Is Battleclinic in need of a doctor?

I spent a few hours yesterday and today poking around Battleclinic’s killboard. Say ‘Battleclinic’ or ‘Griefwatch’ to anyone considering themselves a web developer or EVE third-party dev and you’ll probably receive a derisive snort or a simple laugh; it may have a lot of data, but the interface is pretty horrific. And I mean horrific. In the course of my prodding, I noticed that the kill detail page- the page that shows a single kill related to a character- doesn’t actually list a date or time for the kill.

Now, that’s pretty important information. If I’m looking through BC to see someone’s kills, I’d like to see when those kills were. Say I’m crawling it for a corporate applicant’s kills- if the kills were a few years ago I don’t care about them as much as if they were last week. So, me being me, I looked around to work out how to file a bug report. Their forums looked like the place, so I registered with a non-me username and a mailinator address. I’m not a huge fan of spam so I try and keep my real email restricted to people rather than automatons.

All going well so far. I browsed to the ‘Bugs’ forum and made a new thread, then went to get a mug of tea. Then it got interesting.I refreshed the thread to see if any response had been made, and was met with the following message:

Sorry <my username>, you are banned from using this forum!
Email host not allowed, please use a real email address.
Your ban is not set to expire.

So, let’s see. I’ve been banned for using an email host they didn’t like. What? OK, so why didn’t they tell me this at registration so I could give them my ‘oh, if I must’ account? Why am I banned from using the forum, website and so on at an IP-address level (thus potentially blocking other people if I were on a dynamic IP) for a fickle detail?

That made me feel pretty pissed off, so I took a stab in the dark and joined the #BattleClinic IRC channel. Lo and behold, there was one channel owner there. Spotting he was in Battleclinic’s teamspeak AFK channel I decided to leave a message and await a response. I explained my situation and why I felt that ban was inappropriate. After 8 hours I looked at BC TS and saw the owner had moved to the WoW channel, and seeing no response in IRC decided to prod him.

[19:36:56] <Ix_Forres> MrCue: Given I can see you’re active on BC TS it’d be nice to at least have a response, even if it were to say ‘fuck off’.
[19:41:19] <MrCue> you may email chris@battleclinic.com
[19:42:46] <Ix_Forres> Do you not think that permabanning instantly without warning people who just don’t enjoy spam is perhaps a little overreaction?
[19:43:12] <MrCue> you may email chris@battleclinic.com

Well, that’s me told. I explained my account was there purely for bug reporting and that the other bugs I was going to report wouldn’t be reaching him. I decided not to bother emailing whoever ‘chris’ was.

Battleclinic’s modus operandi for being a large-scale killboard is simple aggregation. Quite heavy-handed aggregation at that, pulling in whatever feeds they find without asking and hitting them fairly often. Compare this to any other KB host- aggregation is typically done by one board operator submitting his feed to another. Apart from simply being friendlier it stops load from overwhelming small boards with little resources that may be hammered away at by Battleclinic.

But there’s a snag. Nearly every board in existence provides feeds; the few that don’t are typically private/closed boards that have no interest in syndicating or being syndicated. Battleclinic not only relentlessly scrapes other killboards, but requires users to register and pass a captcha test in order to view original killmails from their site, as well as not providing real feeds. This antisocial behaviour when it comes to sharing data is simply rude; to grab all your data from other websites and then to prevent those same websites from being able to benefit from your data is just bad nettiquete and serves no purpose. I know of many board operators who have banned BC’s server IP addresses to stop their boards being crawled.

The claim of course is that to provide a feed would impose too much load on Battleclinic’s servers. What? Their website is more or less a feed, simply comprising a hugely increased number of elements with additional data fed in from a large database and rendered in realtime. To generate a feed could involve a single data source, a single element (the original killmail) and could be write-through cached with ease, resulting in more or less a net zero load addition to their servers. It’d be like serving up a simple HTML page, such as the (invalid) HTML page I am served to notify me I am banned. And BC doesn’t seem to have much issue throwing those up.

BC has banned users in the past for merely bad-mouthing their website. So I’m pretty much guaranteed not to get unbanned after this, because heaven knows they won’t see it as a post of things they could improve. It’s difficult to see why they’d ban people who give feedback or criticism; without that information you’re not likely to improve your service, only detract from it.

As a response to Battleclinic’s lack of a kill feed, I’ve written my own generator, called Medikit. It’s still in development; as Battleclinic decided not to put a date on detail pages I’m rather stuffed when it comes to pulling complete sets of data from those pages, though I’ve gotten everything else working and rewritten in EVE’s killmail format, so I’m still rewriting the scanner to work off recent kills/losses for characters. With enough time I’ll be able to build more or less a complete dump of their killboard data and provide a realtime feed of my own derived from the data available on the website. Medikit will be making an appearance on Github soonish.

Oh, and a while ago I did a complete dump of the Battleclinic fitting database; I’m publishing the dump below to save time for those looking for a large collection of fittings. That said, I would strongly recommend using these as ‘bad’ training data if you plan on using these in neural network/decision tree fitting generators…

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