Quote Originally Posted by Riddle View Post
Good old neopets.
A well designed auto buyer can bring you a lot of users to the site.
Also, remember that Gaia flash games were created by experienced programmers... I think Neopets flash game framework was originally developed by one of the creators and then the site kept building upon that... So the design for Gaia is probably a lot better than Neopets. My theory anyways.
I think it's mostly luck that Gaia's games are done better.
Gaia's games were created by experienced programmers, I'm sure, but they built most of them with the "Sushi" server from RawFishSoftware. It's a terrible setup and extremely annoying. Various programmers added to the games over the years and it's resulted in some terrible code and some terrible patches. I've suggested to a developer I'm in contact with, from time to time, that he bring up the idea of open source towns. The result being that they could scrap Towns 2.0 and allow the users to submit changes for them to review and apply. This means they don't have to waste effort to patch unless server side junk is needed. The response I got was "I don't think Towns / Rallies will be open source, for two main reasons: a) it's a horrible body of code that should be taken out and shot; I'd hate to have it seen by the world at large as an example of our code. b) Any security changes which require a compliant client are inherently flawed."
While there are problems with client patches, 90% of their patches have been client side anyway. Realized I'm starting to rant. My bad. Okay, on to topic.

Right, I just want to express my interest at the challenge of a score sender. I did not expect it to be so complicated. It almost makes me want to get into Neopets, but you said this is a rare find. All the same, I thoroughly enjoyed reading through this thread.