Well, for the last week or so, I have been working on updating the RSS feed for Evo Xtreme. Well, I took a bit of a break from that for now to build something else.
I don't remember when or who, but last year, or, maybe a few years ago, someone requested an RSS feed block for their site. I guess they wanted to highlight any news for game that their clan ran and I don't ever think anything came of it. Well, while the RSS feed, I was messing around with my steam and I clicked on something and I ended up getting the RSS feed from the game that was in my library. Well, that got me thinking, so I started creating a simplistic responsive Feed system, You can see it here:

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As of right now, minor control over it is available,

• Ability to control how many characters will show.
  
• If there is a seperate image that comes with the news, you can have it float left right or both, and having it just center. The example above has it floating left and right.
  
• How many articles to show.
  
• Ability to just have the heading show, (removal of the pubdate), and you combine that with 0 characters for the character limit and you just have the headings.
  

It's not a block right now, and being a center block, the responsiveness would be similar to what is on this system, but as a side block, I would have a theme that would fix it to "side block size or a little bigger. Probably talk to Lonestar on that. Right now,it does cache the feed and updates it ever 12 hours, but that can be changed easily. It also does display then it was last updated. I have that feed on a game called "Hell Lets Loose", but can be put to any game. You can also control how many characters to show in the feed. For side block, I would probably do hidden divs unless click on to show and hide the story, and you only see the title.

My question is, Is this something that people would want and use. I don't want to waste my time writing something that is not going to be used.

its looking good i would defo use it might be better if news bit was a scroller??

— 2xTaz wrote

its looking good i would defo use it might be better if news bit was a scroller??

Are you talk about something like this?

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That is just an example.

yeah something like that

Okay, I am back working on this system. Some update changes have been made to it.

• Removed the heading image. After looking at many feeds, most of the time it's just a duplicate image and serves no purpose.
  
• Updated it so if you want to show the whole article, you just set the character count to 0.
  
• If set to 0, then it will force the toggle, so it doesn't stretch your site by default.
  
• Found that if there was a YouTube video, it was creating a funky space above and the video was small. Using some CSS tricks, as long as the feed uses Steams preferred method of coding, (that's using HTML), it will work. More information below for those that don't use the HTML.
  
• If a game has no articles, it will now say there are no articles available.
  

Things I am looking at adding.
I am looking into a scrolling div, but, after putting some thought into it, if I do, then I am going to put strict limits on it like a default character limit, and what not. Still trying to decide on how I want to style it and how I want to function.

Scroller will be a good option to have.

Suggestion: How about combining the avatar image and online/offline image together?

• IE: Using profile picture as being online and if offline using a grayed-out profile picture as offline.
  
• Limited to displaying one or two [following] member(s)per scroll page. Or condensed all the information to one per line with one profile per each of the scroll pages.
  

— EmeraldDragon wrote

Scroller will be a good option to have.

Suggestion: How about combining the avatar image and online/offline image together?

• IE: Using profile picture as being online and if offline using a grayed-out profile picture as offline.
  
• Limited to displaying one or two [following] member(s)per scroll page. Or condensed all the information to one per line with one profile per each of the scroll pages.
  

I think you are a little confused by what this thread is about.
If you go to the home page of this site, you will see under the twitch block, a Steam News block that covers the latest news from the developer. (latest 1 - 10 articles). The limit is 10 because that is the most they provide. This block is still in the works. I have not released it and there are only 2 sites that have it, which is mine and EIDs site, since they are into a bunch of different games on Steam.

If I do a steam block for the users, all it will do is have links to their profiles and will not show their current live status for if I tried doing that, I can not think of a way of stopping the flooding of request to get the status where Steam won't flag it as a possible DDoS attack. Even my current system with my slow refresh of the caching still happens gets listed and blocked for weeks. Unfortunately, steam has no place to talk to staff about it. Now, to have a live status system in a block can easily be done using the feed from the Steam Group, but, everyone that wants to show up in that block has to be part of that Steam group, and that system is just a single file that has all the information for each person in that group to build on.

Overall, if there was a way to get sites whitelisted from steam easily, so they don't get flagged as false DDoS, that would be a block I can do using my system.

But I do like the idea you had for the status color for the image, but I am thinking more for the steam profile and the border around the image. That part is being rewritten anyway to be responsive, I am just waiting to hear back from Lonestar on what he is thinking.

For anyone that wants more clarity of the issue, I will go into details now. If you don't care, stop reading.

The issue is this. The way the system works is each person has a separate API file that gets requested from Steam, (well, while in the forums). If you go to their Steam profile on the site, like if you click

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, you will see mine, that page request 3 different API files. To minimize the impact on Steam, I cache these file into a folder on your site, well, on the site the module is installed.

