i'm sure many (most?) persistant worlds have forums associated with them. on my server, we have a system of player owned shops that people could put items up for sale (this post is NOT that code). in olden days, people would then manually type everything in the "for sale" section of the game forum.
i thought, wouldn't it be clever to have a 3rd party (outside the game) script parse out the contents of the shop and automagically create a posting to our forum?
so i developed a sytem where the PC talks to an NPC in the room and asks for the contents of their shop to be advertised to the furm. the NPC would then take the contents of the shop and print all of the information about the items to the game's regular log file. (this part would be too heavily module dependent for me to submit)
what i am submitting, however, is the cron job i run every 5 minutes to read through the log file, parse out the items for sale, log in to our forum, and submit (or edit) the appropriate post.
you can see what the posts look like in our forums here:
hopefully this (and looking through the code) will do justice to the system.
we've since taken this idea and expanded it to work with other systems like proclamations, quest events, etc. the real content is the parts of the script that logs you in and posts to the forum, since anything that can be read from the log files (or a NWNX DB i suppose) can then be posted.
NOTE: this code works for phpBB 3. i think i may have code for phpBB 2 somewhere i can dig up if people are interested.
NOTE 2: some knowledge of perl would help a lot when trying to figure out what i'm doing here.
NOTE 3: oh, and also see my post in the phpbb3 forums about the subject. i may have more explanations there that i didn't include here:
Link
NOTE 4: i guess this is pretty non-standard to not include any code for a NWN module, but i thought this system was an interesting idea that other people might want to use.
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