RockyMoon News

Battle Trackers have had a major upgrade and are now ready for wider use across RockyMoon.

You can create a tracker for an upcoming or active war, choose the guilds or players on each side, and follow changes in Fleet, Economy, Experience and Technology throughout the conflict.

Trackers can now be scheduled in advance, with support for your chosen community timezone, and optional war objectives can be added for things such as fleet reduction, economy reduction and XP gained.

There are also new visibility options. Trackers can be Public, Unlisted or Private, giving you control over who can see them. Public trackers can appear in the new Battle Tracker directory, while completed public trackers remain available in the War Archive.

For sharing outside RockyMoon, trackers can generate shareable result cards showing the latest figures — or the final results once a tracker has ended.

I've also continued improving Bob's economic intelligence. Where enough base-ranking information is available, Bob can now provide a more detailed breakdown of the sources behind a player's Economy. On larger servers where the available base information is incomplete, these figures remain clearly identified as estimates rather than presenting assumptions as fact.

More to come.

The latest round of work on RockyMoon has been about making more of Bob's long history useful again, while bringing the services around it into a more modern and joined-up site.

There is still more to do. Next up is finishing RockyMoon's Admin and Control Centre, followed by a wider polish of the public site and then some new ways of making use of the statistics Bob has spent years collecting.

Another round of work on Bob has gone live, with the focus this time on collecting fresher data, making that extra detail useful on the site, and keeping the growing archive efficient.

The new update cycle is now running successfully across the active servers. Next on the list is some long-overdue work on RockyMoon's sitemaps and SEO.

A lot has been happening behind the scenes at RockyMoon.

Following the recent work to speed up Bob's ranking collector, we've continued rebuilding some of the oldest parts of the code that keeps the site running. Several of the background data collectors have now been modernised, with shared infrastructure, better error handling and safer database updates. It isn't the glamorous side of RockyMoon, but it gives us a much stronger foundation for what comes next.

There is still plenty more work underway, but the aim is simple: modernise the code behind RockyMoon without losing the years of history that make Bob useful in the first place — and use that new foundation to make the site considerably more useful going forward.

Although after looking through some of Bob's older code I wrote, I'm increasingly impressed that any of it worked in the first place.

Bob's archive has always been good at showing what happened to a player, guild or server. War Tracker turns that history into something new: a live, shareable view of a conflict built from the guilds and players you choose.

Following the recent performance work, the next stage of Bob's refresh has focused on making the historical data easier to explore. Player, guild, ranking and server pages have all received further interface and usability improvements.

There is still plenty of old Bob code left to modernise, but the aim remains the same: preserve the archive, make it faster to query, and find better ways to turn years of statistics into something useful.

Over the last few days Bob has had a fairly substantial amount of work behind the scenes. The main goal was simple: make the site much faster now, while giving the database room to keep growing.

The historical data itself remains the important bit: the changes are designed to make querying it cheaper without losing the long-term archive.

The main statistics view is now being modernised for PHP 8 while older parts of the site continue running safely on PHP 7.3. This staged approach lets individual areas be upgraded and tested without requiring a risky all-at-once migration.

Older RockyMoon updates

Bob has been evolving since 2015, including historical charts, gains/losses, player and guild histories, server dashboards and the Rob Battle Reports service. This page has been reset for the current generation of Bob; older development notes have been archived rather than carried forward into the new layout.