- Lifelong historical data -- No more wondering why the Standings are the way they are. Users can view an individual Characters' profile to view a variety of statistics as well as the lifetime raid history, including exact detail of dates, times, and even what caused the particular point changes via mouseover tooltips.
- Full Retirement & Resume support -- When a player retires from the game or is on hiatus for some reason, that Standing record can be Retired, removing that player from the currently active Standings and distributing his or her Points accordingly, but retaining the full historical data of that player's past. If a previously-Retired player then returns at a later time, that record is simply Resumed and the system fully restores the Point-placement that individual left off with.
- Standing Ownership Transfers -- Swapping mains? No problem! Total ownership of a Standing record can be transferred at any time to a new Character without losing any historical data.
- Full raid, participation, and point revision control -- Any and all changes to an individual Character, Raid, or even a particular Participation event will appropriately propagate throughout the system, updating relevant Standings/Points/etc.
- Site-wide asynchronous retrieval, search, and sort capabilities -- Just about anywhere you see a table of data in the site you can sort any of the indicated columns or search by text in the appropriate box, and all data is pulled asynchronously for faster load times.
- Role-based authentication -- Visit any user page to see the assigned role(s) for that person. Appropriate users can assign roles to others, so that Moderators or Admins can edit a variety of data (help pages will outline these capabilities in the future).
I have populated the site with a lot of dummy data for testing purposes just to give a sense of how it will behave in practice, but do not take the existing data as accurate to reality -- it's just for testing and show.
I encourage (and kindly request) you mess around with the site a bit and see what's what. Please let me know if you have any issues or experience any bugs, because this will be the first time I've been able to test it from outsider perspectives. The big things I'm looking at are server stability and responsiveness.
I am also looking to get a few Officers or what not to help me test the Moderation and Admin functionality, since again I've been the sole tester thus far.
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Originally Posted by Aerro
