Dawn of the Geeks

TopDuels.com has been through a number of incarnations and I’ve had it for less than a year. The latest incarnation is a graphical browser based MUD using the “chatter” engine.

The latest feature is that it is integrated with phpBB. The biggest issue with this I’ve found so far is the insistance of phpBB passing around a session id and using cookies. Maybe this was needed back in 1996 but PHP has this new invention called a session. Sessions have replaced cookies. Instead of putting data on the user side in a cookie, data is stored server side in a session. The only cookie that the client gets is a php session id. The forum session id is no longer passed around in the url. That makes the forum experience much better.

It took me a bit to switch phpBB over but now it is and it works great.

For those that also want to make the switch, just put a session_start() at the top of session.php and then where cookies are set add some code that will set the session value when the timestamp is greater than or equal to the current time and unset the
session value when the timestamp is less than the current time.

Don’t delete any cookie creating code.

The next step is to change the code so that sid, k, and u are grabbed from $_SESSION rather than $_GET and $_COOKIE.

And finally, change the append_sid function to not actually append the sid value to the url.

You could try to remove cookies entirely and get rid of append_sid all together but that’s a lot more work than needed. The biggest issue is getting SID into $_SESSION so that it doesn’t need to be in the URL and can be used elsewhere.