Tournament Hub (C4A2?) Design and Plans

[txus]

 Facebook? No thanks. But this on the other hand:

I have no idea if the provider of the forum boards provides external oauth access, but if this is the case it would seem like a neat mechanism (that way you could pull the photo/username from the forum and immediately people would recognize other people in the game from when they have browsed the forums).

is simply an amazing idea, and IMO worth pursuing (for those with the skills, and if possible at all)! It would give the community an even stronger meaning.

 

[pmprog]

Anonymous doesn't really work when you're creating scoreboards and friends lists. I'm not overly bothered about how "real" account details are (hence why asking if I should make email mandatory), but you need an account in order to rank and communicate.

If you just want a "game launcher", then I'm sure the THub stuff can be disabled if you don't log in, so you can still launch and play games, you just don't get chat and submit to high scores etc.

Being able to register without an email means you can join in, but not get mail notifications; but it also keeps your account seperate from anything else you might do

 

[pmprog]

Guess I'm saying.. don't make it pyra or pandora specific; keep it wide open, and then could be a server for pyra + pandora, and other servers for r-pi, or just one big server for it all, etc.

Yep, I already plan too, hence why I set up http://www.tournamenthub.org.uk rather than asking ED

I'll go through your other suggestions later when I have a bit more time; but yeah, I'm hoping I can get some devs to add THub API into some of their releases. I've already asked Foxblock for it in Project4, and I might make a new build of Spout; but these will have to wait until the API is ready

 

[levi]

Regarding emails, and avoiding dead accounts, it'd be not too contentious to say accounts with no activity over the period of a few months, say, and no associated email address will be culled.  How long dormant accounts with an associated email address should last for is arguable, but at least you can alert those users that their account is about to go.

 

[skeezix]

By 'cull', it might be wise to flag them as 'locked' and never deleted .. ie: probably the database of scores will have a sourcing user-id pointing back to user table. So just flag it as deceased. Could always manually restore an account if someone comes back two years later and wants to resume their friends-list etc.

jeff

 

[pmprog]

Well, I'm not sure on the exact limit to my hosting space/database, so I will need some form of culling, but I guess we'll just have to play that by ear until I get a feel of how many dead accounts we get

 

[Rockthesmurf]

 Facebook? No thanks. But this on the other hand:

I have no idea if the provider of the forum boards provides external oauth access, but if this is the case it would seem like a neat mechanism (that way you could pull the photo/username from the forum and immediately people would recognize other people in the game from when they have browsed the forums).

is simply an amazing idea, and IMO worth pursuing (for those with the skills, and if possible at all)! It would give the community an even stronger meaning.

Well the whole point I was making is the end user can choose, some people prefer Facebook, others prefer email address. For this forum, it actually allows you to authenticate via email, Facebook or Twitter, and from a very quick Google, I can't see any built in ways to use the board directly to authenticate - but I agree, out of all the methods, this would seem like quite a nice option (but then again, perhaps we just think this as we are currently on this board, indicating that we use the board).

With regards to the anonymous user stuff, you can still support friend lists/scores etc. the anonymous user is pretty much just treated like any other user. Checkout something like Parse, their documentation probably describes a lot of this server side architecture, including authenticating, oauth, anonymous users, etc.

 

[skeezix]

Did you ever keep going with this? The website is still empty.

RL has been brutal for 18mo but hopefully improving so I'm catching up again

 

[pmprog]

Yeah, my real life has just decimated all my free time. All of my projects have pretty much ceased development (with the exception of OpenApoc, but that's because other people have got involved).

I don't know when I'll get any serious time, and it annoys the crap out of me. :-(

 

[TheGeopard]

This TournamentHub thing reminds me to the Steam client.

 

[pmprog]

To be honest, my plans weren't entirely dissimilar.