News: More Z-Band Server Page Work

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Today I played around with merging the Z-Band registration and score update pages with the phpBB3 forums. Unlike the other 2 previous pages, these 2 require being logged in to the forums to access. I have them working with getting the users account name, outputting messages correctly, and generally working as intended. But both have yet to really tie both into the php account system properly.

Once that's done though, I suppose streamlining them a bit would be best. Then I don't know. I'm considering making them useable as is, so people could do some rankings manually if they wanted. It would probably be a decent beta test for it all. But that's not to great of an idea with a lack of a proper client like Z-Net or zbattle. I can't say I'd recommended using ZN2 with it. I've considered making and releasing a Z-Net 2.0 Lite for the hell of it, so maybe that would make sense with it. lol

A Lite version would be little more then the "Launch Manually" options from ZN2, and a stripped down settings window. Basically just requiring users to log in mIRC as a normal IRC client, talk to other people in the room, and decide to play from there, leading to using those Launch Manually options. ZN2 regular could work just fine, and in should still kind of be easier then that. In theory. But I'll be honest. There were probably still a few bugs left in it before I stopped work on it, and I just don't feel like supporting those bugs right now. A lite version however would strip away most of what was potentially buggy. But this all is just an idle thought, and I don't know how serious I would be about making it. I suppose just putting it out there as on my mind is enough, and from there people could express their interest in it if they wanted. From there I'd give it more thought. At the very least, people could just install ZN2 right now and use nothing but those existing options if they wanted to keep it simple. But anyway, I'm getting sidetracked.

In other news. The poll is growing... well... surprisingly. 5 more since my last post. Combined with the growth from the day or 2 previous, and well, hmm. I'm not sure I'm ready to call fowl on it yet, but I'm skeptical. I think most of the recent votes are coming from the ZSNES forum post that I replied to. That post was around for several days before that, bringing hits. But not this much. Perhaps it was just my reply catching more google searches. If not, all I can do right now is say, if someone is stacking the votes, please stop. The goal was chosen for a good reason. For the users as much as for me. So that I would know there was enough people interested in using it to sustain a minimum player base so users are left with no one to play with, as little as possible. But hopefully that isn't the case, and instead things are just picking up, likely for the reason I said.

Also, since I've been staring at the forums so much lately, I got around to posting some starter and informational posts for if/when people start using them.