Driver Database Updates

The members of Driver Database with a little bit of extra trust (earned by extremely hard work and dedication) can now approve some more submissions sent in by the “regular” users. They have been able to approve fan messages, new drivers and changes to driver profiles (names, birth dates and such) for a few months now, but from today they can also approve changes that have been made to championships and non-championship races. This should hopefully mean that the queue for these entries should be considerably smaller than if I’m the only one who can approve/decline these.

The hard working members who now can approve/decline these submissions are; Bertil, Urs, Dirk, Erick, Erik, Jari, Otto, Federico and Ross. These guys all play an extremely vital role in what goes on at Driver Database and without them the database would probably be only a fraction of the size it is today.

On another note I removed the bug which prevented the cached results on the driver’s overview page to not be updated when an entry had been deleted.

I’ve compiled a little to-do list on a separate page on this blog. I will keep it updated with new stuff and when tasks have been completed. You are all very welcome to come with suggestions of things to improve, but try to keep it reasonable.

A lot of work, very little spare time and trying to complete the Premier Profiles (which for reasons indicated earlier in this blog is quite important for the future of the web site) has made me fall back on my emailing again. But I will get back to you all as soon as I possibly can.

A few drivers can now try out their premier profile; Michael Bilyy, Cassey Watson and Jono Lester took advantage of my free try out (2 free spots are still remaining, just read the my previous blog post for more info) and they can now try it out by logging into their account and looking at all the new goodies that are now available on their profile page under the “Submit info”-link.

Also, let’s all cheer for Jono as he makes his Porsche Supercup debut this weekend in Bahrain! Good luck!
Edit: It appears that Jono will have to wait for his Supercup debut.

Oh, and here’s the link you’ve all been waiting for:
Things to do in 2010

The long awaited premier profiles are now ready for a few days of testing. Everything is now implemented, I just need to test it out a bit before I’ll let drivers have the option of upgrading their regular boring profile into a premier profile.

With a premier profile the driver (or manager/racing mom or dad) can add their biography, presentations of their sponsors, YouTube clips,  latest tweets, links to Facebook fan-page, Q&A’s, external blog feeds, favourite links, published press releases and perhaps most importantly get top priority when it comes to updates of data and photos.

My goal with the top priority is to be able to add press releases the same business day that they are received (if they are received before 17:00 CET) and all photos and data (if they are sent in correctly) within two business days. This is just a goal however, not a guarantee, as most of the functions on Driver Database relies on me alone and I can’t guarantee that I won’t be home sick or out of the office some days of the year.

The price for a premier profile will be €40 for six months or €65 for one year (may be subject to change).

Five drivers will have the chance though to try it out right now for free though, before the proper launch (which will be a few days or so from now).

The first five drivers to comment on this blog entry with something in the likes of “Yeah! Let me try this thing out!” will get their Driver Database profile upgraded to a Premier Profile for 6 months for FREE (and there are off course no strings attached once those six months run out)!

(The drivers on Driver Database who have a nice and shiny gold medal on their profile page has already had their profiles upgraded (for one year) as a thanks for their support .)

I’m looking for the results of the Endurance race at Paul Ricard in December 2009 of the Sportscar Winter Series. This results from this race seems impossible to find.

It really should be easy though as there are two sources:

1. Formula Le Mans website – with results PDF’s.
2. Paul Ricard website – with results PDF’s.

It isn’t easy though:

1. The PDF on the Formula Le Mans website about this round contains lots and lots pages and is even called “complete results”, but results for Race 3 is mysteriously missing.

2. The PDF at the Paul Ricard website for the Endurance race looks to have been overwritten with Race 3 from the next round.

I’ve tried to contact Oreca about it, with no luck.

I’m hoping there’s someone out there with either better search skills than me or someone who actually has the results sheets for that race.

