[crossfire] new metaserver

[Mark Wedel]

  I was thinking about this metaserver some more, and had some various thoughts.

1) Has someone agreed to run the metametaserver?  What about the slave 
metaservers?  While all this looks nice, if you don't have people willing to run 
it/take care of it, it is all pretty pointless.  For the metametaserver, I'm 
thinking more of the Tanner's, since they currently hold the main crossfire home 
page, but of course, the metametaserver could move someplace else (not as sure 
how many people have as stable and ip address and network connection that they do).

2) having the clients connect to the various servers to get stats like current 
number of active players is IMO an extra level of complication that can be done 
without.  If we have a dozen active servers (which was actually low if I 
recall), you probably don't want to do it sequentially - that means it coudl 
take a significant amount of time to go through them all.  Especially if one is 
down or unresponsive.  this means you need to do it in parallel, and writing 
that threaded code is a bit more complicated.  Add to the fact that the client 
would then have to send some commands and parses the responses from the server. 
  I just don't see any reason that dynamic info shouldn't be included.

3) I'd much rather have a simpler approach than something really complicated for 
many reasons.  The current approach seems to be going towards the overly 
complicated approach.

4) Has anyone considered the approach where all the servers talk to the 
metametaserver (lets call it the master metaserver), and all the metaservers 
just regularly pull updates from the master metaserver?  And we disallows 
directy client queries to the master metaserver (basically, it will only allow 
queries from the client metaservers)?  This goes to #3, where it seems to be a 
much simpler approach.  And it is only slightly less resilent then the proposals 
I've seen.  In this approach, if the master metaserver is down, the clients just 
use the last copy of the data they have.  But at least all the client metasevers 
are sure to have the same data.

  Just some thoughts.  I'd probably still be good to rewrite the metaserver 
logic, but IMO, having the servers talk to web servers is an extra complication 
- pretty much all metaservers that are out there (certainly netrek at a minimum) 
use their own protocol for the servers to update the metaserver.