Scholarship Schools is a California-based charter school network founded by former California Senator Gloria Romero and Jason Watts.
Strategy Star built a website system that allowed Scholarship Schools to operate multiple school websites with and offer a consistent web experience to their students, parents, and staff. We launched the system on March 13, 2017.
The core components and capabilities of the system were:
Mobile-ready websites for the network and its schools
Online enrollment
Multi-language support
Portal for parents, students, and teachers to communicate and share materials
Content Management System (CMS) for school staff manage the websites
We built the website system with open source software including PHP, MySQL, Apache HTTP Server, Symfony Framework, Bootstrap, and jQuery. We deployed and managed UAT and Production environments on hosting services from LADedicated with CDN, DNS, and WAF capabilities from CloudFlare.
In 2010, we developed and launched the SelectAndUnite matchmaking platform for youth sports. Its mission was to help coaches, parents, and players to discover and contact each other while giving youth leagues a platform for targeted communication.
We deployed the platform to test and production environments and continued to maintain and manage the stack until 2016.
The core features of the platform were:
Matchmaking Algorithm for creating suitability Scores between coaches, players, and teams
Privacy-first and mobile-ready portal for coaches and parents to
parents to create profiles for their young athletes
coaches to create profiles for their teams
all parties to discover and contact each other guided by suitability Scores
Subscription system with payment processing through Authorize.Net and PayPal
We built the platform with open source software including PHP, MySQL, Apache HTTP Server, Kohana Framework, and Bootstrap.
Strategy Star developed a robust community website and an integrated server software suite for Leetway Inc.
From 2013 to 2014, Leetway hosted a Beta service for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. During the Beta, the software we developed was used to operate over 70,000 online CS:GO matches for over 45,000 users.
The website we built was integrated with the Steam Community API and OpenID
The community website was integrated with the Steam Community API and OpenID service, so the CS:GO gamers could seamlessly log-in to Leetway with their existing Steam accounts.
The website boasted features including Forums, account management, profiles, teams, matches, statistics, ladders, videos, screenshots, as well as robust administration tools that Leetway administrators and moderators used to manage operations.
We used the LAMP stack to build the website using the following technologies:
PHP
MySQL
Apache
Composer
Kohana Framework
Bootstrap
jQuery
To operate a world-wide network of game servers, we built a server software that provisioned game servers in real-time as CS:GO matches were initialized on the community website. Players would create and join match lobbies on the website and then be prompted to connect to the provisioned game server when enough players had committed to play.
In addition to being able to play through the website, we built a custom desktop application which was integrated with the Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) tool used to prevent and catch cheaters.
To make a full-cycle integration between the website, desktop client, and the game servers, we also developed a plugin for the CS:GO game server itself. We used SourcePawn and SourceMod to build a system that managed the CS:GO matches in-game and essentially acted as the referee. The plugin would ensure that the correct players joined the server, that they played on the correct teams, kept score, changed maps, switched teams at half time, operated overtime scenarios, recorded GOTV demos, sent real-time notifications to a REST API, and finally submitted match-end statistics and data to the community website for processing and publication.
All the different components that we developed came together to form an epic competitive gaming hub that facilitated well over 35,000 hours of gaming fun during the 2013-2014 beta.
LADedicated operates a high demand server network. With many customers using servers for many different purposes with visitors and users from all over the world, the server and network infrastructure is put through all sorts of trials on a daily basis. When you operate servers for long enough, you eventually run in to occurrences of abuse, threats, and attacks. A common threat to server operators is a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) in which a malevolent party floods a server or network with bogus traffic in an effort to cripple its performance or sometimes to even cause it to crash all together.
To combat and mitigate the threat of DDoS attacks, LADedicated deployed the Corero Smartwall Threat Defense System, which a piece of network hardware that sits between the internet and the server infrastructure at a data center. The defense system detects malevolent network traffic and triggers alerts to the server operator so they can take action to mitigate the problem.
Strategy Star helped LADedicated to respond to the Corero Smartwall alerts in real-time by developing a custom software application (DDOS-AMS) that receives the real-time threat notifications, analyzes them, and immediately takes action on the network by shutting down connections from malevolent sources directly on the Cisco routers used at the data center.
The software we developed is saving LADedicated money by reducing the amount of man-hours that would otherwise be required to manually react to threat notifications. The software is also ensuring excellent up-time and service to LADedicated’s customers by mitigating threats in real-time and ensuring that the network stays available. The business depends on it!
Strategy Star worked with NetcodeGuides founder, Casey Foster, to build a custom video and content publishing platform. NetcodeGuide’s team of professional Counter-Strike gamers uses the platform to publish proprietary video content that is only accessible to their community members.
