If something, or someone, is missing on this page, let us know.
FICS
We have devoted a separate page to the beginnings of Snail Bucket.
Many thanks to
- PankracyRozumek, BethanyGrace, pchesso and Bodia: SB co-founders in 2014/15
- predkoo who created most of the artwork back then
- RoyRogersC, herrahuu, Maxmagnus, who were TDs at the time
- crem and PankracyRozumek who attempted to rebuild Snail Bucket from scratch in 2016.
- araszek who wrote the second (yellow) color for our Bad Times feature
- Mekk for the FICS bot writing tutorial series, upon which Snailbot is based
- blkmagic for setting up FICS news 1542 on Thu, Oct 23rd, 2014
- FICS for letting us play chess freely
- Teamleague, the place we all met
- The FICS games database
- Watchbot, which stores game comments
Design
- SB typography: Rage Italic font by R. Zwingelberg M.W.
- The Slow Coach by J. Leech. In: G. A. à Beckett: The Comic History of Rome. London, 1850s (History)
Most images from the 2014/15 Snail Bucket editions, were our own, except:
Technology
The website (code here) runs on Bodia's home server. It is written in Java, and uses a lot of free software:
- Spring MVC/Security. Lightweight framework alternative to several J2EE technologies.
- Jetty. Java web server and servlet container.
- MySQL. Relational database management system. We have switched to MariaDb eventually.
- Bliki. Our wiki renders pages with a modified version of Java Wikipedia API.
- Chesspresso-lib. Open source Java chess library. Its development ceased in 2003.
- Apache. We use commons-fileupload, commons-io, the HTTP client, and other components.
- ImageMagick. Scales images.
- Joda Time. Handles time zone peculiarities.
- Jython. Integrates PankracyRozumek's tourney scripts (buckets/pairings/standings creation).
- Python. Snailbot is written in Python.
- Jamwiki. We use a simplified Jamwiki skin.
Special thanks:
Vegachess. We're given a free license to use this pairing software, which is very kind.