Honestly I don't think this is a great addition at this point. If we'd just started or were still semi-new, sure. 5 years in though... the numbers certainly won't be accurate and it will just be another random metric people want medals for.
Why not though? Given the feedback, people obviously like it, and there's literally no set backs to adding this.
It doesn't actually have any benefits either. Sure, it gives a trivial piece of information (that for a majority of players won't be anywhere near correct). However really we're just adding it for the sake of adding it, and I really don't think a new plugin to do pretty much nothing should be thrown into the mix.
To me this seems pointless. Whats the point in it when it won't log peoples previous online time? It wouldn't really give an accurate figure. It'd be like... your online time is 128 hours... from last tuesday. It seems silly to me.
If online time is stored in a simple plain text database, it should be possible to write a script that runs through all server logs since the beginning (in case they still exist, at least) and calculates previous online time from connection and disconnection times, then adds the calculated numbers as starting values to the plain text database. It would probably be an extremely ineffective way to measure it (that would burn ECC's resources nice and fast), but it could be possible. You may now question the sanity of this idea's author.
Unless I am mistaken... If andrew has any logs from 5 years ago I would be so surprised. I like the idea though.
You have no idea how many log files there are and how big they are. When I was a GA andrew didn't keep logs older than a few weeks on the server. We'd download them and andrew eventually deleted them. Besides, that's many many many gigabytes worth of logs. It took my program 20 minutes to generate onlinetime for a single person for a month. and at almost 60 months, and well over half a million people.. That's about 3 years of continuous processing of data.. (less considering most people didn't play for long and thus don't need much calculating. Whereas staff needed a lot of calculating. So a conservative guess is about 10-12 months of continuous calculating) Let's not.
