It’s been a while since the last update publicly. There’s a lot happening behind the scenes. We’re setting up some things that we need to have a more public face to the website on a more permanent basis.
While in the past, the website has been up and down at various times during the year (for testing and beta user integration), we’re now making a move to keep the website up even though we’re still evolving some of the features and working to bring some of them online.
Why Now and What’s Coming
The decision was made because we’re going to be setting up some features that will require website traffic and testing with the help of some groups and organizations. We can’t get into what will be coming because we’re conscious of the instability and novel approach of our plans. We hate to sound cryptic on the whole thing but suffice to say, things are finally coming into fruition on several fronts.
We’ve had several updates to the site since we last went public with the site a couple months ago. In fairness, when the site has been public this year, it was to test out some new features that we’ve been fighting with. We’ve needed to test some things and we needed a few test users to do that with. We’d like to thank them and we welcome their comments and suggestions.
Profiles
One of things we’ve been fighting with is user’s profiles. As it looks now, we’re not inclined to enable all the profiles that we’ve had in the past from the old site. Many of them are from a decade ago and there exists a full 14,000 usernames in the system. Toward the end of 2016, there were only a few hundred profiles still frequenting the site. We don’t wish to reserve all those usernames in the current system.
The idea has been floated to restore names and profiles upon request. We do still have all the users, teams, ranks, and competitive ladders and tournaments in the database. In fact, we’re now testing the queries to bring back the ladders as “Read Only” and that seems to be working well. However, we feel that bringing back usernames for the new system carries it’s own issues.
How would we prove that the person 10 years ago is the same person making a request today? The easiest solution would be to go by email address. Even that has limitations. How many people keep the same email address after 10 years? Another solution might be to have a known player vouch for someone having issues logging in or may have changed their email.
We’re still up in the air about this. We’d like to offer “Veteran” status to those who are still in our old database but on the other hand, how do we verify that person? If the player does indeed have the same email address, we can simply setup a lost password routine and anyone that successfully recovers their account will be transferred to the new database with their old username (or a new username), but with a “Veteran” status. The same can be said if a person is able to log into their old account without an email but actually remembers their old username and password combo.
We’re also not going under the assumption that these people are still around and online any longer. we may be lingering over a decision that no one actually cares about if our new members here are all new users who have never been here. When the site has been up and down during testing since 2023, we only genuinely got advice and suggestions when we posted in our Steam Group. At that time we received some legitimate help and suggestions from some of our previous users. Participating users received some game keys with our thanks.
WordPress over PHPBB
At this time, we’re using WordPress. It presents the most options for us and with us doing a database conversion to call up the old statistics, WordPress seems the best option for us. We actually won’t be converting. We’ll be updating the queries and injecting the new data into the new database. The old site was based on MySQL queries and we’ll be upgrading them to MYSQLi and then PDO for new storage and then migration into a cloud format.
The old site was using a hybrid of PHPBB and PHPBB2 with custom coding for the functionality (PhPBB software is now PHPBB3). Our problem back then was the PHPBB hybrid site prevented any upgrades without breaking significant portions of the site. As a result, when security patches were pushed through for the PHPBB software, we as a site couldn’t implement them.
Same would be true for any mobile functionality for styling and responsiveness. It’s one of the things that prevented us from moving forward with the old site. As developers, we knew the PHP language but lacked the time and custom coding familiarity with PHPBB to keep the site up and still keep the site secure (see GWL History).
Once we gathered ourselves for a future here at GWL, we made the decision to go with WordPress. WordPress has a much bigger community working to develop the software and there’s a much bigger eco system behind the software in terms of plugins. PHPBB3 has a small community and SOME people working to bring the software forward but it pales in comparison to the size of the WordPress community of developers. Not to mention, that over the years our own IRL experience has gained much more knowledge through a WordPress platform over PHPBB3.
– User Accounts and Avatars
This presented a problem for us with users. We wanted a user base totally free from the Gravatar user system and WordPress does this internally. If you’re unfamiliar with Gravatar, WordPress ties itself into Gravatar with your email address. Gravatar loads up your image (and your data on Gravatar’s end) when you create an account on any WordPress website with your email address you previously set up at Gravatar. We wanted to be free from this system and we have cleared that hurdle though our own custom coding.
This gives us a self supporting system of user accounts and user avatars that isn’t dependent on third party sites and is complicit in their data collection. Being self reliant for users and profiles was a key feature we liked about the PHPBB software and we’re happy to have achieved it within WordPress. Your avatar is now stored on our system and should show for comments, activity feeds and your profile picture (where ever its needed on our site). We’ll need to monitor updates to WordPress software to maintain this isolation but it shouldn’t effect our site externally for the individual user.
– Forums – WordPress or Discord?
Forums are going to be forthcoming. WordPress does support several forum software options. We’ve even got one installed right now but it isn’t public. The reason is that we’re working on linking our Discord server to our website here. We’re trying out several possibilities for cross posting and cross membership. this will involve Discord roles in some fashion but we’re testing which is better for our purposes and bandwidth from the site or from Discord.
As mentioned, we are a work in progress and this is one of things “in progress”. For now, we have a forum setup on our Discord server publicly. Users can post there without issue. When the decision is made regarding the best option for us, we should be able to cross post or cross import from one side or the other depending.
– Discord Server
Clicking this will open your Discord App – GWL Discord Server Invite
The discord server has gone though many iterations over the past few years. We’ve made the decision to wipe the server of all previous activity. We actually just reverted back to our back-up duplicate server and have basically started from scratch. All channels, chats and interactions are as they were when we started the server initially a couple years ago.
Over the past couple years we hosted some private clan events while testing the functionality and our own custom bots. We actually were running our custom bot from “Replit.com“. Replit.com is an online Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that allows users to write, run, and share code directly from their web browser. It supports a wide variety of programming languages and frameworks, making it a versatile tool for developers.
However; after a few of Replit’s policy changes we decided to go with a Mee6 bot because of it’s customization features and convenience regarding our own server. Along with Mee6 we’ll be introducing our own bot hosted on our own server here.
News and Front Page
We’ve kept news posts going as we’ve needed to however the front page slider is in need of an update. Expect that soon. If you were here in 2023 or 2024, you’ll notice that the main slider images and posts are a bit outdated. Originally our thought was to include posts and news there. These posts would be an update to previous games we supported and new ones that may grab the community for interest.
Our direction and thoughts regarding what will be happening here has changed slightly so even though the images and news posts in the slider are accurate, they’re old and reflect our old way of thinking. More to come on that matter but moving forward you can expect the main slider to be updated to a more news worthy content.
Some Final Thoughts
As mentioned, we are genuinely a work in progress. The site you see now is not the site we will have in a few months. We can customize WordPress in a way that is modular and separate from the WordPress software without falling into the same trap we did last time where we couldn’t add security patches or features that would break the site because we wanted to stay up to date at the core.
We welcome new members and our old community if they still exist out there. We are actively working to tie all our social media and online groups together to keep as many people as we can in the loop. Follow us on “X” at /globalwf and join the Global Warfighter Steam Group for updates and status for the main site here and users can always join the GWL Discord where news and status is usually mirrored. We appreciate all the interest and patronage.
To all, thanks for reading. A special thanks to the team here at the Global Warfighter League Project. You’re doing a spectacular job. Keep up the good work, keep smiling and as always “Stay frosty”.
