Tampering in Forum's Domain
I recently took over hosting the website for the LARP's I am in, starting really from scratch and learning as I go. It has been educational, with starting and copying in both a phpBB forum and a MediaWiki database. Even with GoDaddy's hosting center making it easy to do the initial install (and it still took me three tries with the automatic configuration :( ), I explored a little bit to see what actually makes this software run.
Wow. I think I understand it.
To celebrate, and because my fellow players started comparing cute avatars of our fantasy characters, I built a small mod for the forum to display the avatars and allow the players to update them. Took a little time and I started with something a bit similar to get the feel of it all...but it worked.
Ok, first flush of confidence! I added to it, allowing folks to indicate a basic status in the gallery of avatars. One player asked me later to worry why my avatar was grayed out. I had used the same background color for both missing and deceased characters as appropriate for the game. That's me if you go to that link, the Delphinan.
So what do I do next? I wasn't planning anything until I started using multiple accounts on the forum, and discovering how long it took to check one account, log out, log in on the other account, go back to the first, etc. How did the players with three or more accounts/characters do it? There was even an older thread in the forums I inherited discussing some sort of switch capability, though it seemed a hairy problem.
I started hacking...putting a note on the boards that I was the cause of the strange messages others were seeing. At the end of a few hours, I had it. Each member could now specify what other accounts could jump to their account without logout/login steps...then the display would provide a link to each of the character accounts you could jump into. I liked the new ease of use I had built-in, what before took quite a few seconds and several trips now became simple.
Now the yay. One of the players was very very pleased and said something that made my day today:
Renatasia Tygart (5:34:51 PM): I'm very extraordinarily happy with the hack you did.
Renatsia Tygart (5:34:57 PM): It's making my life a lot easier.
Thank you!
Wow. I think I understand it.
To celebrate, and because my fellow players started comparing cute avatars of our fantasy characters, I built a small mod for the forum to display the avatars and allow the players to update them. Took a little time and I started with something a bit similar to get the feel of it all...but it worked.
Ok, first flush of confidence! I added to it, allowing folks to indicate a basic status in the gallery of avatars. One player asked me later to worry why my avatar was grayed out. I had used the same background color for both missing and deceased characters as appropriate for the game. That's me if you go to that link, the Delphinan.
So what do I do next? I wasn't planning anything until I started using multiple accounts on the forum, and discovering how long it took to check one account, log out, log in on the other account, go back to the first, etc. How did the players with three or more accounts/characters do it? There was even an older thread in the forums I inherited discussing some sort of switch capability, though it seemed a hairy problem.
I started hacking...putting a note on the boards that I was the cause of the strange messages others were seeing. At the end of a few hours, I had it. Each member could now specify what other accounts could jump to their account without logout/login steps...then the display would provide a link to each of the character accounts you could jump into. I liked the new ease of use I had built-in, what before took quite a few seconds and several trips now became simple.
Now the yay. One of the players was very very pleased and said something that made my day today:
Renatasia Tygart (5:34:51 PM): I'm very extraordinarily happy with the hack you did.
Renatsia Tygart (5:34:57 PM): It's making my life a lot easier.
Thank you!