Why not use a real threaded and grouped message system like NNTP?

You could set up a web interface to it here, but people could use their own Newsreaders if they wanted.

It'd give us read/unread counts, groups, killfiles, threads...

Example:
http://floh.gartenhaus.net/newsportal/index-english.php3

The devs might just want to program every thing thereselves and be able to0 say we programed everything, including the message board, yah sure theres some whistles you want here and there but over all it's great, in addition to some junk i pointed out i wouldn't mind the backgrounf color being a few shades lighter.

We wrote the messageboard ourselves, along with the rest of the web stuff, to try and get the most server-mileage out of our limited hardware. 99% of popular messageboard software is written for 99% of the average use case scenarios, and not for being slashdotted. Doing a messageboard through NNTP/NNRP isn't necessarily a bad idea, but at this point I don't think we'll bother. Plus I'm not real excited about sticking Diablo on some machine and dealing with all the news-isms, having one more thing to worry about. Not a good use of time at this juncture.

You guys are preparing to get slashdotted? /me is impressed...

what do you mean by slashdotted?

Do you really -think- that once 3.2 is out, or when its announced more to the public a while later, that the /. (http://slashdot.org/) crowd wouldnt grab hold of your server and gang-rape it with excessive connections that brutalizes its poor limited resources in ways you never imagined possible?

Making a Geek-friendly game that runs on linux, even more so, a hypish MMORPG set in -gasp- space. where you cn, like, shoot people.

if this story leaks out toe the /. crowd you are quite likely to hit the frontpage for a day... which means about 150 000 hits the first half-hour, and then continuing like that.

I really wish you would set up rate-limiting to drop excessive connectison before you machine has broken down to overload of spawning www processes. :-)

Actualy, /. is how I ended up playing this game... /. linked to a happypenguin review about a bunch of linux games, and I believe this was one of them, or was linked from the nav elements... Whatever. I clicked, the rest is history.

Sam, slashdotting is basically the act of bringing a server to its knees by posting a link to it on slashdot.

lol... and slashdot is..?

*cringes* slashdot.org...

We're all about getting the most we can out of our hardware. We're well aware of the risks of getting hammered by a popular link. We'll do the best we can. Andy even looked at writing our own webserver (Apache isn't exactly optimal anything, Zues is expensive, and various other lightweight select() loop open-source projects all have their downsides), but we can't take too much time away from game development to do.. webserver optimization. We'll optimize what we can, round-robin the load across a couple of machines, and hope for the best. Yes, we have hard process limit restrictions, bandwidth caps, and all the other stuff I would consider pretty basic to server performance profiling / preparation. In the end, we'll probably still get crushed. But, I hope we'll be crushed much more elegantly than most :).

Subjecting our userbase to this in-house messageboard, lightweight and written in C instead of some bloated (but feature-packed) PHP nightmare, was part of this optimization process. No, we don't have emoticons and little user-profile portrait images. But it should survive the worst-case scenario a lot better.

Please do one thing for me if you do post on slashdot, some how restrict the speed to the users not logged in, and give us that extra speed, that way we willl be happy litttle clams and the clam crushers will be well, pretty slow clam crushers.

I like this weboard, but could you make the background color a few shades darker? It's a bit hard to read whilest the backlight is turned down.

I wonder what server google uses... Ooo! Set up a beowulf cluster! :P

OMG!! i went to slashdot!! /me shudders

jesus.. i bet those guys sit in their basements and look whiter than the background on this reply thingy.. The horror!!!!!

Hehe... Yeah, it's like that... Just make sure to set your threshold at something above -1 so you don't get all the offtopic stuff and the trolls.

Google uses their own webserver, called (oddly enough) GWS. Regarding rate limiting for game users vs. web users: the webserver and game server are on distinct networks, so that is less of a concern.

All hail the all inteligent devs!!! =)

Is it possible to use their webserver or something? I've never seen it down...