WP BBS Slots

A turn-based progressive slot machine game for WordPress.

Pull up a stool at the machine. Every player gets a handful of spins a day, a bankroll that carries over for good, and a shot at a progressive jackpot that grows with every pull of the handle until somebody lines up three Jackpots. The Gazette reports the day's play and the Hall of Fame keeps the records.

WP BBS Slots is played entirely in the web browser through ordinary WordPress pages. Players sign in to your WordPress site, choose a player name and play.

Credits have no cash value and depict a game score only. Nothing can be bought, won, sold or redeemed for money or prizes. WP BBS Slots is a score-keeping game, not gambling.

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Not affiliated with anyone

WP BBS Slots takes its inspiration from the mechanical progressive slot machines of old and from the turn-based "door" games of the BBS era, where you dialled in, played your turns for the day and came back tomorrow. It is an entirely new, independently written game:

• Its code, text, rules, pay table and artwork are original to this project.
• It contains no code, text, artwork or sound from any casino game, slot machine, gaming platform or other slot machine software.
• It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any casino, sportsbook, sports organisation, gaming company, slot machine maker, or any other slot machine game or code.

Any product or company names mentioned anywhere are the property of their respective owners.

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Disclaimer: install and run at your own risk

You run this plugin at your own risk. The author accepts no responsibility or liability for any loss, damage or compromise arising from its use.

Every effort has been made to write it safely: every spin is decided on the server, forms and AJAX calls are protected against cross-site request forgery, database queries are prepared, output is escaped, and administrative functions require WordPress administrator rights. Even so, new vulnerabilities appear in software of every kind every day, and no website can be guaranteed secure. This software is provided as is, without warranty of any kind, as set out in the GNU General Public License v2, under which it is released. You cannot hold the author responsible for the consequences of using it.

Before installing it on a site you care about:

• Test it first on a staging or local site rather than a live one.
• Back up your database and files, and keep doing so.
• Keep WordPress, PHP, your theme and every plugin up to date, and serve the site over HTTPS.
• Protect player accounts. The game relies on WordPress for registration, login and passwords, so secure those as you would on any site, for example with an anti-bot plugin on the registration form.
• Read the code. It is open source precisely so you can audit it, and change it, before trusting it.

Found a security problem? Please report it privately by email to sysop@maddogproductions.online rather than opening a public issue. See SECURITY.md.

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How to play

1. Sign in to the WordPress site and open the WP BBS Slots page, which explains the game.
2. Go to Play and choose a player name. It is yours for good; nobody else can take it.
3. New players start with 10,000 credits. Your bankroll is your score.
4. Choose a wager: 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 1,000, 2,500 or 5,000 credits. It stays set from spin to spin until you change it, or until your bankroll can no longer cover it, when it is lowered for you.
5. Pull the handle: click Pull, or press Enter or the space bar.
6. The three reels spin. The first stops after three seconds, the second a second later and the third a second after that, and then any win is added to your score.

The reels

Symbol	How often
🍒 Cherry	often
🍋 Lemon	often
🔔 Bell	moderately
BAR	less often
💎 Diamond	rarely
7 Lucky Seven	very rarely
JACKPOT	extremely rarely

Pay table

Combination	Payout
Jackpot Jackpot Jackpot	the Progressive Jackpot
7 7 7	500x the wager
Diamond Diamond Diamond	250x
BAR BAR BAR	100x
Bell Bell Bell	50x
Cherry Cherry Cherry	25x
Any pair on the first two reels	2x
A Cherry anywhere, with no other win	a free spin

Every payout also earns one bonus spin, and a free spin gives back the spin just used.

Daily play

• Each player gets 10 spins a day (the admin can set 1 to 50). Unused spins do not carry over.
• Missed days catch up: a player who misses whole days receives each missed day's spins, up to 7 days' worth, so at 10 a day the most at once is 70.
• The bankroll carries over permanently.
• Daily top-up: at the start of each day, anyone with less than 10,000 credits is raised to 10,000.
• Daily bailout: if a bankroll drops below 1,000 while spins remain, the house adds a one-time bailout of 10,000 credits so the player can finish the day. Only one a day: spend that too, and you are done until tomorrow's top-up.

The progressive jackpot

The progressive starts at 100,000,000 and every spin by anyone adds 5,000 to it. It is shown in large type at the top of the Play page. Three Jackpots win the whole pot: it is added to the winner's score, announced in the Gazette, entered in the Hall of Fame and the jackpot winners list, and the progressive resets to 100,000,000.

