If NS2 game servers exposed their status as a web service using SOAP it would make it much easier for server operators to build websites to monitor their servers.

Plus I would like some way of indicating which servers are running a given map on NS2World

Steam uses it's own protocol which makes querying this kind of thing fiddly, but now you have the M4xX0r engine it opens up the possibility of easier integration.

This would be nice, very easy to pars the data onto a website. No need for a middle man site or anything like that.

On this topic - it would be nice to have a link to a website built into the server browser itself, would save a good deal of copy/pasting and make it easier for admins to promote server communities.

In fact, Firefox is open source right? What would stop you from including a simple web browser based on Gecko into the actual source code (as a plugin, so that you didn't have to open all your code of course), but a plugin that was preinstalled.

It would be pretty amazing to have an integrated web browser, because then you could run applets like an irc channel from within the game. With LUA you could then make those applets launch or display in the game.

The only problem would be security. I would probably default all potential security problems to off (even javascript and cookies). Then when players trusted a server, they could turn on their plugins.

You mean like HLstatsX?

The advantage of using the Steam protocol is that a lot of things already speak it. It's well documented, and it's really not that hard to use the PHP / whatever socket library to parse the format yourself if you don't want to use an off-the-shelf library.

Would using this 'SOAP' make servers more vulnerable? hackable? cheat-able? stat-hackable?

SOAP is a XML sheet, you download off of the server and that is it, no upload or anything like that. The server would only give out basic info like: server name, map, players, player time, player score, ping. Now you could have it give more data on players, like there hit % and stuff. Now that would be editable but the server admin should be honest and not edit the sheets. And people who traking them selves on there own stat page could edit it but what is the point?

I would like to see it. easier to deal with imo.

A) It's not that well documented
B) Not as many as handle SOAP

The only downside I can see with my suggestion is that being XML based the messages are bloated out with all the <tags><tags/> stuff, so they would use a little more bandwidth than a steam browser protocol.

Even if UWE choose not to implment this it might be a viable to build a server side LUA mod to do this in addition to whatever protocol NS2 ends up using. I'm not sure of the capacities if LUA/Evolution in this area.

Could use a lighter weight format such as json?

Could do, but then you're getting into the area of all the clients having to write parsers again. I don't know how often servers get queried, but compared to the game/voice traffic I imagine the XML bloat in the odd server query would be negligible.