Need help with conducting a survey and stats

raine posted this at 04:56 — 6th March 2002.

Joined: Feb 2002

Alrighty, I have a dilemma...

As some of you may know, I run a gaming site (eldaronline.com), and very recently (today) another gaming site handed me their code because they were closing down.

The main attraction of their website is that they ACCUMULATED Battle Results and CALCULATED different stats with it.

That was an amazing feature because they tallied more than 10,000 battle results. Unfortunately, they did it all by hand! =( Basically, if a user had a result, they would submit it via e-mail to the webmaster and he would hand-calculate it and add it to the site.

Well, I'm hoping for something automated and here's my idea:

Say for instance, there are 10 different armies in the game we play. When a user comes to this BATTLE RESULTS page, they choose which are the armies involved in the battle (probably best with a survey type multiple choice) - so they choose Army B DEFEATS Army C.

He hits submit and the data is sent to a database and it's stored. Then, on the following pages, the user can choose to view these stats ::

a) A list of each army stating the amount of battles fought for each, the amount of victories, and the winninger % of each army.

b) A table displaying the army vs army winning percentage. So it basically lists all the armies on the X axis and all the armies on the Y axis, and lists % of victories against each respective army.

c) A Table that states which is the most popular armies, in order.

That's it!

Bonuses? IP-logging and graphical representation ... but these are of least conercn ... the main thing is a form that does what I'm asking for.

I asked Megan for an opinion and she suggested that I go with PHP and MySQL, but unfortunately, I don't know either of those. Anybody konw of any easy ways to do this? (ala Frontpage/Dreamweaver/Survey generator on the net?)

Or any other suggestions?

Where to start looking, etc?

Finally, I'll be posting a request on the jobs and barter forum to see if anyone's willing to program this for me in exchange for a "programmed by" credit/link on each page the battle results are shown on.

Thanks for any help, comments, or assistance.

Cheers

Busy posted this at 09:07 — 6th March 2002.

He has: 6,151 posts

Joined: May 2001

frontpage, dreamweaver etc are just editors, you need a server side language and database like PHP/MySQL as Megan suggested.

There are premade scripts for things like this but whatever you find will have to be changed by you to suit as it wouldnt be made for your needs.

raine posted this at 21:43 — 9th March 2002.

They have: 34 posts

Joined: Feb 2002

Hey! Progress (kinda)...

Here's what the ORIGINAL site looked like, and how it worked... just to y'all an example http://www.eldaronline.com/battleresults/

I'm going to use phpESP ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpesp/ ) as the basis for this survey... I will have two questions (to start)

the first asks WHICH ARMY WON the battle
the second asks WHICH ARMY LOST the battle

I may add a third option that asks WHAT KIND OF BATTLE IT WAS (but that's of little concern at the moment)...

So the survey can do what it's supposed to do and generate the data... but now what? Anybody with some knowledge of php/mySQL wanna give me an idea as to how to proceed?

Thanks