Everquest Emulator Population Tracker

I'm sorry to say that this project has shut down. I suffered a catastrophic failure of my VPS, and basically lost everything. I DID have backups running, but I suffered the cardinal sin of not testing restores¹.

I have the code in git, but the data is gone. And honestly, getting a year's worth of data wouldn't be that hard, it would just take another year.

However, I have decided that this was a sign, and I'm going to just let it lie, for a few reasons.

The purpose was met. I set it up as a way to learn some HighCharts.js, and although I did that, I never really needed to use that knowledge. Which is fine.
I haven't played EQ in years, and although I enjoyed seeing servers come and go, very occasionally go into the P99 forums and read the latest raid drama, and reminisce, it's just not doing it for me.
LLM's could do a better job than this in about 53 minutes. My guess is someone will do exactly that².
The code is, well, crufty. It was fine for me, as I'm an old unix head, but most of it was thrown together shell scripts and some novice level python. Nothing I'd want to foist on the world.
I'm almost to retirement age. Using this site as some sort of "portfolio" of my work isn't important to me anymore, and quite honestly the technology was old enough now that it wouldn't have mattered.

So, everyone, thanks for the likes, the very random and infrequent forum mention and the even less frequent mails. My experience with this site has been fun, and I'll miss it.

All the best, and holler at me if you would like to. michael.campbell@gmail.com

Footnotes

¹ I actually DID test restores, and they worked fine. But some time ago I ran out of disk space so bought a block volume from the VPS, put all the EQ stuff on the new disk and symlinked to it. Turns out, my backup program does not follow symlinks by default and I didn't think to recheck after that. (sigh)

² The only interesting part of this would be getting the data; for anyone interested in doing this, I used cron + a combination of wget and lynx to dump the population numbers from https://www.eqemulator.org/index.php?pageid=serverlist and parse that. Quite basic. Threw that into SQLite3, and ran some simple aggregation queries.