Hallo.
I suppose there are a few gaming forums that are based on eblah out there (mine is ) which have some sort of real time statistics displayed. The old and simple way to display this on the forum is using a free image banner like this and insert it into your board description with [img] tags.

http://module.game-monitor.com/89.38.194.244:27015/image/default/default.png
(random server)

However, images can't be personalized and look quite bad, if you ask me.

I noticed that game-monitor.com supports data feeds: http://www.game-monitor.com/cs.....aM.RO-DataFeeds.html

I was thinking that a tag like [server]ipaddress:port[/server] could be added using perl, which would parse the xml file for the correspoding server on game-monitor's site and output a text like "ON 4/20 players" if the server is online and just "OFF" if it's down. This is the amount of info you can get for free; for a premium server the list is much larger.

Here are some xml examples
Free: http://module.game-monitor.com/89.38.194.244:27015/data/server.xml
Premium: http://module.game-monitor.com/83.145.248.13:30131/data/server_all.xml
Offline: http://module.game-monitor.com/89.38.194.244:26015/data/server.xml

Would this be possible? I don't have any perl knowledge.

I forgot to add that the info should be cached for some time and only updated when a user views the board in order to save some bandwidth.

I'm looking into GameQ. It is open source and I am sure you can make it pretty with E-Blah.

I can't use anything like GameQ because outgoing connections on those ports are blocked on my shared hosting server.

good point (I'm so used to having total control I get a bit spoiled)

I can do all this with PHP but I am still learning PERL. I am sure PERL has an XML parser of some kind. I am spoiled with my PHP IDE because it has code completion, which is one of the major ways I learned PHP.

I am going to mess with the API today and maybe I can learn some stuff.

I thought that using perl it would be easier to integrate with eblah.
Btw, I found this:
http://search.cpan.org/~wilsond/WWW-GameMonitor-0.03/lib/WWW/GameMonitor.pm
It says the server must be listed as a premium server but I think the author wrote that before game-monitor made free the limited data feeds.

You should be able to change the ports gameq uses... even if you have to hack away at it for a bit.

If you're not using ssl on your site then borrow that port and if you're using the default 25 then use port 567 for your game too - it's often used as an alternative smtp port.  Well, I guess that depends on whether or not the host services try to grab or drop the traffic on those ports.

Hell, it could even work with port 80.