Tips from the regulars

Every spin is random, but successful players often build their bankroll with smaller wagers, raise their bets when credits are plentiful, save the big bets for jackpot runs, log in daily to make the most of their spins, and climb the leaderboards through steady play rather than risking everything on a few spins.

The odds

The reel weights are in WPBBS_Game::SYMBOLS in includes/class-wpbbs-core.php. Every reel uses the same strip. With the shipped weights the machine pays back about 102% of wagers before bonus spins and the progressive, about 27% of spins win something, and three Jackpots come up roughly once in 29,000 spins. Because wins and Cherries hand spins back, a day's 10 spins make about 30 pulls of the handle on average.

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Requirements

• WordPress 7.0 or later
• PHP 8.0 or later
• MySQL 5.7+ / 8.x or MariaDB 10.3+ (the standard WordPress database)

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Installation

1. Install the plugin. Copy the wp-bbs-slots folder into your site's wp-content/plugins/ directory, or zip the folder and upload it under Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
2. Activate it. Activation creates the game's database tables (wp_wpbbs_*), seeds the progressive at 100,000,000 and schedules the daily job.
3. Create the game pages. Go to WP BBS Slots → Dashboard and click Create pages. Choose whether to add the home page to a menu: Don't add it (the default), one of your theme's menu locations, or, on block themes such as Twenty Twenty-Five, Theme header. Only the home page goes in a site menu; players move between the game's pages with its own navigation bar.
4. Let players in. Only signed-in WordPress users can play. Either create accounts yourself or enable Settings → General → Anyone can register (new-user role Subscriber), with an anti-bot plugin on the registration form.
5. Set up cron so the daily top-up happens at midnight. See below.
6. Optional: tune the game under WP BBS Slots → Settings.

Game pages

Page	Slug	Shortcode
WP BBS Slots (home and how to play)	wp-bbs-slots	[wpbs-home]
WP BBS Slots - Play	wp-bbs-slots-play	[wpbs-play]
WP BBS Slots - Gazette	wp-bbs-slots-gazette	[wpbs-gazette]
WP BBS Slots - Hall of Fame	wp-bbs-slots-hall-of-fame	[wpbs-hof]

The home page, Gazette and Hall of Fame are public. Play asks visitors to sign in, and asks a signed-in user without a player name to choose one first. If you create pages by hand, keep these slugs: the plugin finds its pages by slug. Each shortcode also answers to an underscore spelling ([wpbs_gazette], [wpbs_hof] and so on), and the Hall of Fame to [wpb-hof] as well.

Widgets: the Gazette and Hall of Fame in a sidebar

Add a Shortcode block to a sidebar or footer (Appearance → Widgets on classic themes; the Site Editor's template parts on block themes; or a page builder's Shortcode element) and paste one of:

[wpbs-gazette limit=10 compact=1]   the progressive and the top 10 scores
[wpb-hof limit=10 compact=1]        the Hall of Fame records and the top 10 scores

Attribute	Gazette	Hall of Fame
limit	full page: news items (40, up to 200); compact: top scores (10, up to 50)	top scores (20 on the page, 10 compact, up to 100)
compact	1 for the widget: the panel only, no title, navigation or footer	same

The Gazette

The Gazette shows where the progressive stands, who played today (with their spins, winnings and score), the top 20 scores, and the news: new players, big wins (50,000 or more by default), jackpots, new Hall of Fame records, the first player to reach each rank, bailouts and the daily top-up. News is kept for 30 days by default. Its masthead is the WPBBS_GAZETTE_NAME constant in the plugin's main file.

The Hall of Fame

A permanent record of:

• the biggest jackpot won, all time, and every jackpot winner
• the highest single spin win
• the most consecutive wins
• the highest monthly bankroll, all time and for each of the last 12 months
• the first player to reach each rank: Regular (25,000), High Roller (100,000), Card Shark (500,000), Millionaire (1,000,000), Tycoon (10,000,000), Mogul (100,000,000) and BBS Legend (1,000,000,000)

and the top scores.

