A Look At 2021
To say 2020 was a hectic year would be the understatement of a decade. It was a mess for millions around the world due to COVID-19. It was also a very busy year for BF4DB.
We continued on our mission to detect and ban hackers from Battlefield 4 in our third year of operation. We saw a lot of changes in 2020, including the introduction of Discord ban appeals, support tickets, and our new Policies & Procedures document that replaced a few other outdated documents.
As part of our 2.0 launch in May, we also opened our Player History Tool to vetted Patrons, as well as other perks. Patreon has increased significantly in popularity since May, and we are very thankful for all of our Patrons!
We were also able to launch our very own BF4DB Discord bot, which provides player information and allows users to link their players to their Discord account, thanks to Revolving_DCON! We use this bot with all of our Discord appeals, and makes it easier to look up accounts. It recently crossed the 100 server mark and has become a Verified bot by Discord. Thanks to everyone who uses it!
BF4DB also had its share of challenges in 2020. We started off the year with a hard disk failure in our server, which depleted our cash reserves as we replaced the singular drive with two drives set up in RAID.
The primary challenge we faced throughout 2020 was performance and uptime. We suffered a number of service outages of varying natures. Some of them were a result of an issue with our hosting provider, and some of them were a result of issues with our servers. DDoS attacks have been on the rise as well and contributed to a few minor front-end outages.
2021 will bring a lot of new updates to BF4DB. To address the performance issues, we leased two new servers. We are in the final stages of setting up a new architecture that will reduce downtime, increase redundancy, and include automatic failover.
Once this is complete, we will be retiring and selling our old server, which has served us well for three years. Our new servers are much newer, more powerful, and will last quite a bit longer.
Our developers have been hard at work over the last year as well. While pmkevinrudd and skulls have been working on our new architecture and moving services to the new hardware, developers cmmd_mx has been working on a few goodies, including a fully mobile-friendly front end overhaul with a new theme on the site. This will be a lot more responsive, and feature new things such as a more comprehensive search function, and expanded BF4 statistics. More on that coming soon.
For those who remember, BF4DB used to have a server browser that displayed all servers running our plugin. We removed it when it was causing admins of BF4DB-protected servers to be targets of DDoS attacks. DoggGodd has been working on a brand new server browser for us, and will make searching for servers much easier.
After the introduction of Patreon, our Clan Representative program fell by the wayside and into disrepair. This program will be making a comeback in 2021, with Auditor Daniel_Recker_95 taking the reins. A separate announcement with more details will follow in the coming week or so.
We will be refactoring how our staff works on various things, from reports to appeals. These internal changes will increase efficiency and reduce delays in processing. While this won't be publicly announced since it's an internal change, this will be completed soon.
We are super excited for what 2021 will bring us and can't wait to show you more as the year progresses! Thank you for your support, your patience, and for being a part of our community! Have a great year!