Now, if you imagine, in the forum, you have 10 peoples replies, and each of those 10 people have their Steam information set up on your site. Well, what happens is, each page refresh, in theory, your site can make 10 different calls to Steam in 1 second. If I didn't have the caching, and just say you had the 10 people/bots on your site at the same time all looking at your Steam profile page, now, that went from 10 request to 30 request, and that was just one one-page refresh. Now, what happens, those same 10 people, opened up 10 different Steam Profiles over the course of 30 seconds, Do the math, you can see how those request can add up if the file wasn't cached and why Steam may think you are trying to DDoS their site, since, in a mild form, that is what a DDoS attack usually is.

So I have a caching system that will on the first request, create a folder in a specific spot for each person, and in that folder it will create a file/files, depending on if the person went to the forums or right to their profile. Now, at any time with in 30 seconds, (I think I have it set to 30 seconds), the system will check to see if a file exist and if it's not more than 30 seconds old. If the file meets its criteria, then it will read the information off that file and not make another call. This way, even if you had 500 people on all going to that page, no matter what, it will only do 1 call, so, we don't flood Steam with request, and they don't flag you as a possible DDoS.

Now, if I went to make it into a live status block, and let's say you have 100 people on your site that has their Steam info in there, and nobody has been on your forums for the past 30 seconds of few min, and someone comes to your site on the home page, that is automatically going to be 100 request sent to steam. That would be really the only way to have it a "Live Status" block. Now, with the Steam Group like I mentioned before, that would be a single API call to the steam groups, and in that JSON/XML file, it would have the name of each person, their steam ID number, their online status, and I think what game they are playing. There might be more, but I have not looked at that API since I was still at ClanThemes, to 10+ years. That, I could build on and have that update as current as a 30-second delay, (of course to stop the possibility of too many requests being sent to Steam). I made one a long time ago, and I believe McGyver made one a few years ago. But with that system, you would have to add everyone to a Steam Group that you create and most aren't big into joining them, as I found out.

Most places, like Steam and Discord, are really not supporting too much into the web side of everything anymore, and focusing more into mobile widgets and applications. What they supply in XML and JSON is enough, but it's tough to get things done to find documentation on what's out there. Most everything I find for Steam is old, outdated information, or, extremely vague. Twitch makes it confusing and though is actively messing it up, I mean, updating it, they seem to make changes that makes things harder and requires more digging. Discord, well, they just don't care, and they made that abundantly clear when they chose to ignore my questions a few times then when they finally decided to answer a few weeks later, I got replied with a generic BS answer that has nothing to do with the question I asked. Hence, one of the reason I dislike Discord.

Sorry for the rant, but was just trying to cover all the bases.

Now, what I can do, I can make a block that will show the Steam users, and I can grab their most recent avatar, but only read from the cached files and will only update once their profile is visited, or a thread where they made a post is. But that will be just a list of people on your site that has the steam section filled out, and not a live status.

— coRpSE wrote

— EmeraldDragon wrote

Scroller will be a good option to have.

Suggestion: How about combining the avatar image and online/offline image together?

• IE: Using profile picture as being online and if offline using a grayed-out profile picture as offline.
  
• Limited to displaying one or two [following] member(s)per scroll page. Or condensed all the information to one per line with one profile per each of the scroll pages.
  

I think you are a little confused by what this thread is about.
If you go to the home page of this site, you will see under the twitch block, a Steam News block that covers the latest news from the developer. (latest 1 - 10 articles). The limit is 10 because that is the most they provide. This block is still in the works. I have not released it and there are only 2 sites that have it, which is mine and EIDs site, since they are into a bunch of different games on Steam.

If I do a steam block for the users, all it will do is have links to their profiles and will not show their current live status for if I tried doing that, I can not think of a way of stopping the flooding of request to get the status where Steam won't flag it as a possible DDoS attack. Even my current system with my slow refresh of the caching still happens gets listed and blocked for weeks. Unfortunately, steam has no place to talk to staff about it. Now, to have a live status system in a block can easily be done using the feed from the Steam Group, but, everyone that wants to show up in that block has to be part of that Steam group, and that system is just a single file that has all the information for each person in that group to build on.

Overall, if there was a way to get sites whitelisted from steam easily, so they don't get flagged as false DDoS, that would be a block I can do using my system.

But I do like the idea you had for the status color for the image, but I am thinking more for the steam profile and the border around the image. That part is being rewritten anyway to be responsive, I am just waiting to hear back from Lonestar on what he is thinking.

LOL! Maybe so, or at least about 50/50 confused. And yeah, I got it now.