Integrated Rewards & Forum system (like Neopets)

[Gheeda]

I want what neopets has managed to do. Simple Forums system with the users account being used to access game content & forums without a seperate login. I've got Avatars/Rewards Unlockable and accounted for in the databases per user just cant think of a way to craft a forum system that can function like the example.

[Jackolantern]

While I am not familiar with Neopets, what would likely be the easiest way to have a combined forum/game login would be to first set up the forum using existing third-party software such as phpBB (the software running this forum). Make a few example forum user accounts, and inspect the database. At this point you could do one of two things: 1. You could use signing up for the forum to be signing up for the game, and simply read and use the forum accounts as the accounts for your game. You would not need to (or want to) alter any of the tables for the forum system. Simply use the forum user account numbers as references in your game db tables.

Or, more likely what you want, #2 would be to inspect the account the forum made, try out a few different forum account examples, and start working towards making a custom login system for your game that also creates the required database entries to setup a new forum account name. phpBB won't care how the account got into the database as long as the data is perfectly what it expects; it only matters that it is there at all. It may take some tries and some debugging to fix simple errors and to account for all of the features a forum system expects (although a lot of them would likely be set to default values hard coded into your account creation logic where players could change it through the official forum system later, such as avatar image, time zone, signature, etc.), but I can almost guarantee this is the option you want, since most dual registrations give the forum registration as a bonus, rather than the user signing up for the forum and getting the game as a bonus. That would just be confusing.

[Torniquet]

phpBB is not so easy to work around, i have tried and got fed up with it.

If you want an all singing all dancing forum, then working your way around 3rd party software is probably the best option. If however, you want basic forum functionality, then building your own is ALOT easier than you might think.

But it all depends on the level of functionality you want said forum to be.

My one i have on my site is very simple. Has catagories, forums, stickies, basic mod tools such as locking and deleting threads and posts. and includes simple bb codes.

over all from start to where i am now (which is where i am leaving it for the time being & fully functional) it probably took me no more than 5-6 hours to code.

[Jackolantern]

That is basically the balance. I was not actually familiar with how complex of a database phpBB has, but assumed it was quite complex (why I mentioned that it will take a lot of poking around, investigating and trial and error). A simple forum with the basics would not be too hard to build from scratch. But making something on the level of phpBB would take a very long time, and for most game devs, it just isn't worth it as they have no interest in a project like that (12+ months possibly just for the message board).

[Gheeda]

Yeah, I'm Looking for simplicity over all. A Trade Section, a Help/Social Section, & a News & Feature Update Section. Basic Post/Reply/Mod Tools with the ability for the user to freely change the avatar image his message is accompanied by is what I seek... I dont need spam/flood control, nor do I really need to record anything like Postcount. The forums are an afterthought with cosmetic rewards bleeding over from the game itself.

[Gheeda]

Really stumpped. I thought it would be simple to create a page that would check for the user logged in.. and then allow them to use that name to use a forum to post freely onto a blank page. The posts itself being held in a database. Any thoughts on this in the meantime would be amazing but I'll post the code that I've got sofar when I get back to the house.