EVE Technology Lab

By "they" you mean the actual TEA developer I hope? If not, you are an idiot and please stfu, and here is why.

Like some posts before you, its clear that the "old" way of parsing xml TEA is using is error prone, as it can easily be broken by even valid xml documents. A proper way would be to use SimpleXML to parse it (and catch it for invalid XML results), and grab the values from the returned object. Even better would be to use PhealNG, as PhealNG uses SimpleXML internally while also providing checks for cache and valid keys (based on requests).

For the last couple of years we (the 3rd party developers, mainly located on Coldfront IRC channel #eve-dev) have been requesting updates to the EVE API, mainly to remove annoyances and limitations because of outdated code. Where most CCPers made only small changes (some good, some bad), we haven't really had any big updates. True, CAKs came out making it easier for people to share api keys, but in the end no big changes were made to the data itself.

Since the introduction of the CAKs CCP started to monitor API errors even more closely. By that, I mean that if you try to get the characterId with a nonexistants characterName, you'd get an error stating that the 'character doesn't exist'. Errors are logged based on IP. If you get too many errors (like if you try to find all characters in EVE), you'll get temp/perm-banned from the EVE API.

This however did not make sense as you had to query some API endpoints to figure out certain information (like killmails and if the character was part of FW), which would return an error. Killmails in particular was an annoying call, as per character you could only get the killmail list once per hour in total (not dependant on IP). So if zKB would query the killmail endpoint, Battleclinic and others would receive an error. Imagine that happening to the thousands of API requests per hour, and yes you can guess it....*poof*...killboards were banned by CCPs strict policy. PrismX saved the day by removing such bans until a new killmail API was built and released, allowing killmails to be checked by multiple killboards.

Things slowed down after this though. We were hoping for more conversation between CCP and 3rd party developers, but unfortunately the API is only considered a side-project by CCP which has to make way for more important stuff. In short, PrismX doesn't have a lot of time to invest on it.

Luckily, FoxFour was able to save the day. Even though the API is not his project, he was able to introduce small tweaks which we've been waiting for for a long time. Most noticeable is the CREST killmail endpoint allowing players to easily post killmails to killboards in a verified way. But also small changes like adding factionId and factionName to most character-based calls so you don't have to generate any errors anymore to figure out if a character is part of FW. Or the new OwnerId call where you can actually see what the ownerType is you are requesting (figure out if Cyerus might a character, corporation or alliance), effectively making CharacterID obsolete.. (more information can be found here).

And yes, you are correct in saying CCP should fix this small bug, and they certainly will. However, I'd like to point out its not their fault for you not helping to test the new changes. Yes, you, the person who has been using TEA for over 4 years without a problem blaming CCP for every small glitch, while you could've set up a test forum pointing to the updated Sisi API server to see if everything would be working correctly..

After all; CCP FoxFour went far and beyond to make those API changes, I guess a small "thank you" is impossible to say.

ps. Vote Fuzzysteve for CSM, as he's the only CSM candidate whom I've seen contribute in the CCP / 3rd party developer scene.

1, The version of TEA i use does use simplexml.
2, If you bothered to read the twitter messages that went between me and CCP FoxFour, you would see that while i was annoyed to begin with, he explained what happened, and why the error was allowed to go into a production service without anything being caught in a code review. Which instantly killed any anger I had, as somebody who made the change, was fixing it.
3, I did thank him, mostly due to him fixing the problem within an hour of being made aware of the problem, and partly because we didn't have to wait for weeks for CCP to go through it's usual internal argument of "NOPE! EVERYTHING IS FINE!".

Hello...

I have version 1.3.1 R2 installed in my forum.
I am trying to uninstall that version and install R5, but when i uninstall R2, my forum goes to a white page and is not accessible.
I already try 5 times and every time i had to get a forum files backup and upload them again.
Can you help me with that problem please ?

Thank you.

No luck. Still white screen...

EDIT: Nevermind. After several tries i manage to uninstall R2 and install R5.
Everything is fine now.
Thank you.

Just playing with the new version, and for some reason, the mod is allowing people to register without putting any api details in, yet the mod is set to require api details for registration.

It doesn't throw up any errors, you just skip the api details and hit register, and an account is made.

Any ideas, Shin?

Thanks,

Demi

Doesn't look like it. Not yet.

This type of error sounds very much like you've installed other Mods after TEA ...if you look in your apache/what ever webserver you use logs you will probably see a php fatal error ... this should tell you roughly where the problem is.

Sounds like you've done an uninstall at some point and then an install of a new version but the uninstall didn't complete correctly. This usually happens when you install other mods after TEA and the uninstall script can't find the bits it needs to remove from an existing file ... you are going to need to clean up your install I'm afraid.

Damn...

Can you suggest an efficient way of doing this? I'm not really even sure of all the files that get edited.

I got my dirty install mostly cleaned up, but the user's profile page still has some extra fields and I'm just not sure what needs to be removed to clean it up. The Status, Main Matched Rules, Characters, ID from API page, and Verification Code from API Page fields are all duplicated once. I'm just trying to figure out how to clean that up.

Screen shot ----> http://i.imgur.com/0nHoabh.png