Spamlandian Broadcasting Service

Spamtown Home District, galactic headquarters of SBS

"Quality reporting across this side of the quadrant."

Probably serving a nonzero number of users but who knows?

Recent events

07/08/24: Stat logging is gone (again) for now but I think I figured out a workaround to the ephemeral filesystem issues

04/19/24: Stat logging is back baby

04/16/24: Rebranded from STV to SBS (since there's no video feed)

04/14/24: Third rewrite/migration in progress, some functionality may be temporarily missing

10/20/23: UI and other changes

09/08/23: Spamtown becomes first Level 6 settlement in MC2

08/28/23: STV rewrite + additions complete, domain changed

08/12/2023: Spamtown reaches 5M residents

05/11/2023: 100th save file recorded

04/25/2023: Spämländia becomes first world to unlock Transcendence in MC2

04/01/2023: Can you believe it's already April?

03/03/2023: CSS improvements made

03/01/2023: Spamtown reaches 1M residents

Configuration

To those who may not be familiar with how news servers work in MC2, don't worry! Adding a news server to a world is a very quick process. First, make sure that you're the owner or an administrator of the world you'd like to add SBS to. Then, open the Statistics window through the sidebar, scroll to the bottom of the World tab, and there will be an input box to link news servers in. Finally, type the URL of this site (https://sbs-5kya.onrender.com) into the box as is. Important: putting spaces or a www. in the URL will mess it up! Now, you can switch back and forth between SBS, GNN, and other news servers by clicking on the little red logo square in the left corner of the news ticker.

Troubleshooting

After setting up its endpoint, SBS may fail to be available on your world for a number of reasons. Most often, the URL in the news server input may be malformed— spaces break the URLs and any errors in formatting happen silently. Another possible case is that your internet may have been out while the game was trying to poll its news servers, in which case you can simply click in and back out of the news server input box to force a re-poll. Finally, this site itself may have occasional downtimes due to unforeseen technical issues, but these downtimes should be few and far between.

Technical

SBS is a custom MC2 news server that populates the news ticker at the bottom of an MC2 instance with headlines in the same way that the default news souce (GNN) does. An individual MC2 worlds has a list of news server endpoints, regularly polling each of them for news data.