They say no news is good news, but maybe this'll cheer some of you up. As many of you have noticed, the weekly awards were a little screwy last week and this week. Last week was OK, because all of the awards were stored as they should have been and it just came to running the lists manually, but it came to crunch time this week. I'll try and explain clearly what went on, but before I do, here are some of the reasons this is taking so long:
1. There's a ton of other stuff that needs/needed to be taken care of that happens on a daily basis, rather than weekly.
2. It's difficult to test this kind of thing and make sure it all goes without a hitch, since it's a once weekly occurrence.
3. The data in the testing environment dates back to November or so last year - so when running tests on this, you don't get any results for this week's winners, because there aren't any in the testing environment. We could have run another import of today's latest backup, problem there being it would probably take longer to do the import than it would just to go ahead and fix everything.
So, the script that runs weekly and picks the winners is archaic - it's been hacked at over the years to accomodate portal audio stuff and changes of content, but that's about it. It was probably one of the oldest scripts, if not the oldest script, in our current environment that's being used. It contained references to a bunch of old and equally dated scripts, some of which don't exist any more. So it was getting so far through its tasks before spazzing out.
I spent today re-writing the file and accompanying files, so we should be good here on in. There's still an issue with some of the lists on the portal not updating correctly, I'm about to get on that (the one I'm thinking of is the Past daily winners list) - but apart from that, I think we're good to go with the lists in the portal from here on in.
Sorry that some of the entries for today's winners got juggled around - all but two awards are still on the list (the ones that aren't there won awards last week), so at least everyone who was supposed to be ranked today is ranked, even if slightly differently than earlier on in the day.
You can see how lonely the testing environment is looking below.
