Back in the day...4, 5 even 6 years ago, I made a handful of VB programs for the game. For example, the VB Entity Database and Planet Database. With the significantly more advanced website we have, they are practically obsolete, but I came up with something recently that I wanted to run by the Admins.
I'm sure its perfectly legitimate, but you know me, I don't want to run the risk of getting myself banned.
To cut straight to the point, I've written a program that grabs the ID, name and controller of any number of planets in the SWC galaxy, displaying them in a nice little list box. Hidden systems it can't read.
It works be grabbing the source code of any webpage (in this case, a planet page from the Galaxy Map) and I then use simple string manipulation (InStr, Mid and Len) to pull out the data I want.
Now, I'm not grabbing information that is not readily available, the VB program simply works faster and more efficiently than I do.
From a character standpoint, it gives me quick access to data about the entire galaxy.
From a member/contributor standpoint, I've already found some interesting things that while extremely minor, may be beneficial to fix.
For example, Edit, nevermind, could have been the result of a glitch I have since fixed in the program. I no longer see the issue.
Actually, if WebServices were fully operational, this would be possible through those (I have an almost complete copy of the visible systems in my own database, plus a few hidden ones I had to add manually).