Hello forum!

I'm looking for some ideas to realise the following:

A player can create a customised level which will be saved in a Lua file.

Next step would be, to upload this level file on a server.

The server's level files can be seen in the client, it should show who created it, ratings, downloads, ...

Once a player decided what to play, they can just press download and the client downloads the level - saves it within the applications source tree.

I would like to know what server software might become interesting for this?

Another part is checking whether the uploaded material should be accepted.

I would not want someone to upload some malefic file. However, trusting the source from where the file is being uploaded should not be trusted without further ado, right?

Thinking about all these integrity checks make me wonder, if having a server isn't actually way too dangerous for my users.

Also aspects like DDOSing blows this topic up to an extreme extent.

Nonetheless, I would happy to hear your thoughts and suggestions!

Thanks a lot : )

I thought that using a MySQL-server would be sufficient.

An alternative is to just create an account with email address and password, and make the user verify the email address with a link you mail them. Most web application frameworks should be able to do this for you.

While it is an interesting thought to support "Log in with ...", it creates some dependency that I would have to maintenance if the API changes.

I thought offering registration for a personal account might be quite a good way of doing it.

While I read a bit about security, I liked the idea to use a PHP script as a proxy for MySQL-server interactions.

Is there any way to do this in C++? I prefer approaches that are platform independent.

Additionally, are there maybe complete libraries that centre around this concept? Maybe providing an easy way to login and keep a session alive.

Oh, I might expressed myself the wrong way.

The proxy shall be PHP, which accesses the database. However, the C++-client shall send the important data to the PHP-proxy.

For example, the user wants to login, C++ shall send the username and password to the PHP proxy. This one shall see, whether the given account exists and has the right password.

Or the user wants to upload a level, Lua-level-file will be sent to the PHP-proxy.

I was wondering on how to call a PHP script via C++. Especially, when it is not part of the source tree, but located on some online host.

Is there a neat library to do this? Preferably as platform independent as possible.

About the web services, I was rather thinking about active sessions on the C++ game client itself, in order to avoid requesting username/password a dozen times for every action that shall alter the uploaded files on the server. Probably something along the lines to simply save the username/password encrypted in some file, sending these to the proxy together with the content changes.