Integrated Forum rankings - v2

[I.M.O.G.]

I use chrome and sometimes I forget about stuff like that. Good point, I don't think that's the way to go.

Essentially, my goal is to do the banner based sigs hwbot does but in a way that appears like text and fits with our site. It gives people the team stats they want to present, while not changing the rules for the site regarding image based sigs.

EOC Folding stats is an example of sig stats we are implementing right now, and I think you could probably do something similar with hwbot. How hard would it be for you to do something like the following? With sig images like this, I can create custom bbcodes like this which blend in with our site very well. It doesn't have the rendering problems which the current javascript based API does.

[ fstats]6238[/fstats ] =

I could probably put something together myself with a bit of work, but I wouldn't know how I can use the hwbot data in a friendly way (scraping your pages and caching it on our site would be a no-no).

[richba5tard]

Well, I now our signature creator is in dire need of upgrading, but you could make a simple signature using the ocforums background. Then, you could create a [hwbotsig]user_id[/hwbotsig] which maps to [ url=http://hwbot.org/community/user/richba5tard][ img]http://www.hwbot.org/signature/u<user_id>.png[/img][/url]
or
<a href="http://hwbot.org/community/user/richba5tard"><img src="http://hwbot.org/signature/u<user_id>.png" alt="hwbot signature" /></a>

It's not easy to find your user id though, we almost always use the url friendly name in the url. If you want, i can create a http://hwbot.org/signature/n<user_name>.png mapping which fetches the signature by user name.

[I.M.O.G.]

No need to do the mapping, we can give instructions for people to grab their userid from the storage path line here:
http://hwbot.org/profile.images.do

The way you suggested would "work", but people could use different backgrounds, fonts, and text layouts. With the folding stats example, the bbcode controls all formatting, and all the user has to do is insert their userid. It's very simple, just presents the stats, and impossible to mess up or tweak which means we don't have to police sigs.

So right now with the way things are, I could make the following available - however anyone could choose to use different background and text font if they want (and whatever they chose would only look right on our forum, no where else).


I think the easiest solution for me, given the special needs I'm looking for, would be to get a daily export of the team stats from hwbot and pump that into a sql db so that I can use the following PHP to create the images we want:
http://us3.php.net/manual/en/ref.image.php

You could do the same thing, but it would be a decent bit of work, and most people are happy with your image sigs already - I don't really think it makes sense for you to spend the time doing it. On the other hand, I can't do it unless I have the raw data available - I'd need daily exports something like what the F@H project offers. Then from that, I could hack something together to present the sig data we are looking for. Probably also doesn't make sense for you to export your raw data. :-/

[biberu]

Is this information available as plain xml or json anywhere?

[richba5tard]

The plain xml api exists for a few years now, but is barely used hence we don't plan to extend or even support it anymore.

You can however retrieve the (x)html directly, server side, and cache or process it. That's what we do on our local forums: instead of populating an iframe with javascript, we make a direct http get request to the same html page using php, and cache the response on the server. It works faster, but you need a tiny bit php/jsp/... knowledge.

[biberu]

We could do that of course, but it's preferable with a solution that doesn't depend on your presentational format, for both parties. If we were to parse the html for raw data it would lock both of us to that format since a change on your end could break it, unless there is an option to request a specific version of it. Still, it's unnecessary to do this over html. There is nothing preventing us from caching xml either, for clients on our end there wouldn't be any difference.

How come you are discontinuing the xml api?

[richba5tard]

Like said, the xml api has existed for a few years and except for i4memory nobody used it. Now the xml api data is outdated (it doesn't support the new ranking concepts, cooling, countries and regions, etc) and the framework used does not support caching in any way (so no option for hightraffic useage).

If someone would actively make use of the xml api, I think we need to think about which data we want to provide, and start from scratch with a more decent architecture.

[eva2000]

what discontinuing xmp api NOOOO after I finally figured out to how to properly filter/check your xml feed for validity before overwriting the local cache xml version heh

but yeah i understand the demand isn't that great and leaving the option to cache xml feed of hwbot.org up to end users is risky in case overload hwbot.org servers

it's been a great learning experience getting revision 4 php code to work with hwbot xml api. Had some problems it seems that if hwbot api xml feed is called from www.hwbot.org the xml file i cache locally is corrupted with 400 bad request. If called from non-www hwbot.org link the xml file is cached locally without problem !

Got the wordpress <p> issue fixed http://i4memory.com/wp/hwbot-team - decided to just bypass the front end and go right into template code - also will be able to pull in custom api xml data on the page - well until you discontinue the feed

[richba5tard]

Hey eva2000, I won't remove it as long as you use it, I just don't want to extend it in it's current form. The XML api needs a rev2, and this time I need feedback from the community dev's to see what is needed and wanted.

[I.M.O.G.]

Very cool! I want to use it but I hadn't known it existed until now. I'll be stretching my development knowledge to actually figure out how to make use of it, but by the time I figure it out I should be ready to tackle rev2 when it drops. Thanks.