Development log

RockyMoon News

18 August 2026

A faster Bob — and a new look

Major update

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.

Dashboard performance

Large server dashboards have been reworked to avoid thousands of repeated database lookups. New compound indexes and bulk player-name resolution dramatically reduce load times.

Latest-player cache

A new latest_players table now keeps one current name per permanent player ID, so current-name lookups no longer need to search millions of historical rank records.

Faster hourly imports

The ranking updater now uses bulk database operations, transactions and fewer round trips. API requests are also paced between game servers to reduce rate-limit failures.

Interface refresh

The landing page, server summaries and shared site chrome are being refreshed with cleaner cards, compact service statistics, subtle animation and improved responsive layouts.

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

August 2026

PHP 8 migration underway

Infrastructure

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.

From the archive

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 This page has been reset for the current generation of Bob; older development notes have been archived rather than carried forward into the new layout.