Would this be legal?

DeletedUser

Guest
If I were to run a web server for the purpose of storing and interrogating battle/spy reports, would it be acceptable to declare a grepolis account that is used to communicate with the web server?

The idea is that alliance members PM reports to the 'gateway' account. The server logs into this account and retrieves and stores the report data. The account would in no way be used to engage in any form of gameplay, and Inno games could easily check that this does not happen. It is purely a means to extract the actual report data from the BBCode link to the report.

If there is an easier/better way to do this, I'm all ears.
 

DeletedUser

Guest
i'm not even sure what you're asking, but your best bet is prob to send in a a support ticket asking this question as the ticket can then be sent to the right people who would be able to answer.
 

DeletedUser

Guest
OK, I will do.

If it helps to explain however, when we publish reports, all we paste is a bit of BBCode that is interpreted by the grepolis server to display the specified report. This BBCode would be useless to any external server, as it would have no way of accessing the report data from the report id number. If my web server could login as a nominated user and access the message inbox, it could easily parse out the report data supplied by grepolis and update it's database accordingly. I hasten to add, this is not a bot, as it would not be participating in or automating any game play - just reading messages sent to a specific account.
 
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DeletedUser11965

Guest
Maybe. It just going to be a storage for battle reports right?
 

DeletedUser

Guest
Ahh i see the use in this, quite genius i must say. You send all reports to the account who sorts them by city, giving you a almost totally foolproof database of troops in cities. This could be a gamechanger, but really it is just as easy to have threads in the ingame forums for the same purpose.
 

DeletedUser

Guest
If its purpose is to be a public log of battle reports then I think this would be frowned upon, but not illegal. If you're only planning on publishing them to alliance members, and no-one else, then I think it's perfectly fine assuming you've declared any 'shared internet connection' things, or whatever they like to have reported. :)
 

DeletedUser

Guest
jonorocks1 said:
Ahh i see the use in this, quite genius i must say. You send all reports to the account who sorts them by city, giving you a almost totally foolproof database of troops in cities. This could be a gamechanger, but really it is just as easy to have threads in the ingame forums for the same purpose.
Click to expand...

The account doesn't do any sorting. My web server has a back end database that stores the data, which can then be queried via a web page. Of course, if the gateway account is attached to an alliance, it could be used to post processed information to the forum, for example listing potential enemy nuke cities. Lets say somebody posts a battle report that shows that an enemy attacked us with 160 LS and 130 survived, this is clearly identifiable as an LS nuke (duh!) for reporting purposes. For example, give me a list of all cities within a two hour radius of my city that has been seen with over 100 LS in the past week.

In-game threads are great, but battle reports get deleted by users or eaten by the grepo monster. They also get scattered throughout the forum making them hard to collate, causing a lot of work for some poor individual. I would rather extract the pertinent information into a proper database where it can be queried in any number of ways.

I was hoping that a moderator would jump in at this point pointing out reasons why this would be unacceptable use of an account. I don't want to do anything now that would get me into trouble later. If an account is being used to provide intelligence information via a semi-automatic back end, does this qualify as an illegal bot, even if that account is not participating in attacks, defence or farming?
 

DeletedUser

Guest
This is what I suspected. Although it's only purpose is to provide a means to extract report data to an external source. Can you think of any other way of doing this without javascripts? My reasoning was that by using a declared account, admins could easily check that the account was doing nothing untoward.
 

DeletedUser

Guest
Briliant, congratz for your idea and I hope you can make it work :) jocuri
 
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DeletedUser

Guest
Actually I just realised. It would add a new fun aspect to the game. If every alliance had their own gateway city handling intel reports, it would become a prime target for enemy alliances. Think of the fun we would have trying to defend it.
 

DeletedUser20429

Guest
Post an idea about it in the Ideas section. Oh and PLEASE use the format in the Read This First thread!
 
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