If there is going to be a Private Login Server option for what are currently considered Public servers, IMO, it shouldn't rely on anything other than itself to work. A centralized status list would be nice as an option, but shouldn't be required IMO.
If possible (and I am sure it is), there should be a way for players to log into their current Public accounts and set a password while in game through the Public Login Server that will let them use that same password to authenticate to that same account from the Private server. Preferably, people should set a different password than what their public password is, but just in case they don't, the passwords should be saved to the database as MD5 if possible. It also might be good if admins had a way to set a temporary password for accounts. Then, if the LS is down and someone needs access to one of their accounts, but hasn't set a password yet, if the admin trusts that they do actually own the account, they could set a password for them. And, after they log in with the password the admin set for them, they could change the password again.
Then, when someone tries to connect to a server through the private LS connection, they would just use the password they set and still be able to access their characters from their Public account. The only issue with a system like this would be creating new accounts while the Public LS is down, but that isn't too much of an issue.
It would also be great if all servers had the option to be connected to both the Public LS and the Backup Private one at the same time so their players could use either, or easily switch to the backup if the public was down.
Actually, after checking the source, there is already a command called #setpass, which would let admins set their own password. It would just need to be modified so that players can use it as well, but only for setting their own passwords (not everyone's password like the command is set to do currently).
If a statistics webpage was set as an option, it would be really nice to have a decent customizable config in it. The config could include an optional webpage/forums link that link directly to the server's website/forums from the status page. Also, it would be good to have a setting for entering the host name of the server. And, that too would have a link from the status page that could generate exactly what to change your host.txt file to to use that particular server. I am sure someone could even write a simple batch file that would let people pick which server they wanted to connect to and it would simply automatically change their host file for them. It also might be nice if there was a way to add a brief description of the server to the status page (maybe from a mouse-over or something) that would be limited to 250 chars or so. That description could also be saved in the config file as an option. I am sure other features could be added to make a really cool status page, but those are just a few I can think of off the top of my head that would be really useful.
Now, for registering accounts through the Private LS and not have it conflict with the Public one, that would be a bit more complex, but I am sure it could be done. One way would be to have a separate table for private-only accounts that would append some sort of prefix or suffix to the account name when used so that it doesn't get confused with Public ones. Either that, or just make it so that Privately registered accounts automatically append something to the name that is highly unlikely to conflict with any public accounts. Or, just require that people using private-only accounts append something themselves for the account to work. So, if you wanted to make a private account named "cleric1", you would actually create an account named "pls-cleric1", where the "pls-" stands for "Private Login Server".
It would probably be a fair amount of work to get all of that working perfectly, but that is the best solution I can think of to make sure that the Login Server is never an issue on the emu ever again.
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