Summer of 2011 z2 improvement thread

[Quantum P.]

Or winter, if you're in the Southern Hemisphere.
https://dailydigesthub.com
In the spirit of getting organized, and in maintaining some sense of momentum for fixing up z2, let's make a central wishlist of things that could be fixed in the near future! Then I guess we'll see where we are in several months.

Relatively easy:
* robots.txt: This needs to be less restrictive. We should probably do a quick audit of the files on z2 beforehand, just to make sure that we're not exposing anything sensitive to search engines.
* Fixing up metadata: T-Bone knows more about this than I do. It's mostly just keyword and description tags, if I understand correctly?

Some work involved:
* Front page content updates: Some of the tutorials are way out of date. I'd like to save the old ones because I'm a packrat, but we should make it easy for newcomers to get started with DOSBox and modern computers. Fix dead links, maybe get more people to link to us.
* New themes for main site/fora: I'm not big on this, probably because I don't like change (my current theme is z2 Classic). I do understand the appeal of the idea, though, and I think that a minor refresh of an existing theme would be nice.

Might be difficult:
* Code refactoring: It would be nice to get the top-level directory cleaned up. And get our DB configuration stuff in one place. And make our URLs search-engine-friendly. And maybe do a security audit, while we're at it.
* Upgrade phpBB: This needs to be thought out more thoroughly, because it might break a few things. It's a prominent part of the site, and we don't want to replace a working phpBB2 install with a partially broken phpBB3 install. The amount we gain from phpBB3 is uncertain.
* ZZT in a Java applet: This is a really cool idea. It might be difficult to support playing every game in the archive, though.

This is a list-in-progress: feel free to say "You forgot X" or "Y is a waste of time"!

[Commodore]

As funny as it has been for the past two years, I think it's time we change the default member rank from "sucks"

[Dr. Dos]

I started editing the main FAQ but have yet to upload changes.

We could use a "Running ZZT" page that explains Dosbox and possibly a frontend for it like D-Fend.

[Commodore]

it would be cool to get something like zztunder to launch dosbox when clicking on a zzt game.

[Zandor 12]

I like Commodore's idea; anything that makes it easier to run ZZT without 98se/XP can only be a good thing.

[Saxxon]

A fully configured ZZT DosBox setup would be nice. If the cycles are set low enough, the sound effects actually sound like they should. You can even Autoexec it. Way better experience than running in a standard DOS window even on 98.

[Dr. Dos]

I've never noticed dosbox cycles changing sounds. I've always ran ZZT in it at 50,000 cycles since that number seems to be good for everything I run in dosbox.

[Quantum P.]

I've noticed the sound effects sounding different depending on DOSBox's speed. When DOSBox is slower, it's easier to hear the difference between the different sound effects.

Of course, when DOSBox is faster, you can play games with tons of intricate ZZT-OOP code, without things bogging down much.

[Dr. Dos]

I got an e-mail today:

Alex Kwiecinski <skate323k137> to DoctorDos@gmail.com

Hey-

My name is Alex, I stumbled across your ZZT site. I work for a web
hosting company in the security/abuse dept, and I also administer a
small phpbb forum.

For a while, I was using firewall rules to block china, africa, etc.,
which stopped 30-40 attempts a day. After a while they started to
proxy through US IP's. I was able to completely stop my spam problem
with two relatively easy steps.

First, I blocked UTC-12 Registrations. It's an uninhabited time zone,
that most spam bots pick by default. This is outlined here:
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=2122696

Second, and most importantly, I added one extra field to the signup
page by adding an extra "profile field" that was mandatory for new
registrations. This is outlined here:
http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article/custom- ... mmer-tool/

you can see it on my site at
http://www.gogreenlongboarding.com/foru ... e=register

Between these, I literally eliminated ALL the fake registrations. It
looks like you may be running an old version, so definitely run a
backup of your docroot and database first.

Hope this helps you out.

[Quantum P.]

Cool. I did add an additional registration field a while back, but this is the first time I've heard of the UTC-12 trick.

[Aplsos]

the updated default phpbb skin is really ugly

also where did the devastator go

[Aplsos]

turn avatars back on

[Aplsos]

You cannot add administrators and moderators to your foes list.

.'/

[Quantum P.]

the updated default phpbb skin is really ugly

also where did the devastator go

Should we switch the default to prosilver, the default phpBB3 theme (change board styles here)? I set it to subsilver2 because it looked familiar, but I'm open to changing it. Alternative: we make our own theme?

devastator: phpBB3 is a lot more secure than phpBB2, and one of the security things they did was crack down on HTML usage. HTML can no longer be squeezed into forum titles.

turn avatars back on

Ackpth. I have no idea how that happened. I just assumed that the phpBB 2->3 convertor was broken. Fixed.

[Aplsos]

Should we switch the default to prosilver, the default phpBB3 theme (change board styles here)? I set it to subsilver2 because it looked familiar, but I'm open to changing it.

naw, that one's just as bad. i can't even place what i dislike about the new style.

also, the forums don't have a favicon, while the front page do.