Hello fellow Spongers, mmonkey here (I know, it’s been a while). I have been thinking about creating a plugin for a while now, but before I get into programming it, I want to get your input.
The Idea:
A community (not unlike a social network) for players and servers to connect.
As a player, you would register an account and tie it to your minecraft account. (think facebook profile)
As a server owner, you would register your server. (think facebook pages)
There would be a companion sponge plugin that would be required to connect to the API to talk with the website.
Features:
Friends list: see when your friends are online, and what server they are playing on. Optionally get alerts when they log onto a server.
API available to other plugins. I haven’t quite figured out the details to this part, but essentially other plugins could submit player and server data to the website.
Statistics / Analytics: As a server owner, you could track useful statistics about your server on the website and in-game.
Recruiting: sponge forums are not supposed to be a place to recruit moderators and web developers for your personal servers. This is a great way to connect to other players.
Sharing: share screenshots, stories and other MC related things through your profile (think facebook wall).
There are so many possibilities here that this list could go on and on, however, if it is ever going to get made, I need buy-in and your input. Let me know if you would use something like this. Are you a player or do you run a server, or do you develop plugins? Would you use it?
Also to be perfectly clear and transparent, this project would be completely opensource and I would use Oauth2 for player profiles and servers alike, so other websites could use this platform for registering users and what not to their websites.
UPDATES:
Server owners could manage permissions and groups from the web-interface, and that could directly tie into PEX. (thanks @TrenTech for the great ideas)
The Sponge portion (Java implementation) will be built via modules, so a server owner can use the pieces they desire, like logins, friends list, permissions, etc.
Although this service, may not be the end-all, be-all plugin, if it becomes widely used in the future, and we gather enough data, this could be helpful with global user banning / warning. So if a server owner installs the module for user logins, they can optionally apply rules to users that are banned or in trouble on another server.
I don’t know much about Enjin, but it looks as though that is a place where you create a website for your sever, which would probably need it’s own domain and it would cost $$. Where as this would be free for server owners to register their server, and customize their pages.
Although there are paid features, and the option for a personal domain, it can be run for free, with a domain enjin provides. I used it for a while. Wasn’t the best experience but functional.
I’m actually very curious to see where you go with this. Will you have some kind of permission hook, for displaying player tags and such?
I may not completely understand where you are going with that, but, the idea is that any visible information on a player will have opt-in visibility. So a player will choose which information is publicly visible and what is visible to friends / apps.
Since I would be using Oauth, your app would ask for certain scopes of that players information, and if the player allows it, it will gather the information within that scope. I haven’t quite worked out all the details there.
What I mean is say, you have your players separated into groups/ranks, ex. Admin, Mod, Donor etc. If I look at my “friends list”, or a player posts something on my “wall”, a tag, prefix or even special icon, would be displayed next to their ign. This actually is a feature in Enjin. Hooking into the servers permissions, would also allow to create a paid ranking system, for whitelisted servers and such, for accepting donations on your site that automatically add player to the paid rank. I’m sure there are other things you could do with it, but just to name a few
A WordPress Plugin wouldn’t be a bad idea as well. Pretty much every hosting provider provides an easy way to install it and WordPress provides free sites. I’d just go that route.
I’m looking to house all of the information in one place. Since there will be an API involved, I’m not sure a Wordpress plugin is the right thing to build. However, a login via Oauth Wordpress plugin to authorize users on a third party website via the api, that may make sense.
Hey, I’m interested in this project. I have just started working on an OAuth based Minecraft / Web authentication system that generates one time codes that are used as the sub domain to connect to a minecraft server to authenticate you with your mojang account. That way you never have to give your mojang password to anyone but mojang. I was mainly making it for my gaming group as a method to authenticate your mojang account with your website account, but it would be cool to combine what I have already done (not much yet) and make it into a bigger project, or start from scratch and make something better…
Since I would be building it open source, you definitely can contribute! I see that you are using Laravel for the website, which is what I will also be using, so that is an added bonus.
I will probably build the Laravel API first, but since I am in the planning stages, I will have no code for a bit. I am also working on updating my other Sponge plugins, so at this point, those take priority. Check back in a week or so, and I will hopefully have something started.
