New Server System: ARK Web Notifications

[Jeremy Drake Stieglitz]

As of ARK v243, servers can now get web notifications optionally posted somewhere when important things happen to a tribe, such as Tripwire Alarms going off and Babies being born. (We will later extend this potentially for all Tribe Logs, as well as expose it to Modders for their own uses). For Official Servers, these notifications are sent to users via the SurviveTheArk.com forums that have Steam account associations. For reasons of websecurity and site performance, we can not handle the web notifications for unofficial servers. So we have exposed the system for custom use, if anyone wants to write a basic web service (or even...sell a service if they wish) for unofficial servers to utilize for their players. Here's how to do it:

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To handle alarm web notifcations on a custom server, you have to start your server with "-webalarms" and have a valid AlarmPostCredentials.txt in your Saved/ folder. AlarmPostCredentials.txt is a text file that contains two lines of data. The first line is a web api key and the other is the url to use.

e.g., /ShooterGame/Saved/AlarmPostCredentials.txt
01234abcedf01234abcedf
https://mywebsite.com/index.php?myowncustom=thing&another=thing


Note: You don't actually have to handle a valid key on webservice side if you don't want to but you will still have to have something inside this file.



The server will make a HTTP POST with "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" data that includes key, steamid, title, and message.

e.g., key=01234abcedf01234abcedf&steamid=0000000000001234&notetitle=Example%2BTitle&message=Example+Message

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That's pretty much it. When the game hits an event it considers newsworthy, it'll do that web POST call accordingly. As mentioned, it'll start with Tripwire Alarms and Baby Births, and once we're convinced of the system's potential, coming up, all Tribe Logs. And then modders can take it even farther if they wish!

Happy hosting,
Jeremy

[Neizan D Senpai]

Awesome!!! :D
Thank you very much for this update!!! we can't wait =)

[Unreliable Narrator]

Can we have an alarm hit a custom webhook on official servers?

[Tom | Pro Driver]

I made a tutorial for you guys:
https://survivetheark.com/index.php?/forums/topic/71544-tutorial-set-up-web-notifications-properly-to-receive-e-mails/

credits go to: http://arkforum.de

[Toooni]

This doesn't work. The Ark Server do not send the POST requests. (See thread on survivetheark.com).

[ULiX]

What is the correct key?
-webalarmS
or
-webalarm
I started with "-webalarms" key, and any messages on my web server is not received.

[a white guy]

Originally posted by ULiX:

What is the correct key?
-webalarmS
or
-webalarm
I started with "-webalarms" key, and any messages on my web server is not received.

as the dev hasnt replied to your post and its been quite a long time i thought i might chime in on this. i have not tested to verify this but i do know the ark server manager adds the variable -webalarm (with no s) to the command line if that means anything.

so either the dev posted erroneous info in this post and never updated/corrected it or the ark server manager program is missing the s in their code. if someone can be kind enough to confirm this information on their working server it would benefit any admin that looks at this post.

[Zapek88]

IP 54.38.44.102: 8490
https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/ark/2796517