[Tool] Future News Checker

• Rydian wrote on 2015-06-09 10:07
  Nexon NA likes to write up news articles and just leave them invisible until the right time (sometimes a week in advance). It's only excluded from the listing though, so if you know the URL to a news post you can read it before it becomes officially visible.
  
  I wrote a script that'll check a series of future IDs (50 at a time) and tell you which have articles.
  
  [spoiler="Screenshot"]

  [Image: http://s2.postimg.org/80n13f93d/shot.png]

  [/spoiler]
  http://rydian.net/tools/mabinogi/newschecker/
  (pls dun hammer my host 24/7)
  
  Mabi's news IDs are in base-62 (0-9-A-Z-a-z, 10+26+26) so it decodes the ID to a number, then runs an incrementing loop to check a bunch. I use cURL to fetch response headers for each generated URL (with the no-body option because get_headers() is lazy and downloads the whole page). Nexon's web server sends an HTTP 200 when an article exists, and an HTTP 302 as a redirect to the main news page otherwise so it's a simple comparison.
• M wrote on 2015-06-09 19:08
  Entertaining at least. Might serve to give people a little sneak peak into updates (until nexon catches on)
• Rydian wrote on 2015-06-09 20:37
  People have been editing URLs to check for upcoming news for ages, but now we can be lazy about it! =D
• X wrote on 2015-06-09 23:36
  Are you sure they're base 62 and not 64? 64 is the common version but you know Nexon...