Web Services Department Bi-annual Update

[Daniel Lange (1352906)]

 

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays  Same procedure as every year(x2), a bi-annual Web Department update, except that I forgot to write an update this summer  There's not very much going on since the last update, but a larger change is coming in 2024 that I'll describe here.

What are we working on?

Control Center

• This year we released v4 and many other subversions containing quality of life improvements, optimalisation and most visible change is the task system for mentors and staff. We don't receive that much feedback or bug reports on CC; so just a friendly reminder to send your feedback, bugs and suggestions to web@vatsim-scandinavia.org if you come across something. 
• Many of this years updates has been to improve the attractiveness of the software for other vACCs to use. We're happy to see that VATSIM Latvia, Vietnam, Czechia, Hellenic and Adria are using our software as well. This supports our vision that all individual vACC's don't reinvent the wheel of creating their own plattform.
• Onwards we'll mostly use time to adjust to the new Global Controller Administration Policy that comes in effect in March. This may impose some technical changes we don't know about just yet.

Discord bot

• This year has mostly been bug fixing, but also work connected to a new staffing solution that will be more robust. As today's solution is a bit shaky at times.

Moodle

• We're not developing Moodle, but in general just holding it up to date with latest updates and functionality.

Wiki

• This year we moved the wiki to a new solution (Bookstack) and opened it for all FIRs to use. We initially planned to remain on the old solution (Wikijs) but the updates we needed to expand the wiki for all FIRs never came after almost two years of waiting, so we felt more comfortable to choose a more actively updated open source platform. 

Forums

• Since the new wiki solution is now in place, we're ready to do a larger change in our forums. With the board's decision this autumn, the Web Department has received the task to renew the forum platform and change it into a open source alternative. There's multiple reasons for this:
  • Today's forum is barely used, but for the use that it still exists it's important to keep
  • The price we pay for Invision (today's platform) is incredibly high compared to our actual use
  • Invision is quite buggy and the quality of the service we get no longer justifies the price
• The plan is:
  • Replace the Invision with a free and open source alternative.
  • No threads will be migrated due to missing migration possibilities. Meaning we’ll start quite fresh here and that important threads will need to be manually copied over by your if needed.
  • The new solution will not have editable pages functionality which is currently used to host text, documents and other related ATC or pilot material on Invision. This means all documents will be moved to the wiki during this process.
  • The change will happen sometime during Q1 2024.

Stats and facts

I’ve collected some statistics from our division and services that I though be fun to share.

We're still a large subdivision, and has as of today, 4878 (+360 in '23) registered members according to the VATSIM Database. On Discord we are 2286 (+726 in '23). Ranking us, at least on the official VATSIM Discord list, 4th (+1) largest Discord server. Only 161 members behind VATEMEA.

For the first time in history, #finnish-chat is no longer on top of text channels. This is data for last 3 months.

Norway is still top representing except of other countries.

When it comes to ATC related statistics, based on ATC activity the last 12 months, this is our top 10 controllers based on online hours! Thank you for your dedication!

Controllers with most ATC hours per 2023-12-26

 

Name	ATC hours last 12m	Registered country
@Jere Heiskanen (1440666)	1103	FI
@Jeppe Seier (1602589)	746	DK
@Henri Luiro (1458761)	731	FI
@Lasse Skage (1587880)	647	NO
@Hakan Schulz (937154)	615	SE
@Roald Strangstadstuen (1425746)	561	NO
@Marcus Lundelin (1480664)	553	SE
@Jakob Ek Jensen (1336291)	548	DK
@Sonnich Jensen (1449414)	511	DK
@Ahti Matilainen (1470273)	501	FI

Whole community average: 100 hours (-18h since last year)
Whole community median:  44 hours (-24h since last year)

That's all!

I'd like to thank my Web team for this year's contributions:

@David Mortensen (1419105) for his work on the infrastructure, backup solutions and similar.

@Markus Nielsen (1401513) for working on the Discord bot and upcoming event staffing solution

@Thor Høgås (1512667) for his dedication to improve the development pipelines, to make our infrastructure more easy to use and develop our products quicker and more thoroughly. In addition he has helped out during our v4 updates in Control Center.

With this, I wish you and everyone a happy new year!