I’ve made good progress on the Premier Profiles now (where drivers will be able to upgrade their driver profile with some more stuff). The things that are now working are:

• Add a biography
• Make comments to career entries
• Answer questions in the Q&A
• Add sponsors, logos and links
• Toggle extra visibility in lists (bold) on or off
• Add contact info
• Add links and feeds to social media and blogs

The things that are still on the to-do lists should be quick for me to get ready as they re-use most of the code from the above points.

• Add YouTube clips
• Add favourite links

Once I have those completed you’ll be able to see a demo page of a premier profile in action.

Back to work!

Edit: Got two more things done. Only two left on the to-do-list now.

Today is a big day. It’s Driver Database’s birthday. The website has now turned six years old!

It all started in early 2004 when I was doing a little research during the F1 silly season. I found it hard to get all the information I wanted from one (or in some cases even from several sites). Formula 1 results wasn’t hard to find, but earlier career statistics was a bit more difficult to find and the driver’s own web pages obviously forgets about those years where there were no good results.

I tried to get some tips about good web pages over at the Swedish Formula 1 forum F1BB.com (now F1BB.se), but there really wasn’t anything that came close to what I was looking for. I then asked “if there’s no site like this, why not create one?” and got very pessimistic answers about the amount of work involved, can’t be done etc… Those responses obviously made me more motivated to start the website. I registered the domain name driverdb.com on the 20th of February 2004, as a little tribute to hockeydb.com which sort of was the main inspiration at that point.

In retrospect I should have listened to the pessimists – it really was way too much work.

The first decent working version of Driver Database wasn’t really up and running until 2005 or something, but work began right away.

Here’s the first image of what Driver Database looked like in early 2004. It was just an ugly mock-up basically, complete with phony driver names.

We’ve come a long way.

Driver Database was never really meant to be my number one project. At this time I had just started developing a massively multiplayer racing management game. The backbone of Driver Database was then going to be used for driver statistics in the game and non-player characters would be randomly created from real world data. The management game was quickly put on ice though, a very basic version still exists on my hard drive somewhere.

Some of you noticed that the pageview count yesterday wasn’t counting unique pageviews but all of them. This led to the good old “hit refresh, goddamnit!” syndrome. Those of you who spent all yesterday and today on the F5-button, I’m sorry but it won’t work anymore and the multiple reloads have been deducted from the pageview total. Things are more or less back to normal.

The Driver blogs now have a new front page. Nothing too exciting or pretty, but it should work for now.

Members with direct write permissions have probable noticed and been rather annoyed about that it hasn’t been possible to completely remove a driver’s website. It’s been possible to remove the current URL, but the little house icon has still been present – although pointing at nothing. Today I took care of it so if you now delete the website, the house icon gets removed as well.

Otherwise this day has been spent adding results. Both current results for the NZ based championships but also a couple of oldies; most notably the 2003 season of the British Formula Ford championship.

I thought I’d take a few moments to explain how the “Most buzz” list and the Driverdb.com “popularity” ranking works. It’s really simple, it counts the number of unique pageviews a driver’s profile page gets. This is nothing scientific at all, but it does give some sort of yard stick as to which driver is the most talked about, and therefor mostly researched driver at Driver Database. This works unless people with nothing better to do start spamming their profile pages to get better ranking in these lists.

So, what are the measures taken to limit this?

Here’s how it basically works:

Once per day (when most buzz gets updated) a script runs and triggers when it finds what it believes to be “unnatural” hits based on the surfing pattern of the visiting IP address. It then counts the unnatural hits and the natural hits for each profile page. If a profile page has only 10% (for example) of its hits coming from natural visits, the following day only 10% of the total hits will be counted. The next day this number might be 20% and then 20% of the hits will be counted the day after.

It’s simple, really, if you try to inflate the view count, you will have to work a little bit harder each day as the script adapts to the new percentages. And when you’re down at 0.1% you do the maths on how many times you need to change your dynamic IP to get a pageview…