I have seen this used on a few sites, and I wanted to ask if TMS offers a function that we could use to do that.

If not, would it be possible to add such a function? It would be much nicer and cleaner than screen scraping...

The thread titled in the Webmasters forum explains the screen-scrape solution - which works if you have a rough idea what ranking your MUD is in the TMS list.

A more program-friendly friendly 'feed' of current rankings was mentioned as desirable in that thread, but I'm not sure whether it's something that TMS are interested in writing.  It'd be nice if it happened - I know we'd update our site to use it.

It would be definitely a nice addition, even if it were just for people who advertise. Our server is completely written in LPC, so it will take some painful workarounds to get it done with screen scraping.

Can anybody from the TMS staff give their opinion on this?

I am forwarding this suggestion from one of our immortals (since his posting rights have not been activated yet):

Ok, this boils down to 2 options, polling or notification.

Polling includes screen scraping, but for the kind of service some of the folks on here are talking about, it would need some kind of 'service' to be available that could be called remotely, something along the lines of a web service, for example. Now I guess web services is a bit beyond the means of most of the muds on here, so that is not a viable option.

Looking at notification, I had a glance over at the autorank site, and it seems that amongst the supported features are email support and templated emails, so perhaps a solution here is to allow a facility whereby each mud can register that they are interested in receiveing email notification of information regarding their status on the toplist. TMS can send this email out to everyone interested, and then the mud is responsible for moving this email to a place that can be read by their website.

I wouldn't recommend you do it on every vote change, you leave yourself open to DoS attack, but you could schedule it every 10-15 minutes or whatever works best. The key here is if the admins at TMS can get the data from their DB into the email, if they can, this will work a treat!

~Daffy

100 MUDs * 1 email sent every 10 minutes (each recalculation of the rankings) = sounds painful.

My preference is for a simple page outside the main TMS web pages where the top 100 muds are listed almost, if not actually, in plain text. I can then quickly and easily load the list, find my MUD, record the ranking and vote count (and the one before it) and we're done.

To store the ranking for 10 minutes, I suggest using a one record database table and update the record when the 10 minute period expires.