Netcode originally started as a Forum community which eventually grew to have a private forum section for their proprietary video in-game guides. The organization wanted to better capitalize on their authentic content production and make it the center piece of their operation. Strategy Star helped the organization bring their vision to life with a custom web portal that included the following features:
A simplified one-page registration and login mechanism
User account system integrated with their existing vBulletin forum software
Video gallery, searching, and browsing functionality
Video and written content publishing platform for staff members
Billing and subscription management system
We used the LAMP stack with the following technologies to develop the custom video publishing portal:
Linux
Apache
MySQL
PHP
Kohana Framework
HTML
CSS
Bootstrap
JavaScript
jQuery
Contact Strategy Star for expert help in implementing gaming related websites and portals. We have years of experience with the industry.
Oxford Preparatory Academy (OPA) wanted a custom web solution to deliver the vision for their charter school campuses.
Strategy Star worked with OPA’s in-house technology manager to implement a custom website solution that served several functions, including the following:
Landing page for the charter school organization
Customizable web portals for each school campus
Secure back-end portal for staff and teachers to manage web content in real-time
Secure online enrollment application form for parents
Accounts for parents to log-in with to view and receive important information
A landing page for the charter school organization
We developed the website solution on the LAMP stack using the following technologies:
Linux
Apache
MySQL
PHP
Kohana Framework
HTML
CSS
Bootstrap
JavaScript
jQuery
A homepage for the Chino campus
The campus portals were integrated with a few different third-party tools that the organization used to communicate with students and parents, including:
Google Calendar
Twitter
SendGrid
It was a wonderful experience to implement a time-saving web portal system for a unique education organization.
In 2006, Strategy Star built the first incarnation of Legit-Proof.com which is an archive of teams, players, and matches from several popular online gaming leagues. The data has been maintained for over a decade and it provides a unique snapshot to the early days of competitive online gaming.
The first league which was integrated with the Legit-Proof archive was Cyberathlete Ameteur League (CAL). CAL was generous enough to provide daily XML snapshots of its data. The data processing software that Strategy Star developed for Legit-Proof consumed well over a million records in to the archive. CAL ceased operations in 2009; however, Legit-Proof still provides a nostalgic memory of the golden days of childhood for tens of thousands of gamers around the world that played in the CAL online league.
On February 22, 2009, CAL ceased online operations. At its peak CAL was one of the largest online gaming leagues in North America with 20,000 teams and over 600,000 registered players.
Data archiving for Legit-Proof did not end with CAL. The data processing software was expanded from consuming XML data to also consume CSV and WebCrawler data feeds from the Cyberevolution (CEVO), Xtreme Professional League (XPL), and E-Sports Entertainment (ESEA). CEVO and ESEA continue their online gaming operations to present day.
The Legit-Proof database contains data for many different games, but the Counter-Strike community has always been the most avid group using the website. Players and teams use the archived data as a sort of online gaming resume service, to validate the experience of potential new team mates as well as opponents.
Legit-Proof.com has been servicing the gaming community for such a long time that someone eventually gave it a mention in Valve’s official SteamID wiki page.
It was a pleasure working with the myMumble management team to bring their vision to life with a Mumble hosting platform with instant server deployments and automatic cloud scaling using the world wide server network from VPS.NET
We built a custom PHP and MySQL powered website and integrated it with WHMCS, a state of the art e-commerce system. We deployed a cloud server infrastructure with automatic scaling features along with custom software that deploys Mumble instances in real-time virtually anywhere in the world.
Shortly after launch, the system was put to the ultimate test with an explosive marketing campaign. Within a few weeks, the system handled and deployed over 30,000 Mumble instances. Everything held up!
The software we developed was able to initialize new servers in the cloud in real-time and deploy all the necessary software for Mumble hosting all by itself. We probably achieved the fastest Mumble provisioning on the market.
End of Reality provides premium game servers for hit titles like Battlefield, Call of Duty, and Counter-Strike. The company uses the TC Admin game server control panel system to give its customers access to their game servers. TC Admin provides secure access to game server files and settings with the possibility to install custom mods and configurations.
Strategy Star had the explicit pleasure of working with EOReality founder, Robby Hicks, to implement the new vision for the company website.
A fresh look and feel for the EOReality website
We developed the website systems with the LAMP stack using the following technologies:
Linux
Apache
MySQL
PHP
HTML
CSS
JavaScript
The website features new interactive features such as a clickable map of server locations offered by the EOReality network and a multiple destination login box for the different service panels offered by the company.
Strategy Star helped the Finnish-American Club of Tucson establish an online presence using Facebook and the WordPress publishing software.
We worked with a designer and photographer, Brian Hughes, from Tucson to compose a unique WordPress theme for the Finnish-American club.
Strategy Star guided the club in technology decisions and helped establish an online presence that quickly became the #1 ranking website for the “Finnish American Club” search term on Google, raising its profile among the Finnish-American community.
We trained club administrators to use the WordPress platform for publishing content, pages, and managing their event schedules.
