Official forums for BZFlag.org

Hello everyone,

A while ago I made a service providing information about servers and players and called it BZList, however it was poorly made. Later I completely remade it (twice) with major improvements. I'm officially releasing it in a tomorrow. The client is open-source and can be accessed at https://bzlist.net and the code is on GitHub at https://github.com/bzlist/. The site is mobile friendly and also works offline (although data won't be updated). I am also currently making a plug-in which will provide live information to the database which is automatically synced to clients.

How servers are queried and what is stored
Every 10 minutes a script is run (using a cron job) which gets the official server list from https://my.bzflag.org/db/ and checks each server and if there are any players online it will query it. Otherwise it will just save the data from the server list. If there is no stored data for the server then even if there are no players online it will be queried.

All saved data is publicly accessible via Firebase (it might take some Googling and looking through the source code). Here is the general outline: BZList is still in beta with heavy active development. I plan to keep it alive as long as BZFlag is.

I'm announcing it early so any server owners who wish to not have their servers queried can contact me. Just send me a PM. The data is only updated every once in a while manually until it's released tomorrow (2019-5-2) sometime in the morning or afternoon (US) then it will be set to automatically update.

BZList is now officially released and the cron job to is running every 10 minutes.

Something I wanted these list and log sites to do for a while now, was keep a log of callsigns that played on certain maps, at least for the last 48 hours or so.

Strayer's has something very close to it, showing activity per team in the last 24 hours on a graph, but doesn't log the callsigns, at least as far as I know. The only shown callsigns are of currently active players.

Display of such data would be possible from the data at-hand already, one just has to do it.

I'm planning on adding that feature, but thanks for your feedback!

With the official release nearing, data is now queried every 5 minutes like Strayers.

I had to refresh the page twice to get the current version of the site. Initially I was still getting the old layout with data that was 187 days old.

Looks quite nice! Just a slight typo I found in the attachments; seems to appear for all servers on the list.

blast: Yeah that's because of the old service worker.
tainn: Whoops, thanks for the catch!

I've created a short survey, it would help greatly if people filled it out. Survey.

There is still a lot that I'm working on, so don't worry if BZList is missing something.

I like it. One thing though, are notifications supposed to work? I granted permissions in browser and tried testing by adding favorite server and a friend, but I get no notifications for either.

Never mind, I started getting notifications.

I created a Discord server for feedback and up-to-date information so I don't fill the forums with it, feel free to join: https://discord.gg/fBWGDBx

Thanks for bringing that back!

It crashes for me with "TypeError: this.props.server.countryCode is undefined"