I understand how to download from stats the regular statistics with user.xml, hosts.xml and team.xml.

For my own statistics (and to support my team) I have my own database collecting those for the projects we are interested in.
Now I see often enough that during challenges the update frequency is much faster as the "official" stats file.

Is there a different way to get more update-to-date statistics ? Is that project specific or how can e.g. for SETI happen an hourly update while the regular stats-files come every 24hours ?

Thanks for any hint !

SETI generates the xml dump once a day to reduce the impact of having to run a very intrusive querry too often. Obviously other projects may run different schedules.
As these are project server side activities running onn a schedule there is little scope for individuals to trigger the generation of a stats xml dump on demand.

It is true to say that SETI.Germany organises a special WOW! Challenge for SETI only once a year, to mark the anniversary (in August) of the recording of the famous WOW! signal. While the annual challenge is running, SETI.Germany manages to update progress hourly, even though the bulk export files remain on a 24-hour cycle, as Rob says.

The challenge stats take several minutes to update each time, so my suspicion is that for the limited number of participants involved (*), they may have received special permission to collect the individual stats directly from the website for this purpose.

Consult with the project administrator - Eric Korpela for SETI - and obtain their explicit permission before attempting anything like this. Projects have been know to block access by IP address if users abuse their hospitality by scraping web data.

* edit - the WOW! challenges are by individual user pre-registration, so the numbers involved are kept under control. Web scraping would not be allowed, and probably wouldn't work, for the SETI population as a whole.

Thanks both,

Because I see it not only with Seti@Germany for WOW but also other non-signup challenges. So I hoped there is an official way and a better answer like "please contact the admin and use the challenge-API" ;-)

Beside disliking unfriendly scraping of websites I'm actually even too lazy for. And with the number of different ways to present those data on their sites its also quite cumbersome.

please allow me a follow-up question:

the use of WebRPC API (e.g. show_user.php or team_email_list.php) as XML-format would be rated as unfriendly ? For the server stats it says: no faster then 10min; but other requests there is no limit given.
If I would once per hour grab that XML from my team and some "competitors" -> do you think that would be acceptable ?

Sure I can try to contact the project admins each by each and get their feedback; but from the general point ... whats your thoughts ?