Recommended Listing Sites

[Mutant]

So I've decided I need to push some listing sites to draw a few players into my game. I've set things up on Top PBBG, and already had a bit of traffic through from there. I'm hoping to increase that by linking into their rewards system.

But I'd like at least a couple more. I've done plenty of searching, and found a lot of sites, which all seem to be either really commercial, overloaded with a billion ads, broken, or otherwise crappy. I'd also really like ones that have integrated rewards systems, so I can make sure players are really voting before giving them rewards (which is what I like about Top PBBG).

Anyone have suggestions for good sites to use?

Thanks!

[ST-Mike]

Admins have ignored my deletion request - if you're not going to delete my account then don't have the option there please.

[Sunchaser]

Top PBBG is mine (PM me in case of problems), but i registered my game on some toplists:

www.topwebgames.com
www.apexwebgaming.com
http://www.top100arena.com/

Do anyone knows of French, German toplists?

@Mike, your toplists have a decent traffic?

thanks.

[Mutant]

Thanks guys, this is awesome!

[Murzim]

I can see you already joined but for future reference for other game owners:

http://www.omgspider.com/

It is a games directory + toplist + search engine with high USA traffic.

[ST-Mike]

Admins have ignored my deletion request - if you're not going to delete my account then don't have the option there please.

[Mutant]

Heh, funnily enough I had the exact same discussion with someone at omgspider this week. I probably would be using it (since it seems to get reasonable traffic), but the fact that I'm supposed to use their PHP script (and I don't use PHP at all), and they have the callback URL hard-coded means it's just too much effort for me.

[Murzim]

Hi,

This is a standalone script that runs everywhere. The callback url is only called when the game uses the inceptive.
It needs cURL library to run but most servers have this library precompiled. If not, it is still easy to compile apache with this library.

I am not aware of other solutions that are easier to implement and as secure against exploitation as this one. If you would like to point any, we would gladly add it.

Mutant, I checked your site and I saw you are using a PHP forum. Therefore this script will work for you. Just rename it to .php and edit where needed as described in the script. Then upload it to your server and modify the voting link. It should not need more than 3 minutes.

Mike, we have updated the site to let the user know if a vote has not been counted so your users will not be confused any more.

Do NOTE that you can replace the example query with your own query or queries or scripts. Just find this portion:
if($user_id){
mysql_query($reward_query);
}

and replace/add as you want. Basically, this is the final check and inside this you can put any piece of code you normally run.

Current form is simplistic to help newbies run it.

[chrisjenkinson]

Murzim, why don't you write an API with a registered API key? That is a much better way of doing it. Then you just need to tell the game people how to get an API key and what web page on your server to hit.

[ST-Mike]

Admins have ignored my deletion request - if you're not going to delete my account then don't have the option there please.

[Mutant]

Mutant, I checked your site and I saw you are using a PHP forum. Therefore this script will work for you. Just rename it to .php and edit where needed as described in the script. Then upload it to your server and modify the voting link. It should not need more than 3 minutes.

Seriously, mate, I think I know how my own game works better than you (which I've tried to explain over several emails). My forum runs on a different server to the game. I don't have PHP installed on my game server, as I don't use it for anything else. I really don't want to install PHP just to hook up incentives for your site.

Not only that, but I'd then be using a completely different system for handling incentives for your site. All the other sites I use make it flexible enough that I've built a system into my game where I can configure a new incentive scheme by adding a new row to a table. This makes management of these 100% easier for me. I can easily tweak things, e.g. give higher rewards for a particular site if it's giving me more traffic, or take sites out of the list altogether.

Anyway, I think I've really said everything I can. The bottom line is, it's much harder for me to setup incentives with omgspider as it is with just about every other site that offers them. So where's my incentive to use omgspider?

[Murzim]

@chrisjenkinson
Still, I would need to call a page of referring game somehow ? I have never constructed an API before and I am failing to understand the exact usage.

@Mike
I'll try to respond everything, and be as short as possible:
-Apache/PHP/cURL are a requirement. Thats not a positive but like I said, I am open to more ideas.
-The script can tell if the game is using the inceptive or not by checking the voting link.
-It will only callback if it detects the user handler on voting link. No user handler = no callback.
-The script verifies valid votes. If you want for whichever reason to limit valid votes per user, this is not covered. Just alter the queries inside the script.
-OMGspider always checks at base url as registered. If he registered forums.game.com it will check forums.game.com/omgspider.php
-PayPal works in a similar way in case you are unaware. (Still calls a .php script)
-The callback is not as horrible as you think. It happens in miliseconds.
-The idea of adding a callback for the case the user votes but vote is invalid is not bad and we may add it.
-Your example of simple setup requires registration so I could not see it. In contrary, omgspider example does not need registration.
-I told you that this script and example is setup for newbies and people who grab code and upload it to some web server ARE newbies.
-Please let me know which part of the documentation is unclear so I can be of further help.
-I have not been offended but rather troubled by your approach which is difficult for me to explain. I appreciate your feedback but I cannot understand neither the irony at some points nor the offensive stance.
-I do not see any problem with the omgspider.php page. Can you tell me why this is a problem ?
-You are right about the new tab; it has been removed now and operates on same window.
-I do not think that omgspider fits this description at any part.
-Thank you for your feedback, I hope it will be less offensive next time.

@Mutant
-My mistake, I thought that you had forums and game on same machine.
-You can add the script just I explained above to incorporate your system but since you do not use PHP, not an option I guess.
-Inceptives are great but being a game owner myself, I can guarantee that this is not the first thing to look at a toplist. Just use omgspider and count your signups, this is what matters ultimately. Compare it with the rest to get safe perspective. Ultimately, some sites perform better than other and suprisingly, all the topsites that do well for my game, do not use inceptives at all, except OMGspider.

[chrisjenkinson]

If you don't care whether the user visits your site, just develop a simple REST API (plenty of tutorials on Google). Basically, the game player clicks on "vote" on the game. The game sends a request to your server which tells you to add a vote, and you display an page (with JSON or XML) which the game parses to know whether the vote was accepted or not. This is all transparent to the user.

If you want the user to be redirected to your site, it will be a bit more complicated but is similar-ish to what you have at the moment. You'll want something along the lines of Twitter or Facebook authentication (in terms of workflow). When a game owner registers on your site you'll give them an API key and secret and a page on your site to redirect users to. You'll ask them for a page to redirect back to (a callback URL). That's what you've got at the moment as omgspider.php. When someone clicks vote on the game site, the game redirects them to your site where you ask them to rank it 1-5 or whatever, then after they click submit you redirect them back to the callback URL. Your API has a validate_vote method which the game then checks to see whether the vote was successful.

Hope this helps.

[ST-Mike]

Admins have ignored my deletion request - if you're not going to delete my account then don't have the option there please.

[codestryke]

I think that you're probably all sick of my opinion on this now I've started developing a top list in some spare time, to show how I think it should be done

If you are going that direction we would be interested in helping out. I've started on a top site myself many times but continually get carried off with other projects.

[Murzim]

Following the screenshot at: http://i.imgur.com/Qpu6K.jpg

In the particular system, what is stopping ANYONE to create a simple post script and run it with always result = 1?

I can easily create a script (under 1 minute) that it will even show like the specific website is sending the POST back.

[Dasein Fiasco]

Encode the postback request and sign it with a passkey known to the listing site and to the game site. The game developers would be responsible for decoding the postback, which is not difficult but slightly more work than simply grabbing a post body.

[ST-Mike]

Admins have ignored my deletion request - if you're not going to delete my account then don't have the option there please.