Some sad news from Gamespy

[Coffeebean]

While there may be few active posters just now, every time I check-in there are ~20 guests recorded in the stats.

They must come by here for some reason, don't you think?

I don't want to worry anyone, but I don't think that they (the 20+ guests) are all human!
I can see what they are looking at and doing and I think they are little programme thingies that go around the web sites - for what reasons I don't know. For instance 5 of the 23 current guests are apparently "reporting a post to a moderator" - I know they are NOT doing that as my inbox would be continually full if this was so.
It's all a bit strange.

[Coconut Kid]

I don't want to worry anyone, but I don't think that they (the 20+ guests) are all human!
I can see what they are looking at and doing and I think they are little programme thingies that go around the web sites - for what reasons I don't know. ...

A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms or Web spider, Web robot, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutter.

This process is called Web crawling or spidering. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler

I had no idea that these things would show-up as "guests". My observation was based on the comparative number of "guests" on some other Tropico oriented discussion boards vs those here.

If these "crawlers" are opening the "reprort to moderator" link, it is probably because the way it is formatted triggers something they are looking for.

That "crawlers" are counted as "guests" also says something about the programming of the board's statistics gathering. They should be screenable by IP address characteristics.

[Coffeebean]

Yep, thanks CK that's the thingies.

[Coconut Kid]

... I can see what they (guests) are looking at and doing ...

BTW, so can all of us registered users -- just by clicking on the icon at the start of the line listing users and guests.

   

Oh! There was one that said, "Nothing, or nothing you can see..." in italics. I guess you would see something different.

[Coffeebean]

BTW, so can all of us registered users -- just by clicking on the icon at the start of the line listing users and guests.

Oh good, I didn't know that, or if I did I'd forgotten.

There was one that said, "Nothing, or nothing you can see..." in italics. I guess you would see something different.

Nope, I get that too.

[Coconut Kid]

Heavengames.com is dedicated to games involving building and economy (and,  usually,  war).

Each game type has a separate home page;  for example,  Caesar3 is at caesar3.heavengames.com .
 
I find their format easy to navigate - forums,  user scenarios (with commenting and a template for writing reviews).

As I recall, on one of the prior moves - all the attachments were lost.

Teamstar has kindly archived all the user scripted scenarios for the original Tropicol.

I wonder if someone - perhaps Clever Duck - has done so for T2 - Pirate Cove? It would be a shame to lose those scenarios.

[Sovjohn]

Hello,

Being a long-time Tropico fan (despite being a lurker and not having registered here before), I'd like to offer you hosting for Cafe Tropico.

Details follow:

Hosting would be free, forever, no ads, nothing. Your obligation would be to include a tiny link on the bottom of your page(s), a la "Powered By <name>"

You'd get the resources you need from a dedicated, U.S. webserver. But we'll move to European webservers in the next 3 months, so if that's an issue, you can always decline.

I'd donate you a standard domain name (.com/.net/.org etc), to go with the site.

Finally, this is not a scam, and I did not register here just to offer false promises. The above offer stands, its just that my company hasnt begun an official operation yet, to show you our hosting website. However, http://www.derelictstudios.net is one of my greatest gaming-related clients, and you can have a look at the server performance there.

Contact me, by responding here, or by PM, or by e-mail, if you are interested, and I can have your account setup whenever you want.

Thanks!

-John M