@ Mami Tomoe: The U.S.G.N. works differently from what you are apparently thinking.

The U.S.G.N. itself never actively pings any servers. It uses a heartbeat system. Servers ping the U.S.G.N. every 45 seconds to tell it that they are still alive. If a server doesn't ping for 3 minutes it is removed from the list.
This approach is more efficient than what you suggested.

The usgn.php website is just a read only representation of the server list. It has no effect on the actual server list in any way and is not a part of the U.S.G.N. master server at all. Info requests for details are only executed on demand (when a user clicks a server) and are cached for a few seconds. There is no optimization required for that either. Also pinging all the servers regularly just for that page would cause much more traffic and would be less efficient.

That page is basically a little extra to give people the possibility to check the status of a specific server online. It's not meant to be a replacement for the much more powerful in-game server list.

(the technical problem with the web server list is that all the pinging has to go through the web server which is not cool. Unfortunately it's still not possible to open plain UDP sockets in web browsers via JavaScript. Otherwise I could ping the servers directly via the client connection just like in the game)

@ MikuAuahDark: I can't simply enforce that because of CS2D. I'll check if I can enable it for everything but the CS2D client. Thanks. Actually... I guess the CS2D client just ignores that header anyway so it shouldn't be a problem.

Actually, Strict-Transport-Security header is completely ignored under plain HTTP, so yeah CS2D most likely ignore the header anyway.

Also HTTP2 when, lol

I didn't really have a look into HTTP2 but I guess it would actually be quite trivial to enable it and it shouldn't cause issues either because it's fully backwards compatible. I could give it a try...

Edit:
HSTS should now be enabled for all websites

For HTTP2 I may have to do some more changes because of PHP. So I won't try it now. But probably later because it comes with some fancy improvements. So thanks for the idea

I already mentioned this idea on the Discord server, but I will do it here as well.

I would like to see something like a "thank you" or upvote function for posts on the Unrealsoftware forum. But DC said he will update the entire website first to make it mobile-friendly.

Good idea or not?

Hey DC, maybe it's time to update the links page?
Stranded III's website and the community's Discord channel are missing, and the wikis are dead ( ).

Is it still worth having comics page around here? The pictures aren't loading for whatever reason.

The comics are embedded as flash object, which are no longer supported. That is why they do not load. Can be removed but is not necessary.

That's right. Those comics use Flash (which finally dies now) and I'm not very motivated to export them as something non-flashy in some way.

I removed the navigation section for them. The page is still online (https://unrealsoftware.de/comics.php) but you probably need to use an old browser from hell to view them and/or allow Flash content explicitly.

@ medeiros: Very true. Adjusted the link page accordingly.

https://saveblogging.com/what-is-rel-nofollow/


Website Updates

What am I missing? Or does the funky old fart :DDD miss something?

Basically I don't agree with crippling users who might visit here from search engines (even if these very search engines end up promoting the "few top 1000 alexa" websites more than they deliver relevant results from across the web) - i.e. there're less and less users coming in from search engines every year.

Still, feels too radical for me, if nofollow indeed works.

This is something pretty small and insignificant but for a perfectionist's sake, the copyright details in the footer should be updated, replacing the last part of "© Unreal Software, 2003-2020" with 2021.

Speaking of the footer, gotta love the "This website is using cookies because they are delicious" part lmao never take that out pls

Thanks for the feedback. I can give the nofollow approach a try!

Will update the copyright dates too. Glad to hear that you like the cookie part

I've also located a little issue with the public informations.

https://www.unrealsoftware.de/inc_pub/userinfo.php?id=6943

In case you check the userinfo, it doesn't return the images. 404.

@ Marcell: That works fine for me if it is loaded via ajax directly on unrealsoftware.de (that happens when you point at a user name). It's made for that use case only and should never be used from any other website/service/whatever.

@ DC: Is there any way to get avatar, name and country from Unreal Software API in one single request?

@ Hajt: Probably not, and pointless.

@ Hajt: No, there isn't.
@ Gaios: I wouldn't call that pointless. It's good to save requests.

One problem with Unrealsoftware file archive: the comments. Because they are posted in the opposite order as posts in the forum they are confusing. You could do an update, change the order of the comments, and write a little memo that displays directly above and below the comment section to tell users it changed so people that have used the comments don't get confused at the switch of order.

The idea behind that is that a thread needs to be read in order (top to bottom). File comments however don't behave like a thread in most cases. They refer to the file (which is always at top anyway) most of the time and not to previous comments. Therefore it's more convenient to always see the newest comments on top.

I prefer to keep it like that. I agree that it is a bit confusing though.

maybe you could make and option to change the order. or at least state the current order it is in

Ok DC, so my suggestions:
Emoji not displaying correctly usually (for some emoji works fine). Maybe you need some lib to convert emoji idk. PhpBB3 is converting emoji to svg and they using twemoji AFAIK.
Make api accessible for http (now it's moving 301 to https)
Allow to specify what data return from api for example returns these data in comma separated list