History
Circa 2008 - UOGateway.com and the well known UOGateway program vanished, as the domain expired, and the owner had lost interest. The domain was then picked up by Runuo.com for approximately $3,000 in a domain bid, was barely touched and let to die. A year later, in January 2009, it expired again and was then picked up by uovalor.com for $628.
In honor of Mr. Fixit's work and bringing free UO shards together, the project has been reborn. There are some future intentions to recreate a similar program but for now this will hold simply as a top site list.
How it works
UOGateway is slightly different then typical top site lists. It is more then just a top site, as it has features such as graphing network response time (referred to as ping* for short) and players online. Stats are collected by a custom C++ app that runs on the server and polls each shard every 5 minutes to get a data sample. Data samples are then put together to generate the graphs as well as calculate averages. All collected stats are truncated after 30 days, while graphs display the last 24 hours.
What about the launcher?
Several people have approached me about being able to get the old UOGateway app to work. That's great, but it still limits what we can do with it and it is very dirty as it requires reverse engineering. While I have lot of other priorities, I do eventually want to code a full blown launcher that supports custom patches, and even works without razor.
If you want a launcher, you can check out ConnectUO by RunUO. However, they have been known to forget to renew domains on several occasions (such as this one), have months of downtime on various of their sites, and even lose all of their content, with no backups. So it's still a good idea to put your site on here, we do backups :).
How accurate is the data?
The online graphs and ping graphs are fairly accurate but should not be used for scientific purposes. Like any other server, this server's network can become slower or faster at various times, which will skew the data a bit. If you notice a speed spike on all shards at around the same time there is a good chance it was something at our end such as a nightly offsite backup job.
Support/Discussion
For any UOGateway related discussion, you may register at the Age of Valor forum. Since AoV is a shard itself, please note that blatant advertising of shards on that forum is strictly forbidden and could result in the removal of your shard.
* ping in this case does not refer to ICMP ping, but rather the time it takes for server to respond via TCP.
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