Cyberscore History
From Cyberscore Wiki
Taken from the Cyberscore site. Written by MikkyX.
Contents |
Fastercast
For 9 years, MikkyX had been a gamer, striving for the best scores and the fastest times. Veteran was much the same, and he felt pretty unbeatable at Soul Calibur. So it was decided that we'd set up a site on which to advertise this fact.
Fastercast was written in Perl and didn't use a database. Launching in March 2000, data was read to and from flat files, and you didn't need to register. Soul Calibur was the first game on there before it was joined by time trials for Sonic Adventure, Sega Rally 2, and Tokyo Highway Challenge. The principle was the same - submit your time and see it appear straight away.
Sadly, Fastercast (it even had a rotten name) was never a great success and lasted, if Google Groups is anything to go by, less than a month.
While playing Mario Kart: Super Circuit little over 18 months later, the inspiration hit to do it all again. Using recently garnered PHP knowledge, the GBAList was prepared and launched on November 5th. A tiny database powered the site, which launched with MK:SC and later was meant to get Advance Wars added.
GBAList
The GBAList was a much bigger success than Fastercast and it led us to start thinking there was potential for something bigger - much bigger.
While the GBAList continued going from strength to strength, behind the scenes work begun on building a new database. This database would be capable of accepting submissions to games on lots of different platforms, there would be a scoreboard showing the best players site-wide, and you'd be able to submit to multiple charts from one page.
After a brief period of internal beta testing, April 22nd arrived. Google Groups will show that it was unofficially launched a few days earlier but April 22nd was the day it was declared out of testing, and will always be the official birthday of the site you see in front of you now.
Birth of Cyberscore
April 22nd 2002, then, goes down as the day Cyberscore officially hit the public eye. Newsgroups were the initial source of publicity and a slow trickle of gamers came to show off their skills.
The original site (CS v0.5, if you will) looked awful. It was swiftly replaced, within a month, by a red and black design that, in retrospect, probably didn't look that much better.
It took two months to get 1,000 visitors through the door, which should give you an idea of how fast the site grew - within three years we'd be pulling in 100,000 a month.
There was a brief experiment with a Monkey Ball "minisite" sandwiched somewhere in the next couple of months. Then the forums launched July 21st but again, talk was slow. We originally had one board for each console before settling on the system we now have in place.
Five months after launching, we finally hit 100 registered users when Manuel Arrendondo took up user ID 100 in the database.
Red and black was starting to grate a bit now though, so we went back to the drawing board.....
Cyberscore 2
While CS continued a slow but steady growth, we began rewriting from the ground up. Work commenced on Cyberscore 2 which would make navigation easier, include chart groupings, a user to user messaging system, and serve you freshly toasted crumpets every morning.
In a somewhat unusual display, CS2 was previewed ten months before launch. The new blue look got its first public airing in January 2003.
In the meantime, Wario Ware got added. Suddenly, Cyberscore was getting coded a lot slower and used a lot more. The original history recorded this as the day our server "exploded". Of course, this was purely metaphorical, and nothing actually blew up.
Cyberscore 2.5
Cyberscore 2 launched 19 months after Cyberscore first hit the webwaves. November 8th saw blue and white become the new red and black, and it's a scheme which has persisted ever since.
Around this time, XHTML was starting to gain credibility as the right way to design websites. Picking up on this, Mikky began to feel the temptation to redesign the site - again.
January 2004 was a big month in the history of CS. Not only did we finally reach 10,000 visitors in a single month, we also hired help! A team of volunteers stepped forward from the forums to help moderate things on the site, and their sterling effort continues to this day.
After hitting 50,000 records in February and 100 games in March, CS2.5 then, would launch in June 2004. Fully XHTML compliant and tableless where it mattered, it was no coincidence, perhaps, that we hit 50,000 visits just one month later.
It was to be the final iteration of Cyberscore on that database. Almost immediately, talk began of Cyberscore 3. The database was beginning to show its age and things were starting to run a bit slowly. We agreed that things needed to be done and announced that the next version of Cyberscore would feature a completely new database structure.
September 2004 saw us hit 100,000 records and 5,000 users. 2005 began with more milestones - 100,000 visits in one month (February), 150,000 records (March).
Then, disaster struck.
The Crash
March 15th 2005 will always be remembered as the blackest day in Cyberscore history. Our server collapsed, resulting in the corruption of all of its drives, and the destruction of the RAID array which was meant to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
Frantically, we tried to restore what little backup we had. It failed. Cyberscore was, to all intents and purposes, lost. It was a sad day.
We're not going to lie, we were so upset we honestly considered giving up at this point. CS3 was due a public unveiling, everything was going perfectly, then the rug was pulled out.
The support of the users and the moderators got us back on our feet and working faster than ever. Moderators pledged to re-add everything and users pledged their support in getting the records back in again.
Cyberscore 3
We got the forums back up quickly enough, taking the chance to switch from phpBB to SMF, thus making the forums XHTML compliant along with the site.
Speedy as you like, we blitzed through the CS3 code and arguably, we've launched ahead of schedule. A staff-only alpha went live on April 15th. The site was first unveiled to the forum on April 22nd. A limited-access beta for respected forum goers followed soon after.
Cyberscore finally returned for real on 25th July. It's been a long road full of twists and turns but boy, is it ever good to be back.
Within a week we'd (unsurprisingly, perhaps) accomplished what the original site had taken over 2 years to pull off - 50,000 records on-site. In early August we took on more help, bringing in 5 new moderators to take the total up to 11.
CS3 turned out to be a bit too complex for a mere VPS, and in early September we moved to a dedicated server and we'll soon be moving into the hosting business.
The future? To borrow a phrase from Natasha Bedingfield (we never thought we'd need to do that), the rest is still unwritten.
