vdip is close to what you might call a sister-site. Similar code base and rules, different purposes. Different dev/mod teams, but they sometimes collaborate and stuff or something. There's significant overlap in the communities of the sites and numerous people on each site have an account on both. For a better answer, and for other questions, I'll direct you to http://webdiplomacy.net/forum.php?viewthread=1258038#1258038 .

threadID=1258038

I always forget code rules. :/

We really should make "viewthread" work the same as "threadID".

SOMEONE already mentioned this in the feature suggestion thread ;)

I imagine that will not take long to implement...

A little harder though, sometimes people link to vdip threads/games... Any ideas hows to make them work?

Maybe do a search pattern for external urls, and if the are vdip links pass them through a filter and at least NOT link them to games/threads here...

Orathaic: Yes, I think that'd be possible. We could have a config parameter for "other webdip sites" and have it default to just us and vdip. It's just a regular expression, at the moment, so it's not a big change. If you want to fix up this feature, I'd accept the pull request.

vgameID=
vthreadID=

Should go to vDip. That would be amazing.

If i find the time, am slightly stressed right now with 'work'

Not sure if Kestas would be OK with linking vDiplomacy games, even though we work closely with their website. The priority is to have the best standalone open-source platform, after all. Adding a feature for a third party website could be seen as odd bloatware.

vDippers are cool cats.

Also, XgameID and XthreadID should redirect to DipRepublic and ban whoever clicks the link.

^this

I'm sure kestas would be fine with identifying which links aren't to webdip games/threads, and not converting them into links at all.

Which would force users to manually copy and paste - and is still better than misleading them into clicking a link...

orathaic: Good idea.

I think the addition of a server configurable list of "other webdip installs" would be an improvement. It would be great to have links between webdip installs work correctly, and I don't think it would add bloat to the code.

I don't want to speculate on what Kestas would/wouldn't want, but he's always been supportive of Oli and vDip as far as I know.

A standalone forum and unified signin system would be amazing... But i suspect that would be a bigger change.

Having a central auth (say on the stand-alone forum) and getting the various game servers to request auth on a per account basis (so you sign in to the forum once and other sites auto create accouts by the same name - but don't request your password - and only share an authorization token with the main server.

Basically, anyone could create a game server, where instead of creating a unique account, they would ask webdip if this person is logged in. And give them the username on that server... Actualy looks fairly simple the more i think about it. And it overcomes the 'create a new account' barrier to entry.

This would be problematic for several reasons, the most obvious being that sites would have to maintain the same banned list if this were implemented.