Ron wrote:The "Email Us" link is a mailto. I have php code to add to the menu link which will allow for a php email form to be used instead. Once placed into the game as a folder it simply needs an email address added to send. It also has captcha so robots can't use it send mails.
We use mailto so that the user can their own default email application, also you would be shocked on how good robots are at getting past captcha.
We use to use captcha on the signups on these forums and that stopped nothing.
I ended up writing my own script that uses SFS (
Stop Forum Spam) that works great, granted the odd one does get through, but a simple remove of the account and submitting the info in their database stops it for another several months.
Ron wrote:I'll look into that. Maybe a simple wysiwyg editor added for the admin to spin a news story or two ...
Yeah, I did have plans to add a news section on the admin section, but cleaning up the code was more important.
Ron wrote:What broke on it? That is, what should it do that it doesn't? I took a quick look at the code and am wondering if it's a dbase thing. Anyway, want to tackle that and fix (unless someone else has already)...
I think it breaks when you either create the universe or when you add AI Players, most probably the latter, also I think the Scheduler also breaks when you have Xenobe AI.
I was in the middle of creating new ones that is written as a BNT Plugin but got put on hold due to the new code broke my Plugin code that needed to be rewritten.
Ron wrote:Yeah, I started at 1200 baud and took it down at 2400 baud. Emails send via FidoNet. That was fun times. We had tons of "doors" and miss everyone who was registered on the site. That was just when the Internet was starting up.
Yeah, I remember those days, all we had to play to-do with multiplayer games was a text base MUD (multi user dungeon) that we had running on Linux.
Yep, also remember FidoNet Echomail etc my younger brother use to run a BBS on his Amiga here which was rather popular and I think was one of the main Fido nodes for London, until some hardware issues happened like his HDD dying.
Oh those was the days
Ron wrote:I don't think out of the vast Internet universe we are the only ones who enjoy classic games. With a little tuning Black Nova can become popular again. Just some SEO and a little marketing and folks will begin playing again. Any updates need to be in keeping with the original designs and compliment the game not change it.
Don't get me wrong, I agree there are loads of players that love the old classic games, as for search engine optimization we was listed Google, like if you search for Blacknova Traders this site is in the first slot then our project page on sourceforge is the next.
Well the game was unbalanced due to how the game was written and wasn't intended to be like that, and to resolve that would need to change how the game runs etc.
Loads of players got fed up each month of having to restart from scratch due to the game being reset, and the reset is needed with default code from 1 month to 3 months depending on how many players are playing and how its being played.
There is no way around it, the game needs resetting every two to three months due to the nature of the code, this is the same for MMO's they get regular restarts on a weekly basis like World of Warcraft, Star Trek Online and Star Wars The Old Republic, this is to reset/resync all indexes of objects and clean up any fragmented memory etc.
I was leaning to move BNT to a more MMO style of game with a XP levelling System, Questing, Crafting, Battle Zones and more, this was go give every type of players something that they would like to do.
Ron wrote:We must remove the mailto and replace it with code since it's not the best way to send mail.
I think we did move away from using mailto a while back, but ended up with loads of injected emails, its best to leave it using mailto and use the users own email application, that way it makes it easier to know who sent what.
Ron wrote:We can add a newsletter mailing script for those who wish to join a list.
Social media needs to be added (start a Facebook page)
Xenobe (AI Players) need to be fixed
All the above ideas was/are still on our to-do list but have been put on hold.
A mailing list for players might be an issue, it is very easy to get your mail server blacklisted, when Blacknova was run by the main owner of BNT (Ron Harwood) we was getting blacklisted all over the place result in players not receiving their emails, since it was moved over to me to run stuff on our dedicated server located in a data centre based in Germany it has gotten better, but a few times we have got blacklisted but has since then been fixed and should never happen again, but as a safe measure I like to keep sending emails as little as possible.
Facebook implementation, well many years ago, I did start to rewrite BNT to become a facebook app, but facebook kept changing their API which pissed off a load of us trying to develop stuff, so I just gave up.
Now, Xenobe, Like I said I did have plans to do a new version as one of our plugins, I got about half way through and then got struck with ill health where everything got put on hold.
I haven't long re-installed Windows so I haven't got everything installed yet, so the code is here some place.
As for Ron (Owner of BNT) and another admin/developer without saying too much, have been talking about some new development, but that was like mid July, so not too sure what's happening atm.