Announcement - Statistics Tracker down

Update 12th of October 11:00 EET

Block got removed yesterday, statistics for today should have been ran successfully. However, there are some glitches here and there, mainly since Planetwot haven't been developed to handle a week down time. However, tomorrow everything should be working as normal.

Known glitches/errors:

Daily statistics show now stats from a past week

Daily statistics show now all vehicles, including the ones you haven't played

Daily statistics don't work on previous dates (when the statistics tracker was down)

Vehicle specific statistics don't work completely: graphs aren't rendered quite right

Best regards, Jarkko Iso-Heiko, alias JTS @ EU (say hi if you see me at the battlefield ;)

Update 7th of October 11:39 EET

Site is still blocked. Hopefully it will be removed as soon as possible, but currently I'm not able to tell any estimated date.

Update 6th of October 10:39 EET

Block is still there, let's hope it gets removed before sunday morning.

Update 5th of October

Good news everyone! Wargaming EU Community team has done work in this case, and as a result Planetwot is free to update their statistics starting tomorrow. However the block still exists, and I am not sure that what time tomorrow it will be removed, so depending on the situation statistics might be updated tomorrow. However quite surely they should be updated atleast by the sunday morning.

I hope people don't blame Wargaming for what has happened. Harvesting stats is resource consuming, and they had no idea that the IP blocked was from Planetwot.com. They have all the reasons to block resource hogs which they have no idea who is behind it and with what purposes.

Thank everyone for their support, via email, irc and forums. Althou I know the count of users in Planetwot, I surely had no idea people using it are actually so active, and feel the service so important. Nice to hear I am not the only one whose first things in the morning is to check yesterdays statistics :)

Also great thanks to Wargaming EU Community team, they have been extremely nice and helpful during this problem we had. They even informed me that they try to get a contact for me in the community team which might could actually help with the updating process. However, this is to be seen in the future. However, my gratitude to EU Community Team!

TL;DR: Statistics might be updated tomorrow (saturday), but most probably at sunday morning.

Regards, Jarkko Iso-Heiko, alias JTS - Planetwot developer, 5th of October 2012

Original announcement

On 4th of October morning we faced some problems with the statistics update script, which led to unfortunate situation where statistics for all players couldn't be updated. The problem revealed to be a tricky one.

In short, the issue is that worldoftanks.eu site won't give any more statistics to planetwot.com server, in other words they have blocked/banned my server for accessing the statistics. This leads to a situation where I currently cannot update statistics of the planetwot.com users.

Future of Planetwot Statistics

I am sorry, but I really don't know at the moment. I suppose I will try to contact the Wargaming, and ask if this block is some kind of misunderstanding or not. It might well be an (semi) automated measure for unwanted harvesters or even against denial of service attacks (however, hard to image that anyone could misinterept such a low load for a DOS attack...).

However, the fact is that currently we are not going to fetch the new statistics for the >10k users until we get a go from Wargaming, or come up with some crazy alternative plan. So the player statistics won't be updated for now. This will also affect some others services that Planetwot provides, mostly the much loved ircbot.

Technical mumbojambo (feel free to skip)

After some investigation on the issue, we found out that the problem is that the worldoftanks.eu -server is refusing our request for page loads. In plain english this means that worldoftanks.eu has "banned" our planetwot.com server, the whole www-server is now blocked to access any pages in worldoftanks.eu. Every time I try to receive a statistics page for download, all I receive is "Error 418: I am a teapot" (yes, that is a valid HTTP error status):

HTTP/1.1 418 Server: nginx Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2012 19:24:21 GMT Content-Length: 0 Connection: keep-alive

I have asked Wargaming for the permission to harvest the statistics more than a week ago (after I heard that EULA was going to change to deny automatic harvesting of the site, but the EULA didn't change afterall), however they haven't responded to my request in anyway except by telling that they will forward my message to approriate channels. However, it seems that I have received my response, in a way :)

I recognize that downloading such a big bunch of statistics can be consuming to the server, that is one of the reasons I do the actual fetching of statistics at 05:00 EET, when the usage of servers should be minimal. I also kept around ~1.5 second interval between page loads to minimize the load caused to Wargaming servers.

Sure I could make proxies and go around the block, but frankly I don't want go there. If the case really is that Wargaming doesn't want me to harvest their statistics for the quite massive planetwot.com userbase, I will respect that decision. Anyhow, let's hope that all this is just some kind of misunderstanding, and the planetwot.com can continue it services as usual.

Too long, didn't read

Until further notice, the statistic updates are freezed for undetermined time.

Regards, Jarkko Iso-Heiko, alias JTS - Planetwot developer, 4th of October 2012

Edit 5th of Oct.

Someone has created an forum topic about this to worldoftanks.eu forums, you can discuss the issue there:

http://forum.worldoftanks.eu/index.php?/topic/160303-planetwot-out-of-commission/