Pointercrate

2022-10-04: No more ads!

There are no more ads on pointercrate! Thank you for your patience in dealing with them <3

In somewhat related news, I have graduated from my MSc programme, and am now a full time Software Engineer, which means my time to work on pointercrate will be even more reduced compared to last year :(. My hope is that people will take interest in contributing to the website on GitHub, so that I can take on a more mentorial role for new contributors/maintainers, so if you are interested in the coding side of pointercrate, please reach out to me, either on GitHub or the pointercrate discover server!

2021-08-31: Player Claiming!

Instead of bothering a list moderator to change your nationality, you can now create a pointercrate account and initiate a 'player claim'. Such a claim, once verified by a pointercrate moderator over at the Pointercrate Central discord server allows you to manage your claimed player in the following ways:

• Update its nationality via IP geolocation,
• Prohibit anyone but yourself from submitting records for this player (meaning all future submissions must happen while logged in to the pointercrate account that has claimed the player).

To manage player claims, please go to the new User Area you can find in the navigation bar at the top.

On a more serious note, I will undertake graduate study in October, meaning my time to work on pointercrate will become severely limited.

2021-07-25: New Stats Viewer!

So, you might notice that I am writing these changelog entries very retroactively (in fact, it is the evening of the 8th September, 2024 as I am writing this). You can thank alyn for bringing to my attention that this changelog exists and is severely outdated.

Be that as it may, in this update to pointercrate, a new stats viewer page is born. The old stats viewer was a simple panel on the main demonlist page, similar to the record submitter. As such, it was quite cramped and didn't allow much extension with new features. The new stats viewer is its own page, and most prominently features a world map that

1. shows the global distribution of stats viewer points in form of a heat map,
2. allow you to see the ranking of players within each nation, and
3. allows you to view a ranking of nations themselves.

The nation ranking is computed by looking at the best record on each demon that a player in this nation has achieved, and then summing up the score of these records (this way, having more players is not neccessarily an advantage, as two different players beating a demon will only gives points once).

2021-04-04: Throwback Anniversary!

A lot has happened since the last serious update to pointercrate. While I am writing this, I am studying abroad in Ohio. By the end of the year, I'll be attending grad school in England. These undertakings require money, money I do not have. This is why I recently started putting put ads on pointercrate, with 100% of revenue going into my tuition fund.

But beyond that, I also have a very exciting new feature to share: Pointercrate's own WayBackMachine! It is now possible to view old versions of the demon list going back to 2017-08-05 (I sadly do not have data from most of the 'blue' era, as paqoe calls it, or the forum days). This was definitely one of the most requested features, so I am very happy to announce its implementation (and it going live on pointercrate's 4th anniversary is quite fitting).

Note that for now, past versions of the stats viewer are not available. This is definitely planned, though.

2020: Not a lot tbh!

Keeping up with the tradition of updating this part of the website precisely once a year, I find myself not really able to report about a major update at all. While there were some quite significant changes made to pointercrate this year, they were mostly internal, or not available to the public. Which is why I am using this entry to just quickly summarize the few things that did change this year

• GD Integration has been reworked and is now based upon a much more solid foundation. Our new GD connector, dash-rs, was developed in collaboration with mgostIH.
• Back in march, pointercrate's internals were rewritten to utilize the then-stabilized async/await mechanics. At the same time, the entire database layer was rewritten.
• Since september, the list mods use a web interface for managing the list, instead of a disord bot

Some of these changes will bring improvements to the public facing parts of pointercrate soon hopefully. Mainly, there are plans to overhault the record submitters using some of the UI components that have been developed for the internal management interface. A completely list of planned featured can also be found on this trello board.

2019-03-02: Rustification!

The entire website has been rewritten in Rust! Various minor bugs that were noticed while porting over from the old python backend were fixed and performance has greatly improved. Other than that, it's mostly an internal change, so the list of (visible) changes is rather short:

• I have (yet again) redesigned the home page! Most notably, it has been merged it with the former about page, as both were very under-utilized.
• The Demonlist now has an overview page over here. which shows an actual list (revolutionary, I know) of all demons
• The API has been majorly overhauled. Most changes should be backward compatible, since I just added a ton of fields, but there are some other changes as well, so be sure to check the documentation again. Mainly, there is no state parameter for demons anymore and player.beaten has become the more general player.records.
• There is now deeper integration with the GD servers, allowing me to display additions stats for each demon. The code to calculate level length and accurately count objects was contributed by cos8o, so big thanks to him!

Now onto some more serious topics: As some of you might know, I took up a second undergrad course (mathematics) in october, meaning my university schedule became much more demanding, leaving me nearly no time to work on pointercrate. Development on discord bots related to pointercrate and the Demonlist has already been taken over by GunnerBones, and with pointercrate becoming open source, I'm hoping to find more people will to work on it.

2018-04-04: Anniversary Update!

Its been one year since I rented the pointercrate domain and started hosting the Demonlist! Today I'm happy to announce the official pointercrate API, which can be used to programmatically access the Demonlist. The documentation can be found here. Further minor changes include:

• Internal rework of how list mods are authenticated. They now use the account system.
• The website now embeds nicely into discord!
• We added a link to the official Demonlist discord server, which is an awesome place where I get help with spellchecking
• There is now a public discord bot that integrates with the Demonlist! Find it in the discord server!
• The API is actually just the first step in something way more awesome hopefully coming "soon"... :)

2017-10-29: New design!

Pointercrate's design has been completely overhauled, to fix various issues we had with the old version:

• The old homepage was thrown together in 5 minutes and you all knew it
• Scrollbars were working weirdly or not at all
• On mobile you couldn't close the Demonlist after clicking that weird button in the bottom left corner
• There was way too much blue

Most of these issues arose because the old version was not designed with mobile in mind, and mobile support was 'hacked in' later. The new design uses a mobile-first approach and should be a lot more responsive.