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Administration

The WP BBS Slots menu in wp-admin (administrators only):

• Dashboard: player and jackpot figures, page status, Create pages (with the optional menu link), widget shortcodes and recent admin activity.
• Settings: spins per day (1 to 50), catch-up days (up to 7), starting bankroll, daily top-up, bailout threshold and amount, starting jackpot and the amount each spin adds, Gazette options, whether new players may join, and Delete all data on uninstall. At the foot is the DANGER SECTION, whose resets cannot be undone and each need a box ticked and a word typed:
  • Reset the progressive jackpot to its starting value without anyone winning it (type RESET).
  • Reset all scores, for a new season: every player keeps their name but goes back to the starting bankroll and spins with their stats cleared; the Hall of Fame, jackpot winners, monthly bests and the progressive are kept (type SCORES).
  • Reset the game to new: every player, score, record, jackpot win, monthly best, news item and the admin log are deleted and the progressive is reseeded. Settings, pages and WordPress accounts are kept (type NEW GAME).
• Players: every player with their score and spins; edit a score or spins left, or delete a player who has left the game or asks for their data to be removed. Their row, monthly history and news are deleted; Hall of Fame entries they held stay as "A former player".
• Maintenance: run the daily job now, see when it last and next runs, a daily job log (one line per day for the last 10 days: when it ran, what started it, what it did, and how many attempts there were), and copy-ready cron commands.

Every admin action posts to admin-post.php with a nonce and a capability check, and is recorded in the admin log shown on the Dashboard. The disclaimer is shown at the foot of every admin screen.

Scheduled maintenance (cron)

One job runs daily at midnight in the site's timezone (Settings → General → Timezone): every player is given the day's spins, every bankroll under 10,000 is topped up to 10,000, and old news is purged. If you change the site's timezone, the job moves to the new midnight by itself. Players are also given their spins and topped up the first time they visit on a new day, so the game works even if cron never runs; cron makes the new day show on the scores and the Players screen at midnight.

WP-Cron only runs when someone visits the site. For a live game add a real cron job in your hosting control panel. The recommended job runs every 5 minutes and triggers all of WordPress's scheduled tasks:

curl -s "https://example.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron" > /dev/null 2>&1

Or run the game's job directly, once a day at your site's midnight (cron uses the server's clock, often UTC):

php /path/to/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wp-bbs-slots/maintenance/daily_maintenance.php

Running both is safe: the job takes a database lock and refuses to run twice on the same day. The Maintenance screen prints these commands with your site's real URL and paths filled in.

Updating and uninstalling

• Updating: replace the plugin folder with the new version. Database changes are applied automatically on the next page load.
• Deactivating stops the scheduled job but keeps all game data.
• Deleting the plugin from the Plugins screen removes the scheduled job. It removes the game's tables and settings only if Delete all data is ticked under Settings; otherwise the data stays for a later reinstall. The game pages are ordinary pages for you to remove.

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License

Copyright (C) 2026 Bill Mantz, https://maddogproductions.online/

WP BBS Slots is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (GPLv2+), the same license as WordPress itself. The full text is in LICENSE.

You are free to use, modify and redistribute it, including commercially, provided derivative works are distributed under the same license and keep the copyright notice. It comes with no warranty: as the license says, it is provided "as is", and the entire risk as to its quality and performance is with you.

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Code layout

wp-bbs-slots.php              plugin bootstrap and hooks
uninstall.php                 removes the cron job, and the data if "Delete all data" is ticked
SECURITY.md                   how to report a vulnerability, and how input is handled
sql/install.sql               database schema (applied with dbDelta and the site's table prefix)
includes/class-wpbbs-core.php settings, table names, logging, symbols, wagers, ranks
includes/services/            players, the machine (spins, payouts, jackpot, bailout),
                              Hall of Fame records, daily maintenance
includes/frontend/            shortcodes, form and AJAX handlers, UI helpers, page views
admin/                        wp-admin screens
assets/                       stylesheet and the reel-spinning JavaScript
maintenance/                  optional CLI script for a system cron

Database tables

All tables use the site's table prefix (shown as wp_).

Table	Contents
wp_wpbbs_players	one row per player: WordPress user, player name, bankroll, spins, dates of the last top-up and bailout, last wager, today's play and lifetime stats
wp_wpbbs_state	the progressive jackpot
wp_wpbbs_jackpots	every jackpot won
wp_wpbbs_records	Hall of Fame records: highest spin, longest streak, first to each rank
wp_wpbbs_monthly	each player's highest bankroll for each month
wp_wpbbs_news	the Gazette
wp_wpbbs_admin_log	admin audit log

Options: wpbbs_settings, wpbbs_db_version, wpbbs_page_ids, wpbbs_nav_post_id, wpbbs_last_daily, wpbbs_daily_log.