ICU Webmasters Report 2015/16

Usage

7,250,000 Hits through out the year, up from 5M last year. The main spikes came in August for the Irish championships and in Januar and February.

489 members logged in to the system during the year, with about 100 members logging in each month, same as last year.

Content

While the number of news items has increased to about 1 per day, the number of articles and photos is slightly down on last year.

	2016/17	2015/16	2014/15	2013/14	2012/13
News Items	376	~270	~135	~170	~140
Articles	93	~130	~30	~80	~26
Photos	213	265	70	225	115

Many thanks to all content contributors.

“Fixed” Content

Progress was made in automating some of the pages that were fixed:

• Champions photos
• Junior Clubs listing - This was part of creating 2 new main pages, one for juniors and one for beginners.

A lot of work needs to be done to allow for audited updates of the following documents:

• ICU Constitution (per Oct 2015 EGM)
• Eligibility Criteria for Adult Events (per Oct 2015 EGM)
• NCC Rules (per Oct 2015 EGM)

Operations

Due to Brexit, Dave O'Connell has started preparations to move our servers from the UK to another European country. As part of the migration, the websites will move to using HTTPS traffic, for a more secure system. This will require an IP address change, and this will take 2-3 days to ripple through the internet's domain name servers. We will be coordinating with the executive to find the least disruptive period for that, but it is likely to be over Christmas 2017.

Functional Enhancements

There were significant enhancements, large and small, made in 2016/17 including

• Home Page Improvements with special pages for juniors and beginners.
• Improvements for tournament organisers
• Improvements for rating officer handling errors
• Displaying a Donate button
• A number of minor bug fixes.

Volunteers sought

After a call for help last year, Dave O'Connell offered his services. Dave concentrates more on the system administration, while Jonathan O'Connor concentrates on the coding of the site.

Finally, the ICU thanks those who have volunteered contributions to date. The ICU is looking to the membership for volunteers as follows:

• Content contributors - eg articles, news items, results (eg league matches), photos, videos, etc.
• Site operations support
• A UI/X designer

If you would like to volunteer or would like to recommend someone, please email [email protected].

Plans for next season

• Improve sending of emails, which often can't be sent.
• Finish the support for entry taking and payments for tournament organisers. Stripe will allow the ICU website to accept payments for entry fees on behalf of tournament organisers with the money going straight to the organisers account instead of to the ICU account.
• The ICU constitution, appendix A, and various other rules and regulations are updated by making changes to the website code. I plan to allow the secretary to update these directly. However, the system should show the members, when and who made a change to these documents, why they made the change, and what the change was.
• Introduction of rapid and blitz ratings. This is harder than I thought, and requires a lot of code changes on the ratings site.

Thanks

I'd like to thank Dave O'Connell for sharing the duties of webmaster, Desmond Beatty for his very useful project management advice, and Andrew Kildea for his advice and help during the year.