For those that didn't use it, Xfire was basically a combination of messenger, voice chat, and a server browser for games back in the day.

As far as I know, it was also one of the earliest ways to stream your gameplay for others to watch. I remember trying it out years before Twitch was around.

Vultr posted their response to the concerns here - https://www.vultr.com/news/a-note-about-vultrs-terms-of-service/

The portion of the ToS that people were worried about had been in place for years and had nothing to do with server intellectual property. They are removing it to avoid future confusion.

I don't disagree that it was poorly worded, but the amount of people jumping to the worst possible conclusions on this is concerning. What happened to Hanlon's Razor?

I use this installable web app for cleaning extra parameters from links - https://linkcleaner.app/

Adds a share target to Android once you install it as well, makes it easy to send links to. Open source too!

On a related note... I went to cancel a membership a few weeks back, and the site displayed a message "you don't have an active membership to cancel". I thought it was strange, so I checked out the network requests being made, and turned out the cancel API call was getting blocked for "security reasons". Nothing else on the site was blocked for me, just the cancellation endpoint.

I opened a ticket, and it took them nearly 2 weeks to respond, and there was zero acknowledgement on why cancellation would be blocked.

Not sure if it's a purposeful dark pattern, but it sure seems like it!

Ah yeah, I forgot about Hamachi! It was great for games that only supported LAN multiplayer.

I'm a huge fan of Netdata, very configurable and monitors just about anything you could want. Great interface and alerts too - https://www.netdata.cloud/

Sounds like what you want is some form of webhooks that your customers can sign up for, that will send out when the reports are complete.

There are quite a few ways to do that. One I've looked at recently is Convoy, for setting up a user-facing webhook Dashboard -

https://getconvoy.io/

By using webhooks for delivery, then your actual configuration / viewing of schedules just becomes standard API calls.

An ultralisk was the first thing that I thought of.

Interesting article, thanks for sharing!

I've run a (nowhere near as popular) public API for just about 10 years now. Definitely relate to the bit where he mentions people simply retrying the same request when they get an error. 😂

I get a lot of students using the API for learning projects, which is great! But it also means my rate limiting is more often protecting my server from accidental infinite loops, rather than anything purposely abusive.

I can never tell if comments like this are a joke. Starfield has tons of issues, don't get me wrong, but I'm still playing it because I'm having fun. Why put 80 hours into something if you aren't enjoying it?

Personally if I'm not having fun in a game, I'd just stop after a few hours.

Worth noting that this should not affect you if you are only using tunnels (no DNS entries / open ports).

Right? When I was a kid I would specifically enjoy the "challenge" of trying to beat something over and over. Nowadays though... I just like playing a game for the experience. I still like feeling "progression", so things go from difficult to easy as my character advances. But having to repeat something multiple times? Eh... just not my jam anymore.

It was definitely ahead of its time! Not really sure why it faded away, I guess pressure from Steam (pun intended), and games moving to private in-game server browsers? Along with many other options for voice chat.

That's actually what I tend to do, but would be nice (for laziness) to have two different settings. Or for cases where games don't allow adjustment after starting.

Funny you bring up Kena, because that is actually probably a prime example for me too. Loved the rest of the game, but the boss fights were a bit too difficult imo!

Was literally wondering if there was something out there to do this earlier today, ha. This is awesome, great work!

Any plans to submit to the Play Store? Saw you mentioned it might be against a policy, but could still try I guess?

That sounds amazing, it is good to hear there are still some groups that have kept in contact, even after all that time!

There are some archives of the service here -

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Xfire

Supposedly most of the videos, and 20% of the screenshots? I'm not sure if there's a way to easily search the archive contents, rather than download.

There's quite a few profiles on Web Archive too -

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.xfire.com/profile/*

It's a fantastic game! Since it requires co-op to play, one neat thing the dev did was require only one person to own a copy (you friend can play free).

They did you with their previous game, A Way Out, as well. That one was also great!

Just makes me wonder if the same thing happens in other communities. Say someone posts a photo of a National Park, are there replies how they've hiked most of the trails at that park and decided it's not worth visiting?

