MISTAKES

Meta-comment: I tried to save space, and that was a mistake. Disk is
cheap, and the data is textual.


Each colony should have a unique ID. Trade data should be tied to that
ID. (I sort-of added this later).

Ship data should be indexed by ship name, not by donorid. That way, if
the information becomes available for non-members, it can easily be
added. Donorid was just a bad idea.

Each piece of information should have a unique ID. Then, another set
of tables could track who has access to that information.

Each module/pod/artifact should be entered in one table, which
includes a "location" column. The location could be e.g. "Alcor
Shop-23", "Mad Ninja", "Cat 35", etc. (I added this as tables nmods,
powerrank, etc).

Form handling needs to be made more uniform (e.g. the stuff in
jforums). Most form stuff should probably be consolidated into a
single script that is self-submitting. This typically eases error
checking.

CSS should be used instead of all the nested tables. (Maybe. Depends
on browser compliance). (This used to be much more of an issue than it
is now.)

Various tables only contain the CURRENT information, rather than a
full history indexed by turn. This includes skills and probes. Big
mistake.

The concept of "setting" (e.g. share adventures with public?) evolved
over time, and should be unified.

The way turns are cached and later accessed is pretty ugly.

Blank values should be NULL in the database, instead of a string with
0 length.

Sharing options for the presidential report, terminal report, probe
reports, etc. should be separate from the donor's sharing options.

Attaching donorid to trade table makes no sense.

Paths are hardwired everywhere. Should probably be in DB or at least
in dow.pm

Insertion to the database was positional, making schema migration hard
(e.g. "insert into table value(?, ?)" instead of "insert into table
(col1, col2) values (?, ?)").