I've been losing track of what I've posted here vs. over on the Gamehawk dev list, so in response to Carl's pestering last night and MJHarnish's questions via email, I guess I'd better sum up. You guys already know some of this, so bear with me. Wirebird is the Phoenyx software. Firehawk is the current version. Mhonarc (a third-party product) handles the web archival, or did until recently. I've never fully automated it, so every January I have to remember to update it to archive the current year. I goofed this January and a lot of lists haven't had their web archives built. Some are fixed, some are archiving new stuff but still have a gap, and some just aren't archiving anymore. Gamehawk is the New! and Improved! Wirebird version that we've been promising for (mumble) years now. It's been rewritten eighty-leven times, and I finally said "Screw it, we're SHIPPING!" because otherwise it's going to be stuck in development hell forever. So I started feeding in some current lists' archives, so that I'd have something to play with. But then it became apparent that I was going to have to shelve GH dev *again* to fix Mhonarc. And then I said "Wait! A dumbed-down Gamehawk could build the archives!" And so I built a simple template, and built some archives. They're only a little fancier than Mhonarc archives... they have threaded pages, and RSS versions (Atom versions would just be a matter of a template). That's a baby step, but it's Gamehawk as non- vaporware, so it's also a huge step in its own way. The next baby step will be tacking on-web replying onto those static archive pages. The replies go straight to Firehawk moderation right now, because Firehawk is still managing the mailing lists themselves... Gamehawk is basically just another Firehawk subscriber. Hopefully by April 1 (if not before), we'll bring the new server online. At the moment, Gamehawk's database lives on the pokey little test server, which really doesn't have the horsepower to serve up dynamic pages. (If you've visited any pages with "cgi-bin/viceroy.pl" in the middle, you're using the test server *and* non-mod_perl CGI scripts, so don't worry about poor performance. Also, that poor little test server is currently slogging through importing ten years' worth of Phoenyx historical data, so its mind may be elsewhere while it's serving your requests. All things considered, its response time is surprisingly fast even when it takes a few seconds to load.) The next baby step after that will be having some test users subscribe to Gamehawk directly. The messages will still come through Firehawk, but then Gamehawk will distribute them to its own subscribers. Once that's rock-solid, and Gamehawk is accepting registrations and subscribes and unsubscribes and all that happy stuff, we move all the subscribers to an entire list from Firehawk to Gamehawk. Nobody should notice the difference, because by this time we should have the whole userbase in Gamehawk and cleaned up and so on. Firehawk will be processing mail, but Gamehawk will be its only subscriber. Then we have those test users *post* through Gamehawk. If that works, we take Firehawk out of the loop entirely for that list, it's Gamehawk end-to-end... and nobody should notice that either. (Yes, not having anyone notice is a major theme here.) Once posts are going through Gamehawk, the web replies can do so too, which is where things really start to get fun and it starts to look like a functioning web forum at that end. That's when we stop trying to duplicate existing stuff... up to this point, it doesn't look very exciting (thread-per-page display is nice, but not earthshattering), but the infrastructure is so radically different that we suddenly get to start doing really wild stuff. Okay, the rest of this message is now officially blue-skying... If you go pester that poor little test server thusly: http://www.phoenyx.net/cgi-bin/viceroy.pl/KarenCravens you get to see the placeholder member page. You see where I've posted as "Karen Cravens" twice? That's not a bug. That's two separate "entities" under my username... they just happen to have the same name, and right now that's all Gamehawk shows about them (it's much more cagey about giving away email addresses now). I have, as you see, a total of four entities (the ugly one with the number is my Bloglines ID). While they're not very exciting right there, since they're all just variants on my name, that's just because I'm a bad example... I spend too much time administrating and not enough playing. Here's a player: http://www.phoenyx.net/cgi-bin/viceroy.pl/ChrisHarnish Chris, Christopher, Chris... Cyrus? Cyrus is a PC. Someday (soon!) you'll be able to go to a game list like Realms and pick all those PCs ... they'll be linked to their character sheets, and if a character has passed from one user to another you'll see that, too. Want to read only game posts and none of the chatter? Just select only the posts made by character-tagged entities. You'll also be able to set posting minimums. If Chris hasn't posted as Cyrus in the last 48 hours (or whatever), Gamehawk will send him a nudge. Or send you one. Or whatever. Oh, and if you don't like the whole web forum thing but you like the idea of avatars and hyperlinks, Gamehawk has two different mail settings... text mail (The Way It's Always Been) and HTML mail (the web... in your mailbox). Anybody want a blog? Gamehawk has separate Post (new message) and Reply (followup/comment message) permissions. Only the blog owner (or owners, for a group blog) can Post, but anybody (or any registered user, or anybody in a larger group you've defined) can leave comments. Got your own domain? You could syndicate your games there, either on your own Gamehawk linked to our database, or by letting our Gamehawk FTP updates out to your site. (Or, heck, it's open source software, run your own completely separate Gamehawk installation. But that's getting outside the stakeholders' scope.) Or... well, there's about eighty million ideas we've got. I could go on forever. Baby steps first. Oh, and sometime before we get too committed, I *really* need to pause and build a real template for all this stuff. If nobody steps up I'll do it, but I'd at least like some feedback. Show me your favorite webforum layout, tell me how you usually navigate (or wish you could navigate) discussion archives of any sort, whatever. (Aside: If you get any 404's following links off a viceroy page, that's because viceroy is a window into the Gamehawk future, but its links are sending you to the Firehawk present... it's just a test script, after all. If you take that 404 and stick the "cgi-bin/viceroy.pl/" back in, you'll get the future page viceroy was intending to send you to. Which may or may not be a stub like the member pages, but at least it should exist.) -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net
