Kuulaportti

Kuulaportti’s Marketplace was renewed with consistent browsing, search filters, maps, listing publication and product visibility.

Event pages, registration, ticket payments, check-in and organiser reports were also renewed. A multilingual description editor and media library simplify event publication. Organisers can connect their own services through the APIs.

Currently, Kuulaportti is used by more than 20 different associations and teams in Finland. It is being developed taking into account the needs of associations and players.

The codebase started in 2011 had become outdated. During the early TSTOS years, numerous fixes kept the original Kuulaportti running, and a full rewrite began in late 2020.

The new Kuulaportti was released as a beta in 2021 and tested at TSTOS 21 and Conquest events. The old system was retired as its performance had deteriorated considerably. The November 2020 archive image still shows the interface used before the rewrite.

We realized at the time of TSTOS Parola that if we want to get international customers, using Kuulaportti through google translator is probably not the best idea. However, developing a new system didn't sound that enjoyable idea at the time. We decided to solve the problem by building an interface for registering battlegroup events. The data was still stored in the old kuulaportti, but the user interface was customized for each battlegroup event. This is how we got the translations working and were able to accept vehicle registrations. However, the interface was deliberately implemented a bit hastly and all kinds of modifications to eg. factions and options, could break the registration form.

A separate Eventcontroller interface was built for check-in at the venue. Staff could find a player by name, ID, email or payment reference, or scan the barcode on a printed player slip. They could then check the payment and mark the player as arrived.

The later Eventcontroller 2 suggested names while staff typed. This was especially useful at international events: a difficult name did not have to be entered in full, as the right player could be picked from the suggestions.

Both preserved interfaces are shown here as local simulations with fictional player data. The newer version has a 2017 footer; the exact launch dates have not been established.

Over the years, team registration was added so that one team member could register the whole team. The appearance was also updated, although the original system remained underneath.

This version also had a separate interface for receiving and recording registrations at the event. Players were initially asked to bring a printed player slip with a barcode. An efficient search form soon became the preferred way to bring up a player’s details quickly.

The next version of the Kuulaportti was decided to be developed in such a horry that it was completed just for the Strawberry hills 2012 event. Naturally, the opening of ticket sales for the event was also delayed by a couple of hours, when we found a system breaking bug. The difference from the previous version was the dynamic content. Our purpose was to make a system where you can easily publish events from weekend games to big scenarios.

At first, Kuulaportti contained a single hand-coded form serving one event at a time. The player list was extracted from the database as raw text, and changing the registration form was difficult.

The player list was printed for use at the event. Staff checked arriving players in by ticking their registrations off the printed list by hand.

Historical Kuulaportti data is available at legacy.kuulaportti.fi.