ABOUT LANREG

HISTORY

While I was president of the Gaming Club at Oregon State University the club was constantly struggling to keep our events as cheap as possible for students while still covering our costs. To ensure we were breaking even, we hacked together a PHP based registration and payment system which was integrated with our PHPBB forums. This allowed attendees to select seats next to their friends, and gave us a better idea of how many people we would have at our events.

One issue that the club faced while I was there was a constant change of venue. We held more than 10 events in 6 venues over a three year period. This created many headaches from a logistics and planning perspective, and it caused our static registration system to become useless after each event.

History
Rails

DEVELOPMENT

In my fourth year as a student and my third and final year as President, I paired my passion and knowledge for running LAN parties with my Computer Science skills and I created the first version of a standalone LAN party hosting site that I dubbed 'LAN Registration'. This site was created using C#/.NET since I was comfortable with this language stack from my senior design project. Each site instance would support an event. The beautiful part of the site was the ability to create seating charts dynamically for your events via a web interface.

My first version of LAN Registration was used as an event registration system for over 10 LAN parties from 2012 through Spring 2014. It worked, but it was clunky, not very feature-rich, difficult to deploy, and horribly maintained. In the Spring of 2013 I began working on LANREG which is the product you see before you today. LANREG (built on the Ruby on Rails framework) was designed from the ground up to be a content driven website which would allow anyone to create a LAN party registration of any size with minimal effort.