LFS News

LFS News at LFS World

http://www.lfsworld.net/?win=news

What can you find here?

The LFS News section at LFS World is the place where every LFS racer can post relevant news, provided they are logged in at LFS World.

One can post generic LFS news, but the most common type of news will be League News, like season announcements, race reports and results and any public announcements that a league deems relevant for everyone to read.

To be able to post league news, you must first register your league. You can do that via the League Editors tab in the LFS News window. You can assign other members of the league to be editors and/or administrators for your league as well. It is advised to check with your league admins first before registering a league, so there will not be duplicate registrations. Fake, duplicate or unauthorised league registrations may be deleted.

Some help with submitting news

You can submit news via the Submit tab in the LFS News window. First of all you will be asked what type of news you want to submit; generic LFS news or league news.

Pick one and you will be taken to the edit screen where you can select the league to post news for, enter the news title and write the message.

You can also upload files to attach to your news item. The file requirements are described at the bottom of the window.

You can use basic bbcode to enhance your news text with bold, italic fonts and different font sizes. Also you can insert images that you have attached and you can resize and align the images in many ways to help you write nice looking articles. To learn more about bbcode usage, click the bbcode help icon located under the message-text edit form.

You can at any time during editing preview your news item by clicking the Preview button. Once you have checked your spelling, and thing everything is OK, you can press the Submit button to store your news post.

News approval

Take note that your news item will not be immediately visible to the public. It requires to be approved first. You do not have to do anything for that to happen but wait. You will automatically be notified via email when your news item has been approved or denied (with a reason in case you require to correct something).

A good thing about this delay is that it gives you the time to write or upload race results, which brings us to ...

Adding race results to your news item

In case you have posted a race report and want to supply race results along with your news item, then you can do that after you have submitted your news. When viewing your entire news item, you will notice two links near the bottom left. One called 'Upload results' and one called 'Manually add results'.

The manual version will present you with a results form that you can fill in. The first thing you should do is rearrange your column types. You can leave out the ones you don't need, or can add those that are missing. Once that's setup, you can fill in the form.

You can use the arrows to the right of the form to alter the number of rows or columns.

A note about the description of the results : it is very useful to come up with a logical and re-usable fomat of describing the results. You should incorporate race number and type in them for example. The purpose of this is that it may be possible to just list all results of a league / season in the future and with a good naming convention the list will make much more sense.

Uploading race results

To make results submission easier, you can also upload XML files that you create using the data from your own league race results system. If you have your own league (race) results system and have everything nicely stored, then it should be fairly easy for you to output this in the following XML format :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<raceresults>
	<result>
		<pos>1</pos>
		<userlist>
			<username>Victor</username>
			<username>Scawen</username>
		</userlist>
		<playerlist>
			<playername>V</playername>
			<playername>S</playername>
		</playerlist>
		<car>XFR</car>
		<teamlist>
			<team>LFS</team>
			<team>LFS</team>
		</teamlist>
		<racetime>1:25:34.230</racetime>
		<gap>-</gap>
		<laps>20</laps>
		<fastest>1:24.760</fastest>
		<pnlt></pnlt>
		<points>10</points>
		<totalpnts></totalpnts>
	</result>
	<result>
		... repeat tags in same order...
	</result>
</raceresults>

Encoding can be any of the usual types (normally UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1).

You must always use the userlist, playerlist and teamlist groups even if there is only one racer per entry.

You can put the tags in any order except 'pos' must be first, followed by 'userlist'. Also the order of the tags must be consistent throughout the XML document.