NSHistory

The Nation database contains 52,316,272 records and the newest are dated Saturday, July 29, 2023
The Region database contains 15,446,689 records and the newest are dated Sunday, September 17, 2023
The WA/UN database contains 157 records and the newest are dated Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Currently tracking exactly 4,122,144 uniquely named Nations
Currently tracking exactly 438,322 uniquely named Regions

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Overview

In May 2003, we started wondering about the world we lived in. We created a spider that would read the the pages of "The World". At first it was just The Regions (http://www.nationstates.net/page=list_regions). Then we added The Nations (http://www.nationstates.net/page=list_nations). It simply collected all the data in the three columns displayed. The first couple simply gathered the names. With tweaking, the UN/WA status was captured as well. Due to a fortuitous naming convention, the date was captured as well. We tried to run it once a week. This worked great for years. In late 2009, [violet] happened to be watching the server when we did this and banned us. Fortunately, we were able to negotiate a return with the promise not to hammer the server quite so hard. Today, what used to take an hour now takes 10+ hours.

We originally intended to do this in XML, until we took inventory of just how much data we had. We have over 19 million nation records and over 4 million region records. Current counts are listed above. Needless to say, we needed a database to hold that much data.

This is still a work in progress although there is not much left to do. There are a couple more categories of data we have collected since we started on January 21, 2003. In particular, we have UN/WA vote counts one every Resolution since then. That data was collected manually and we have not written a parser for that yet. There is too much to manually enter it in a database, but we are working on getting it in.

This is a .NET 2.0 application and is written in ASP.NET using C# with a Microsoft SQL Server database. It is best viewed with Internet Explorer.

Notes

1. The queries will only return a maximum of 100,000 20,000 records. If your query returns more than that, you will have to reformulate it. Trust us, you do not want any more than 100,000 20,000!

2. The counts and latest data dates are at the bottom of the page.

3. There is some missing nation data from August 2006 to March 2007. We do not know if we just lost the data over the years or whether NS changed the format and we did not compensate for it for many months.

4. We did not start collecting UN/WA data on nations until February, 2004.

5. The #1 Most Frequently Asked Question about NSHistory: Is it possible to find out he region where the nation resided at that time? Answer: No (see the source of the data linked in the Overview above) Sorry! We would love to have that data as well.

6. Things on To Do List:

7. Add the remaining WA records

8. Automate data collection (too much manual action involved now).

9. Start tracking what region nations are in when we collect data. ☺

10. Feel free to save off the images for use on your own websites. Do not hotlink to them for they are purged on a sliding 24-hour scale.

11. Also, you can post links to your nation or region in the format:

http://nsdossier.texasregion.net/history.aspx?region=texas
or
http://nsdossier.texasregion.net/history.aspx?nation=newtexas

12. more to come...

13. We hope you enjoy the tool.

NSHistory Search Engine

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Overview

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