New server listing site in development

[irishdog]

Hey there.

I have been working on a new shard listing site for the past week and feel it is far enough development to go into an open beta so we can find and squash bugs

The link is : http://pureblooduo.com/topsite

Right now the site is fully functional and as far as I tested myself seems to be bug free, there is only so much testing one can do though without help.

My reasons for making this site are numerous. The main one being that this site will be 100% fair. There will be no vote manipulation and it is very, very fair. You can even check the vote logs for each server to see who has been voting for that server.

As you can see it is in a temporary location right now while I decide upon a name for the site. I am taking suggestions also! ALso if you have any ideas for the site please let me know and I will try my best to accomodate!

I have not been documenting features as I have been developing because usually I just get an idea and do it and move onto the next and forget about it . However I will post a feature list below to the best of my memory. I may have forgotten some.

Site front end features:

• Based on bootstrap for a clean and easy to develop with framework
• Multiple options for searching and sorting the shard listings including country hosted and specific eras
• Current player count and peak player count
• uptime display
• Server software display
• ability to create detailed shard descriptions including one video presentation
• Half masked public IP log for voting that anyone can see.
• Dynamic banner generation for your website or for posting on forums that shows your shard name, IP and current player count. All the colors are changeable by the server owner. Future updates will include more backgrounds.
• Visitors can add comments to server pages
• Can add multiple servers on one account
• Multiple themes to choose from
• Probably more I am missing

Backend:

• Polls for new information every 5 minutes from your server.
• Much more but doesn't really matter to front end users

 

[Soteric]

Nice service. It would be great to see players graph to check how online is changing during the day.

 

[irishdog]

Nice service. It would be great to see players graph to check how online is changing during the day.

Hey, thanks for the suggestion!

I am actually working on that feature and hope to have it available in a few days. It will allow you to see historic data on how your shard is doing!

 

[irishdog]

I'm gonna give this a little bump as I really need people to sign up so I can test the systems especially the shard poller.

What has changed since the last post?

Name change to shard.list and domain name is shard.li
graphs are almost finished. You can see an example of what they will look like at http://shard.li/charts
Vote-gate is available. You now send your players to http://shard.li/votegate.php?id=yourserverid to vote.
Multiple backend changes to increase security.

What's coming in the future?
Anti cheating features including anti vpn and anti proxy.
Ability to join a shard right from the website using a companion app that will be in development soon.
And more. If you have suggestions please post them and I will truly give them great consideration as this site is for you. The player and for you, the server owner!

Thanks for reading!

 

[Vorspire]

Sounds like you're taking on a lot of work - not sure if you've got a team helping but don't burn yourself out haha

 

[irishdog]

Sounds like you're taking on a lot of work - not sure if you've got a team helping but don't burn yourself out haha

It's just me

The website is pretty much finished all that is left to do is finish the charting. After that I will work on the launcher but I may see if I can get help with that as I am more comfortable in php than I am in c#. Basically all I will be doing is either launching razor or UO steam directly and filling in the info to connect automatically using sendkeys. I already have a prototype made that will send keys to uosteam. tab 6 times to get the address box and enter garbage right now. I just need to pass in the correct info from the website. I know it's not ideal but until uosteam supports arguments I don't know what else to do.

 

[Vorspire]

Nice stuff, it really seems promising!
Having access to as much data as possible is not only beneficial for the players, but the shard owners will seriously appreciate those features (graphing, dynamic status display image generation, anti-vpn, etc)

On the subject of assistants;
I'm sure if you join us in Mark's IRC channel, it might be worth discussing how to launch Razor with a protocol, IE razor:// since UOSteam has (or will have) uos://
Razor's UI source is open-source now, so you could probably even do the edits yourself and submit a pull request to have them merged into the unofficial-official repository on GitHub

 

[irishdog]

Nice stuff, it really seems promising!
Having access to as much data as possible is not only beneficial for the players, but the shard owners will seriously appreciate those features (graphing, dynamic status display image generation, anti-vpn, etc)

On the subject of assistants;
I'm sure if you join us in Mark's IRC channel, it might be worth discussing how to launch Razor with a protocol, IE razor:// since UOSteam has (or will have) uos://
Razor's UI source is open-source now, so you could probably even do the edits yourself and submit a pull request to have them merged into the unofficial-official repository on GitHub

That's not a bad idea. I will have a look at the razor UI source and see if I can cook something up.

As far as I know the protocol to launch UO steam isnt available yet though and was promised some time ago. I may still have to use sendkeys for that.

I will check out that IRC channel aswell probably tomorrow when I get some time

Thanks for the feedback! (I need all I can get!!)

 

[irishdog]

Gonna bump this to give you guys this weeks changelog.

It can be viewed at: http://www.reddit.com/r/ultimaonline/comments/1zu434/shardlist_changelog_march_7th_2014/

The big change is that player lists are ready!! You can view directly the players that are on the shard that you are looking at.
This is configurable on a per shard basis. You can see an example at: http://shard.li/server.php?id=8

However it depends on a third party script written by Vorspire that is not publicly available at the moment so until then you cannot add this to your server page.