As you may have heard, EVE-Metrics is planning on moving to bigger and better things. This leaves (the older, more battle scared, and way less slick) EVE-Central as the only remaining EVE-Online market data aggregator. Despite not being an active EVE-Online player either, I am leaving EVE-Central up and running, but I need your help to keep the cobwebs from piling on too thick! First off, EVE-Central needs enhancements. Currently, even simple things like determining the buy and sell price in Jita are horribly flawed (due to gaming of the statistics). Uploads are accepted with very minimal validation work, leading to very obvious fakes and outdated data purging new good data. We’re still using a creaky old CSV exporter which has been known broken for the past 6 months or so (a phantom non-column is being exported). Our Contribtastic client has GUI elements which are basically unimplemented and confuse just about everyone (yes, I know, you can’t login). We’re still using the SMTP push service (it made sense when data volumes were lower, now it just breaks other people’s SMTP servers). What am I planning on doing?
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Augmenting the SMTP push service with a bare-bones, JSON over socket system. Rejoice in the lack of client library requirements, such as AMQP and its unused complexity.
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Fixing some glaring bugs (like the CSV export, and a few input validation glitches)
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Making sure we’re up to the latest item ID database (there are some holes) However, these are simple creaky wheel fixes. This is the part of the post where I mention that both Contribtastic/libevecache and EVE-Central are Open Source, under the GPL and AGPL licenses respectively. Have an idea for a new statistic? Please implement it! Want Contribtastic logins to work? Time to work on that too :). If you actually want to help, I have established a
mailing list/Google Group to discuss changes and contribute ideas. You can of course fine the relevant EVE-Central code on Gitorious. Happy hacking!