EQ2 Bank - Forum Updating Question

[Cadori Seraphim]

Ok I didnt know if this was the best area to put this in so here goes:I would like to know if anyone out there knows if there is a useful tool that can be used to (perhaps in php or something easy to set up like Roster Master) keep your bank up to date on a guild website? No matter where your website may be (eq2players, guild portal or self made).Roster Master works in conjunction with eq2players and I was thinking something could be made thats similar that could update whats in the bank and spit it out in an organized fashion to display on a guild webpage.Am I making sense?Anyone know of anything that would do this? (legal of course)

[Seagoat]

<p>Sidora contacted me privately via email, and I responded to her there.  In case anyone else comes along later and has the same (or a similar) question, here's my answer:</p><hr /><p>Roster Master uses PHP to "scrape" the HTML from the SOE roster page and then cache it in the site database.  The roster information is publicly available on SOE's site, while the bank vaults are not.  (You have to be logged in to EQ2 Players and a member of that guild with the proper permissions to view the vaults.)  It would be highly unlikely that a PHP script -- even a suite on par with RM -- would be able to accomplish this.</p><p>The only thing you could do that might work is to maintain a manually-updated forum thread on your guild forum, or to use a Dragonfly module (such as <a href="http://www.eq2caladrius.com/Downloads/details/id=11.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Wish List</a>) to keep manual tallies of your bank items.</p><p>What you're looking for has been asked for many times before, but unfortunately because of SOE's guild bank vault login and permissions requirements, scraping that information is impossible.  :-/</p>

[Dark_Grue]

<cite>Seagoat wrote:</cite><blockquote>Roster Master uses PHP to "scrape" the HTML from the SOE roster page and then cache it in the site database.  The roster information is publicly available on SOE's site, while the bank vaults are not.  (You have to be logged in to EQ2 Players and a member of that guild with the proper permissions to view the vaults.)  It would be highly unlikely that a PHP script -- even a suite on par with RM -- would be able to accomplish this.</blockquote><p>Not entirely true - although the practical upshot may be the same. Such software does not exist currently. It could, however, be written. It's quite possible to write a PHP script that will log into EQ2Players and retrieve the required information. HTTPS is supported starting from PHP 4.3.0, if you have compiled in support for OpenSSL.</p><p>The software would have to open a SSL connection to <a href="https://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/user/login.m" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/user/login.m</a>, POST the login data for a guild memeber account with the advance services subscription and permissions to view the vaults, retrieve the authentication cookie back, then make a request to the guild bank page while sending the authentication cookie. Then it'd have to parse and store the information. Not trivial, but not impossible - there is no technical reason (on the face of it) this can't be done.</p><p>However, there are three major problems with doing this. First, there are limited resources available to devote to such a project. Those who can do it are probably busy with other things, or not interested in such an endevor. Writing software like this is a considerable time and resource investment.</p><p>Second, the script would have to store (somewhere) the login account's name and password in cleartext. It won't be sending it in the clear, but anyone who has access to the script's configuration would have access to the account information as well. This isn't a showstopper, but it's not a desirable condition, and does put most of the burden of protecting that information on the configuration and administration of the server the script's running on.</p><p>Lastly, this script would be bypassing the access control restriction that only subscribers to the advanced services have access to this information. Guild bank inventory is a paid service (err, it is, right? I can't check from behind a proxy), so you may very well be violating the Terms of Service by redistributing the subscriber-only content. This potentially could put you smack-dab in the middle of DMCA territory, which is not a happy place.</p><p>tldr; There's no <i>technical</i> reason such software can't exist. There's some good other reasons it doesn't.</p>

[Cadori Seraphim]

Thank you both for the information <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />I didn't realize it would be that complicated lolI wonder if there is a way to export bank contents to a file so you could  update the bank section that way? Or if this would be possible even. I know there are UI's that get players gear info, this would be similar but with the banks.