I come from a background in web development so I was considering extending sapp into web development.
Rather than have a file that is updated on the server with lua, I'm thinking I could use the http request to send statistics to a website. The website would sort the stats like kills, deaths, and k/d ratio for each game, and keep data since the script has begun logging. Has someone already made some sort of server statistics related to kills and deaths before? I'm at the point where I set up a way for the server to have a list of requests and they could be like https://somesite.com/halo.php?killer=playerName1&victim=playerName2&killerip=x.x.x.x&victimip=x.x.x.x&updatekey=912ec803b2ce49e4a541068d495ab570 The update key could be anything giving it a bit of extra security so people can't query the server by themselves messing up the logging.
It uses the async ability of the http request when the game starts if there are requests waiting it does them once a second, unless there are none waiting, which there would be one added to the array each time someone kills another player. When the game ends it waits for the last request to come in then stops the looping timer so timers don't get called multiple times when a game starts. Even if the game ends with an explosion that kills 8 players I think it would still be able to keep up. If not the timer could be faster.
I'm thinking the website could put the data in a mysql table so that if the name/ip combo exists it does nothing, if not it inserts the name/ip combo with an id generated by the database. And keep track of the current game with a number, like the first time it's 1 then 2 and so on. And have a table that is something like | game_id | player_id | victim_id | kill_count | it could be done with the standard CRUD rules to make everything right. Then it would be interesting to query the database, find all kills or deaths of a specific player. Or all kills of one player against another, or do a k/d ratio over one game, multiple games, or the life of the logging.
It may be able to be extended to multiple servers but making it public would impose a risk on the data, because they could send whatever to the webserver. I guess if you sorted it into different servers you could delete servers or sort servers that seem to have false information.
tldr;
Send kill and death information to a web server so it can track and sort the information.
I'm going to work on this for a while or from time to time and see if it's actually doable, I think it is, but feel free to tell me I'm crazy or something.