Recycle Bin Functionality Online

I hope all of you have a good start to the new year! Contributors will now have access to the recycle bin. This feature will allow inactive modifications to the site's data to be removed or re-assigned to someone else. This serves to address an issue where contributors - mainly new contributors - send an existing tournament or player to the Development Area to be modified, only to never touch it ever again and prevent anyone else from making changes. A very minimalistic function has already been running for the past several months, which deleted any edits that have not been modified within the first hour of being sent to the Development Area. Data sent to the Development Area and never touched accounted for more than half of the active edits, with the rest having a couple of changes and then forgotten. The new functionality being rolled out today will address it.

If an edit hasn't been touched for a long period of time, the edit will removed to unlock it for someone else. As a safety feature, any changes that have to be deleted will first be moved to the recycle bin. This will allow contibutors a chance to reclaim their modifications, and if need be, allow other contributors to take control of them. The site automatically deals with idle changes as follows:

• Any changes to existing data that have not been modified whatsoever within the first hour will be deleted straightaway
• Any changes that has been in the Recycling Bin for 72 hours will be deleted
• Any changes to existing data that has not been modified for 48 hours ago will be sent to the recycle bin
• Any new data to the site has to be manually sent to the recycle bin, since they don't lock anyone out
• Any new players or images associated with other data must be de-associated before they can be sent to the recycle bin

This will alleviate almost all of the problems with inactive modifications, though you would have to wait 48 hours before you could take control of them. As with the archives, the recycle bin feature took significantly longer than anticipated to implement due to the structure of the data on the site. At first glance it looked like to could just set a simple flag and it would be done. It turns out many parts of the development area had to be modified in order to account for "recycled data". Please press CTRL+F5 to reload any scripts that may have changed in case you're having problems.

Though it looks small in appearance, this is another major feature of the site being rolled out. Of the announced features, the next one to work on are the publishing privileges for long-time contributors. The current system I personally use is very barebones; only useful for publishing. Before I let others use it, I need to work on different tools such as a comparison window to highlight the exact changes that are being made.

I also have some unannounced features to implement. Though I won't say exactly what they are at this time, I will reveal that it requires the forums to be brought back online. The forums were taken down a few years ago due to the immense amount of spam it received and the inadequate tools to deal with it quickly and effectively. However, the features I would like to add requires it to be in place. Some of them will be something long-time contributors will really appreciate. Seriously. :)