ChanStat has been going through many changes over the past few months. Many of which have been behind the scenes, but many affect you, the users, directly.

To start off, we’ve had several staff changes. We lost Redzzy, Sub, and `Simon| for personal and administrative purposes. But at the same time we’ve gained a few new staff members, Escable and Vapor. I’d like to officially welcome both of them, and we’re looking forward to working with both of them.

Some of you may have noticed that your stats pages were a little messed up for a few days. This was caused because we had implemented an entirely new logging system. Our previous one had sufficed until we simply became too large. So after some changes, we got the logging back to normal. This new logging system had not come without side affects though. This caused the !top5 to change somewhat. Instead of it being the Top 5 most active channels within the recording period (14 days), it’s now the most active channel for that particular day. Also the Random Quote section has changed somewhat. Now it’s a random quote from the recording period (14 days) instead of a quote from the last stats page update.

We’re also continuing to grow at a tremendous rate. Right now, we’re in over 1300 channels; which I think is extraordinary considering that we’ve only been around for about 6 months. We’ve just recently had to add 5 more bots; which brought us up to 50 bots! Also, to clear up a common misconception, we do use all of our bots. Right now we’re operating at 88% capacity, considering we just added 5 more bots. We usually add more when we get around 95-99% capacity.

I’d have to say our biggest and most recent change has been the completely new bot code. Previously we were running on Eggdrops coded in TCL. TCL was working great for the time being, but we just didn’t achieve the speeds we’d like. If you may have noticed, the bots entry messages took over 5 seconds to show up on some occasions. That just didn’t cut it for us. As a solution, we decided to code the bots in C++. It uses less memory than the TCL bots, speeds are tremendous, and we’re capable of doing much more. Most changes implemented are behind the scenes. For example: our blacklist/ignore system is more efficient, we have different invite system, and various other things. Some changes the users should expect is: faster speeds (invites, commands, etc), stricter spam reinforcement. and more interesting updates.

What does ChanStat have planned out for the future? We plan on perfecting the channel stats pages, fixing the music charts, adding back the Most Used Word, and possibly adding a few more commands. Also, I’ve been working on developing an easier and quicker method for users to edit their profiles, but keeping them abuse free. We’re always looking for suggestions. I ask if you do have a valid suggestion to please post it on the Suggestions Forum.

Thanks for reading,
Matt-