I can see both sides too, "well we are informing people about the cons of that park, so they aren't eaten by the vicious bears!". I get that, I do! People have an opinion they want to share, nothing really wrong with that. Does that understanding make it enjoyable for me as the person just sharing the photo? Not so much...😂

Maybe, but it would also be very easy to blame on misconfiguration / mistake. Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if the behavior itself isn't purposeful, but ignoring / not fixing it is. I've definitely seen such behavior at other companies, where they drag their feet on fixing a bug that is bad for the user, but helping them.

Many are, but as far as I know, no hosting provider has ever tried something like what was claimed (which is why it made such news).

It seems like many people didn't even verify that portion of ToS was new (checking web archive), or wait for Vultr's response before closing their accounts.

Even after the official response, it feels like people stuck to their original assumptions and felt justified moving services?

Companies, and specifically the people in them, make mistakes. What matters is their reaction. I'm scratching my head to think what Vultr could do better in this case (other than creating a time machine to avoid the initial screw up).

That's awesome when you can organize an in-game group like that to achieve something you couldn't do alone. Sounds like fun times for sure! :)

Netdata is fantastic, but not sure I'd call the UI mobile friendly (unless I'm missing something? 😂) To me, that's really one of the only weak points with it.

Ventoy is awesome, love being able to load a ton of different boot images on a single USB drive! The only issue I've run into is the occasional image that won't boot. Not sure if this is expected, or you need to sometimes tweak settings to get it working?

Personally the thing that decided between the two for me was Liftoff being open source (Connect is not, afaik?)

I'm honestly more excited about this than a Portal 3 announcement! :) Loved both the puzzles and the story / vibe of the first one!

Agreed, I think the first game I saw this in was Tunic. It was a great addition!

Here's another one (with people for scale) at Tuolumne Grove near Yosemite Valley.

Wow, that's a crazy coincidence! That "patron" system sounds pretty interesting too, seems like a good way to incentivize veterans to help new players. Interesting that I haven't really heard of any more recent games having that (as far as I know).

Sorry, not that I know of! Poor phrasing on my part, should have said "more excited than if there were a Portal 3 announcement".

They actually recently opened a beta for sending emails from Workers as well. There are already a few projects to make use of this, examples:

• https://github.com/Sh4yy/cloudflare-email
• https://github.com/giuseppelt/emailflare

The only reason it came up again for me was I noticed it in some old computer files, ha! Used to be my most used application by far.

I played a ton of StarCraft back in the day! I was never too serious about joining a clan (just dabbled), but I now remember some of the things you mentioned with the chat rooms, and clan "tags". I might be imagining it, but wasn't there also some way to set colors on letters in names too (holding down alt and pressing numbers or something...) That might have honestly been my first experience with "bots" for things adjacent to games.

Good memories, thanks very much for sharing!

It isn't how it works today. I'm talking about sometime in the distant (or near) future. Surely at some point AI will have the capabilities on par with at least a low level hacker.

Or, if you still think that's a stretch, just imagine all the ways perfectly legitimate software can cost companies money. Not through malicious design, but just by mistakes.

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone, keeping them coming! Gives me a good list to look through, and also reminds me of some of my old favorites like Caesar 3! 😁

No worries! I definitely get it, coding everything and getting it out there is the biggest thing. Maybe sometime down the road!

Thanks for the App!

Looks pretty good! Although I wonder if moving to 3rd person from the top-down view will cause it to lose some of what made the original unique?

I've been giving Exoprimal a try (free on GamePass). It's actually a really fun mix of PvE and PvP so far! The story is hilariously strange as well. Not sure I'd think it's worth $60, but for free it's been a blast!

As others stated, you can run and access the interface locally (or setup your own reverse proxy) for free. Their Cloud dashboard is also free for up to 5 nodes. They recently added a flat-rate "Homelab" plan as well, if you want to remove the limit. It's all quite usable for $0 otherwise though!

It was a server-side block, from Cloudflare (security rule specifically). I'm very familiar with it, having used the same service over a decade. They are able to tweak the overall security level, or specific WAF rules for the endpoint in Cloudflare. They also have analytics that will show them exactly how many cancellation requests would be blocked. The fact that they totally ignored these details in my ticket, is concerning.