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[acridiel]

Since I'm new and don't know the history of these forums - why were the RP-forums and the new forums separated from these forums?

Well, initially there were RP Boards included here.
But even I can only guess that with the creation of the RP-Lore-Wiki someone thought, that it´d be a great Idea to create RP Boards in there to, that would be "more connected" to the extensive background this way.
In one way that´s a great idea, but with such a small RP community as we have around here, the separation of these focus points of gaming was a mistake.
Just my opinion.

CU
Acridiel

[gcaldani]

It's not that. It's the specific faction forums. Those aren't account dependent but character dependent (and can change over time).
phBBB can't handle that.

Would need to create a new module. Can be done, sure of it, just takes effort, which means time which means money.

Time to make a php module like this?

First, the account forum is already linked to the game account.
Second, the most important job was already done, and that's the web apps where you can get character profiles.
Having just a query to get the guild and the faction of the char, to discriminate what private sections to show, doesn't need any PhD.
Actually, the ingame forum already do this.

Maybe i could consider your caution just because of the security concerns, eventually, but considering the actual external access to the web apps is totally unsecure, i don't see any problem.

[velogfx]

http://dev.ryzom.com here is the access

[dazman76]

This forum uses vBulletin, not phpBB sadly - you have to pay for vBulletin, and I don't think you can access the source code until you do. It's apparently as customisable as phpBB, but I've never delved into it. This copy we're using has definitely been customised, but I remember seeing an answer to a question of mine that indicated there was a lot of work involved with customising to link to the Ryzom account back-end. I asked if it was possible to let account holders with no current sub post in certain forums, and was told by a CSR that this was "too difficult due to the way the forums are linked with the backend".

I'm a phpBB man myself, version 3 is excellent Hmm, apart from the fact that links in posts open in the same tab, and the BB guys refuse to change it because "the code wouldn't be XHTML compatible", requiring code hacks to achieve a simple target="_blank" property Many people have complained about this on their boards (including me!), and they will not budge. I say MEH to your XHTML compliance

[gcaldani]

Well, there is a very easy way to workaround that behaviour: right click the link and choose to open to a new tab. So, really don't need to spend time in something the browsers already give you as a choice (at least Firefox and IE).
That's what i do everytime i don't want to lose the actual page and personally I agree being compliant with the standard.

About the difficulty, well, apart the obvious risks you can get when you write code that access sensible data, the overall programming skill you need to access a database within php code don't need to be very high.
Sure, it's not that hard for people that manage an entire client-server application very complex as Ryzom.

What I don't understand is why they don't put a certificate in atys.ryzom.com. Even if they don't want to buy a new certificate from a trusted authority, what we need is just the SSL encryption and not a validation of the site, so just use openSSL to generate a new mini-CA and sign atys.ryzom.com to generate this damned certificate. Then make a virtual host to separate the web-apps external access from the rp forum and that's it. A 1-hour job (taking even a coffee break) and we could have a secured web-apps access. As long as the customers accept permanently the certificate the first time (but they can just accept it temporary), this is perfectly legal.

[dazman76]

Well, there is a very easy way to workaround that behaviour: right click the link and choose to open to a new tab. So, really don't need to spend time in something the browsers already give you as a choice (at least Firefox and IE).
That's what i do everytime i don't want to lose the actual page and personally I agree being compliant with the standard.

Heh, we better not go too far or we'll be recreating the "discussion" over on the BB boards Personally, I prefer forum software to continue to support features it *used* to support, and that everyone seems to expect from it. Compliance is nice, but there is no way any browser will drop support for the target property, XHTML or no XHTML Forum links, seemingly regardless of the forum software being used, always open in new tabs. Just like when you're designing a website, and providing external links - you don't really want the user *leaving* your site in favour of another, be it by accident or otherwise. And yes, I know there are easy shortcuts in browsers to achieve this, but BB has many users and "followers", and for such an obvious piece of functionality to disappear due to compliance that only the developers care about, is quite a surprise. target="_blank" may not be compliant, but it's unlikely that the lack of compliance for that particular property will ever cause an issue in a browser. Evar(tm)

We tried to get them to include it as an Admin option, so it could be the forum owners' decision as to the behaviour (and therefore compliance), and to set the default option to match previous versions of BB - i.e., automatically open in a new tab. They just ignored the requests though It's most annoying to me, because they have no problems including "invalid" CSS in their stylesheets, to provide the "hacks" neccessary to render properly in multiple browsers. The individual CSS classes/styles are valid, but the way in which their inheritance/cascading is defined, isn't quite valid Ah well, such is life hehe

EDIT: Article: Compact JavaScript example of target workaround