I've had this idea for a bit now, with the Radium's Pre-3.1 game. If this could be pumped into a LJ or Website (other than the JCF) and have it update daily (with the latest topics since it last visited) it would be delightful!

I can generate an LJ code for this, if needed...

Try a hyperlink.

This would be external coding, not the JCF's.

~ Traft

aww, there's nothing that can happen within the JCF that can do that, like pump out topics in XML?

Don't think so.

-Click: Show Printable Version
Ctrl+A
Ctrl+C
-Click: LJ
Ctrl+V

XML, foo.

*Bump*

This can actually be accomplished fairly easily by using RSS (Really Simple Syndication). It's a standard (or at least it's in the process of becoming standard) means of exporting news, blogs, or basically anything using XML.

Here's what needs to happen:

J2O needs to use a [freely available] RSS writer to export what it wants.
- This would generate a file like www.jazz2online.com/jcf/thread-182496.xml
Other websites simply pass that file to their [freely available] RSS reader.
- They can then display it using any means desired (typically XHTML).

This actually sounds like a fun project to work on. Problem is, if it was used too extensively, it would eat more J2O bandwidth. It shouldn't be too bad, though. Admins would be able to 'turn on' RSS for a particular thread or forum, so they wouldn't have thousands of useless XML files laying around. Also, very few people would actually tap into the RSS for their websites.

Hmm, I think I'm going to try something like this with the Mechaius forum. Not that anyone goes there, but it would still be fun.

-Nag

Upon looking further into this, I have found that vBulletin 3 actually already has built-in mechanisms for doing this sort of thing. It has to do with an external.php script, which doesn't seem to be working properly for JCF. It allows you to view latest threads using either JavaScript or RSS. I'm not sure if it allows latest posts within threads, but I'm sure it does.

Anyway, I'm not sure why the script isn't working for JCF. Maybe it's disabled or was crippled in a hack attempt? By hack, I mean an admin attempt to add/change a feature, not a hacker trying to be stupid.

-Nag

Yes! Lets spoil even more bandwidth!

Originally Posted by Newspaz

Yes! Lets spoil even more bandwidth!

Exactly.

This is a nicety that probably can't be afforded considering the current bandwidth situation. Unless you'd like to pay for it yourself, you'll have to - GASP! - spend an extra two seconds checking the JCF.

~ Traft

Originally Posted by Trafton

Exactly.

This is a nicety that probably can't be afforded considering the current bandwidth situation. Unless you'd like to pay for it yourself, you'll have to - GASP! - spend an extra two seconds checking the JCF.

~ Traft

Which... wouldn't use any bandwidth?

Originally Posted by SteelTalon

Which... wouldn't use any bandwidth?

Checking the JCF would use less bandwidth than an RSS feed, which checks periodically. Plus an RSS feed would encourage people to refresh it more often, meaning more hits. New pages would have to be generated for each topic, meaning almost two times as much disk space would be used per topic, as well.

~ Traft

Originally Posted by Onag

Upon looking further into this, I have found that vBulletin 3 actually already has built-in mechanisms for doing this sort of thing. It has to do with an external.php script, which doesn't seem to be working properly for JCF. It allows you to view latest threads using either JavaScript or RSS. I'm not sure if it allows latest posts within threads, but I'm sure it does.

Anyway, I'm not sure why the script isn't working for JCF. Maybe it's disabled or was crippled in a hack attempt? By hack, I mean an admin attempt to add/change a feature, not a hacker trying to be stupid.

-Nag

Well, this is a gamma version of vB3. Perhaps that's the reason. But we'd have to pay $30 (year's updates fee) to get a higher version. (It makes me angry at Jelsoft - first they are so slow with their v3 release that it takes months longer before it's there then they charge you for the fact they didn't do it within that time. And that for a product that seems more bloated than ever.)

Doesn't phpBB have a conversion utility for vBulletin? It's free, and has plenty of hacks to provide anything you might need.

And in defense of the RSS idea...

It would require virtually no extra bandwidth to run this. A single script (external.php) is used to dynamically generate a small RSS file only when it's requested by a client website. Or better yet, it can be used to generate an even smaller JavaScript that accomplishes the same thing.

This could actually save bandwidth for J2O. When I visit JCF, I only check 2-3 forums, and even then, only if they have new posts in them. I usually check at least once daily, and usually only see anything I'm interested in maybe 3 times a week.

If there were an overview of the latest posts on J2O (which I check anyway), I'd be able to save the trip (and bandwidth) several times a week. It would also save at least 2 page loads even when there are posts I'm interested in. I'd be able to jump straight to the first topic of interest, rather than start at the forum listing.

-Nag

Yeah - I'm kind of in favour of the idea. For j2ov2 btw, we already have a basic new/newly updated topics list. We just need to add a forum selecter. And J2Ov2 news has RSS. Still, adding RSS for JCF might be a neat idea.

Never am I going to switch to phpBB though. I don't have much good words left for that software. Just adminning it for a big forum already is terrible.

Using syndication would use much less bandwidth than actually visiting the site, because all the HTML formatting is not present. It's now enabled on the JCF:

http://www.jazz2online.com/jcf/external.php?type=rss
http://www.jazz2online.com/jcf/external.php?type=xml
http://www.jazz2online.com/jcf/external.php?type=js

However, it only seems to show the latest topics and their names, without any post content. It might be good to make an additional script that outputs latest posts from a given thread, or from a specific forum.

Cool, so now the test I wrote a few days ago should work.

Link: JavaScript Test

Anyone interested can use that page as a basis for their own sites.

-Nag