VAPS, the Video Arcade Preservation Society, has served the video-game collector's community for almost twenty years now. For the last ten years, Kevin Ruddy has been the "keeper" (administrator) of VAPS.
Kevin's time is limited these days and Greg McLemore, WebMagic, KLOV, and the International Arcade Museum were all interested in helping out. Kevin's still available to bounce ideas off and to give advice based on the years of experience keeping VAPS alive, but he isn't able to spend a lot of time to deal with some new challenges VAPS is dealing with. The VAPS web site has been moved to a WebMagic server and we are working on some significant upgrades.
There are a variety of new features we would like to add. Additionally, there are some issues that need addressing. VAPS membership has declined a little bit over time. This is due to a variety of reasons. One of them is the system that drops people if they don't re-validate their record. While it was a system that originally worked well, recently more and more VAPS reminder e-mails are getting stuck in various ISP's (and users's) spam filters (E-mail is a broken technology in 2005). People don't get the e-mail, don't remember to log-in, the get ungraciously booted from the Society, and the database shrinks. There are a few things that can help address this and Kevin and I agreed that it was important to temporarily pull the plug on the mandatory "data refresh or get dropped" functions.
As a first step, we recently rewrote the entire vaps site. What was a perl-based system last year has been moved to a PHP and MySQL solution. We intentionally kept the same look while we focused on database migration issues (and some non-vaps concerns). A couple hooks are being made to connect VAPS data with KLOV data and vice-versa. For example, KLOV game pages now state how popular a particular game is to the collecting community (an improved version of this feature is coming soon). And VAPS now has access to the KLOV database in real time instead of being updated infrequently.
Unfortunately, while we work on some data integration issues like allowing one password to work on VAPS.ORG, KLOV.COM, and the message forums, the ability to log onto VAPS.org has been temporarily turned off. We are trying to get the site fully back on-line as soon as possible.
VAPS has meant a lot over the years to quite a number of collectors. If anyone wants to help take VAPS 'to the next level,' please let me know.
Greg McLemore
Kevin's time is limited these days and Greg McLemore, WebMagic, KLOV, and the International Arcade Museum were all interested in helping out. Kevin's still available to bounce ideas off and to give advice based on the years of experience keeping VAPS alive, but he isn't able to spend a lot of time to deal with some new challenges VAPS is dealing with. The VAPS web site has been moved to a WebMagic server and we are working on some significant upgrades.
There are a variety of new features we would like to add. Additionally, there are some issues that need addressing. VAPS membership has declined a little bit over time. This is due to a variety of reasons. One of them is the system that drops people if they don't re-validate their record. While it was a system that originally worked well, recently more and more VAPS reminder e-mails are getting stuck in various ISP's (and users's) spam filters (E-mail is a broken technology in 2005). People don't get the e-mail, don't remember to log-in, the get ungraciously booted from the Society, and the database shrinks. There are a few things that can help address this and Kevin and I agreed that it was important to temporarily pull the plug on the mandatory "data refresh or get dropped" functions.
As a first step, we recently rewrote the entire vaps site. What was a perl-based system last year has been moved to a PHP and MySQL solution. We intentionally kept the same look while we focused on database migration issues (and some non-vaps concerns). A couple hooks are being made to connect VAPS data with KLOV data and vice-versa. For example, KLOV game pages now state how popular a particular game is to the collecting community (an improved version of this feature is coming soon). And VAPS now has access to the KLOV database in real time instead of being updated infrequently.
Unfortunately, while we work on some data integration issues like allowing one password to work on VAPS.ORG, KLOV.COM, and the message forums, the ability to log onto VAPS.org has been temporarily turned off. We are trying to get the site fully back on-line as soon as possible.
VAPS has meant a lot over the years to quite a number of collectors. If anyone wants to help take VAPS 'to the next level,' please let me know.
Greg McLemore
