Spartan, here's my responses to your comments.
1. Regarding the connectivity problems, sometimes the ladder is down because I'm rebooting the server or because I've been changing some code. It'll happen from time to time when I make bug fixes and changes. When there is a major change needed, I will take the entire site offline and advanced warning will be given.
2. The hour long restriction was put into place for database maintenance reasons. If I let a player report a game anytime he/she wanted, they could just spam victories. Your response would be: "Well, I could just reject all reports that are invalid." Unfortunately, it's not that simple. As the database administrator, I would then start to have a ton of bogus information in my database that I would have to clean out and decipher- and unfortunately, I'm not willing to do that if there's a way I can avoid it. However, I can shorten the time restriction to 30 or even 15 minutes.
3. As for the loser confirming the victory, I'd rather have the loser confirm before the points are awarded. Otherwise, this just encourages people to spam victories since the points would show up in the rankings. That's a definite no-no in my database adminstrator book. Also, because the loser has to confirm, this makes it easier to rollback error reports because the games themselves will not have been committed yet. In fact, no rollback would be even required since nothing will have been committed. If we have to roll back reports already committed, I have to go in there and manually correct them (or build a tool to do so), but I don't want to invest another 30 or 40 hours programming and debugging such an internal tool.
I will go ahead and change the time interval between game reports to 15 minutes. From talking to people, this seems like a sensible change.
Trajan
