Most players will never notice a difference between a TWGS hosted behind a BBS and a standalone server. When you've got players who try to shave as much time off their latency as possible or utilize extended macros, they'll notice a big difference on a BBS-hosted TWGS.

As a former WG sysop myself I used to believe that the front end improved overall reliability by helping to weed out dupe players, and in that aspect it does do a far better job than a standalone TWGS or even a TWGS with an external dupecatcher.

But actual server performance is affected by front ending the TWGS server. On Worldgroups systems, the Telnet/RLOGIN connection between the BBS and the TWGS may add as much as 20 ms latency to the player's connection, and that will increase as the number of players increases, and especially if those players are utilizing extended macros such as buydowns.

To most players, that extra 20 ms latency isn't going to mean much. And there are many others who simply won't play on any server that has a front end, because they don't want that extra latency and because they don't want any of the other problems associated with a BBS.

So it really all depends on what kind of players you have, and how much that extra security is worth.

My question is this. Why screw with a telnet BBS front end when you can build a website that accomplishes everything and more at little to no cost. Theres ZERO impact to the TWGS server, and the people that dont want to see it dont have to HTTP to it. Well, zero impact to the TWGS server unless you stupidly install it on the same computer and it crashes it. *grumble* [:(!]

I think you answered part of it yourself, Shinare... it is also bandwidth, and to some degree, webmaster skills. You would not believe the number of sysops who find a simple webpage to be completely out of their range of abilities. (If you don't believe me, look at all the WG standard stock pages out there.) Some of us still puzzle on how all of this flows together.

If I were not running games that had cash prizes or league games, splitting the two apart would be no real issue. In fact, if things go the way I think, I will soon be running 2 TW servers - one exclusively for league that is NOT on the WG server, with only the league/prize game on it and fixed time limits on each game/1 IP per Connect - and Stardock Omega under WG as a more mellow board with the variety of games that we currently have. (There are some advantages to having multiple servers...)

Yes, it would be so much easier if the TWGS could tally the total connect time to it per account instead of per game. If it could do that, I would sacrifice that extra layer of accountability. I do like the transparent visibility that everyone has from the WG menu, and being able to pull IP addresses with just a few keystrokes from the WG server. (Remember, I am not permitted to play in the league game - this will help prove that I am not cheating. The Sysop account will NOT be logging onto that server. I will have not one, but two logs to prove it.)


Is that function ever going to be a possiblity?

I too believe TWGS should have a better security system implemented in it. I think just a simple configurable user TIME LIMIT would suffice. Although I have no need to STRICTLY keep dupers from comming in (I do post a rule "No Dupes" but is currently "on your honor"), like I said before, there are always ways hide/change the IP your comming from. There aught to be a way to record all IPs logged in associated with the account name used into a text file, TWGS parse the file to show same IPs/Different account names, and indicate this to the sysop in some fashon. All this being built into the TWGS software so no need to run external watchdog programs and keeping the server as clean and problem free as possible. Just my 2 cents tho. [:)]

Interesting topic here,

User management is non-existant with TWGS. I initially ran my TWGS stand-alone, but adding every player for every game was getting to be way too much work for me as the popularity of the server grew. My only option was to put a BBS in front of the TWGS or take it down. When you have a BBS front end, once a user has an account, he/she can enter any game any time. The only work required by me is to handle the account application and validation process. Once a user has an account, you're done with that person.

I'm using the Linux version of Mystic BBS as my front end. This results in no latency that I can detect since Mystic uses Linux's native rlogin to connect to the TWGS. Additional latency may be an issue with other platforms, but I feel pretty confident it's not an issue with Mystic for Linux.