HISTORY website

A website that writes to the live game

The game owns the truth. Accounts, characters, guilds, coins and bans live in three MySQL databases on the game server, and the website keeps only its own data (sessions, codes, chat, referrals, the shop's catalogue and ledger) in MongoDB. A data layer merges the two into one player, and every write goes where the game will read it: a registration creates the game account, a ban sets the game's status, and a purchase is delivered into the game's item table.

Accounts the game can trust

• A new account is created in the game blocked, and only the code sent to its own inbox activates it.
• Changing the email needs a code sent to the new address.
• One address may hold at most two accounts, counted across Gmail dots and plus tags, and only Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo are accepted. Registrations and email changes on one address are serialised, so two at once can't both slip past the cap.
• Verification belongs to the account that proved it, never to another account on the same inbox, because anyone can type someone else's address. A test enforces that rule.
• The game decides bans. A banned player can't use the account pages or their actions, and the site mirrors the game's ban expiry.

Money handled by hand, safely

Top-ups are paid by PayPal, Revolut, Binance or bank transfer and claimed by the player with a proof. A moderator accepts or rejects it from the console or straight from a Telegram card. Both paths run the same pipeline, and every decision starts with an atomic claim, so two moderators can't credit the same payment twice. An accepted top-up attaches the referrer's commission.

Referrals that resist abuse

Players share a code and earn Dragon Coins for each referred player who qualifies; approved affiliates earn a percentage of their referrals' top-ups, at a private rate if one is set. Nothing pays instantly: self-referrals, shared IPs and shared inboxes are refused, rewards wait for daily qualification, and commissions stay locked through the chargeback window before a wallet can withdraw them. Every wallet change is an atomic update plus a ledger row in one transaction.

The shop, the wheels and the chat

The item shop sells cosmetics and convenience, never damage, and delivers into the game. The Wheel of Destiny spends vote spins, and a second wheel is paid in Dragon Coins or Dragon Marks. The realm chat is one live room over server-sent events, where players talk under a write-once alias that hides their login, and staff moderate reports from the console.

An item shop that opens in under two seconds

The item shop took 13.2 seconds to open, and its full item list 39 seconds. The queries themselves were fast: the cost was the link to the database, about 88 KB/s, and every view pulled whole item documents, descriptions in all 13 languages included. One bundle of 135 items fetched 1.1 MB of descriptions just to print 135 names. Reading only the fields a page shows cut both pages by 87% and 85%, and I checked that the rendered pages stayed byte-identical.

Then I cached the public half of the storefront in process for 30 to 60 seconds, cleared from inside the write functions so no caller can forget. A cold storefront now does 9 database reads and a warm one does 1: the player's own account, which is never cached. Prices, stock and balances are always read fresh at the moment of purchase, so a card can show a stale stock count but a sale can never be wrong.

Measured on the live catalogue	Before	After
/shop	13.2 s	~1.7 s
/shop/items	39 s	~5.8 s
Database reads per warm storefront view	9	1

Elsewhere, hot public reads (settings, news, the FAQ, changelogs) are cached for 30 seconds and cleared on write, and the rankings hide staff characters and apply the same filter to their count, so pagination never lies.

A designer's poster, made into a page

The server's presentation was designed by Gheby as one long poster, 29,817 px tall. I turned it into a real page: one scrolling document with a contents sidebar that follows the reader, reusable components for its tooltips and boards, and all 13 languages instead of a single image.

13 languages, admin content too

The interface ships in 13 languages, and so does what admins write: every translatable field is a per-language object with an English fallback, edited through one field component and bulk-translated by scripts. Every public page declares its 13 alternates, and the home page carries structured data for the server as an organisation, a website and a video game.

By the numbers

Launch	26 September 2026
Players	400+ registered, ~100 active daily
Item shop open time	13.2 s → ~1.7 s
Languages	13, Arabic right to left
Codebase	~54,600 lines, 38 MongoDB models, 3 game databases