There always was and always will be bickering over the competitions. It's partially because people like to play it their way and partially because we don't research the rules enough sometimes.

I'm all for less competitions, I would think four over two days would be just right.

You're right about Halo 3, it's bad timing for a true competition. However it is a great time to use it as a promotion; maybe give a few copies away to winners of something related.

When you need the pre-reg stuff hosted just email it to me. Our server is a standard LAMP stack, nothing special. If you want it integrated into PostNuke, we're using version .764.

I'd actually suggest having it store things into either (I can't believe I'm saying this) an Access database or have it create an Excel file for you. That way we can use it offline in its full glory. A web page with a PHP back end writing to an Access db is a viable reg setup. Then putting the game day registration system either as an app on the Access db or as a Windows app reading the db would keep it all nice and simple and portable. (Plus, in an Access db I don't have to worry about someone screwing up the PHP->MySQL security.)

do it in rails, it's wonderfully easy.

Coyote is doing business sponsors WHEN SOMEONE GIVEs HIM THE LIST.

There is an important difference there.

Ummm...

WRONG concerning Halo 3, street date is a confirmed, 100% September 25.

So I say we better drop GoW sharpish and stick to the bandwagon. I don't know where any of us got this "october" stuff

Ruby on Rails works offline, you can run it on any machine basically. Any computer capable of running ruby can run rails. My old old old desktop from 2001 with fedora core 6, that i am using as a server at home, has it running it's not really hard to run. If you want it running on a windows machine pop Instant Rails on that machine. It's completely selfcontained (in a zip file) and has all the files you need to run a Mongrel server with MySQL support and full rails support, although you can modify it, very easily, to have lighttpd or webrick.

Most servers are capable of running it, i run it on my server and my website has it running on it. Its pretty easy to move around too if you need to move it from a remote site to your local drive you can just do a database dump and as long as you have all the files rails files locally it builds the vast majority of the content around the database.

Also, you can export the database info in a wide variety of formats, including CSV (Comma seperated values) which is easy enough to import into an excel document that you can have preformmated to stick the appropraite data into the approraite column/rows.

But /shrug

I just like ruby better than php personally, but thats more to do with the langauge than the capabilities of the language, they are pretty close in terms of what they are capable of.

Statistically speaking, rails uses significantly less ram than php but requires more processor power. Although the 1.9.0~1.9.1 beta rails VM's are showing on average a 15% increase in Rails server speeds and they are pushing for more with 2.0 but that won't be relased till 2008.