*** MARCH CHALLENGE: Not Your Father's Random Dungeon ***

[Redrobes]

It logs itself in and fetches a page which contains lines like these...

### New Challenge Entry:Redrobes,1604
### New Challenge Entry:GamerPrinter,1588
### New Challenge Entry:NeonKnight,1611

...somewhere in it. The numbers represent the thread id's. Then it goes through the threads looking for that latest WIP thing and grabs the link to the next image. The script loads up a database and checks if the attachment id is the same as the current thumbnail and if not then it fetches that image and rescales it to thumb size and saves/overwrites it out and updates the database file. Then it writes out the web page bit for that entry too.

So you start with a file or webpage containing a list of entries and the usual set of entry threads as normal. The list could be the challenge description like this thread with a post containing this list or each person could post and add themselves. You might have a database file from a previous run also.

In the end you have a database text file of thumbnail attachment id's, a list of thumbnail PNG files and the web page linking the thumbnails like that of the link above. The latter two being required / uploaded for the web page view.

Maybe if it was run on the same machine that was serving the files then it would (or could be made to) take the files locally from the HDD and therefore not have to go via apache + net and then be fast enough to run as a CGI. This I would grant you would be a tricky thing to get right. So running locally to me/an admin (i.e. across the net) and uploading the results is much easier.