I have been wondering how BB and servers alike use account linking from ingame accounts to web based accounts. For example: When someone donates on the forums, they get advanced in 5 minutes or less, usually. How is that done? Paypal IPN>to.... what??? What extensions are used, who wrote the code? I'm just curious. And in some servers when you make a profile in the game, it will automatically sign you up for the fourms on the site, so you dont have to sign up again, how do they do that?
Uses SQL db, paypals API and a bit of php and magic from cpf. The reason we don't force a signup is that if people don't want to signup or ever login, it takes up space in the db, so why bother? Otherwise, Cpf can do the rest of the answering, I just had to correct answer 4 times, due to being tired.
Umm well yeah, now perks (ugh) are the only thing really running of completely custom code (IPN, etc), now advanced and platinum are based on forum groups, so you donate via vB, vB automatically adds you to the right group, and the server reads that you're in that group. Linking is more complicated, the server writes data into a users profile after authenticating, etc, lots of fun stuff going down there. Annd for the auto signup, for places like sass they wrote their own forum from scratch(? I assume) so it's way easier for them, but in general the server just replicates the actions that normally happen on registration, but automatically. And yeah I wrote all the code.