The version update checker has two flaws:

1. Half the time I forget to upload the new version file
2. It's a popup alert and who doesn't dislike popups?
3. It doesn't tell you what's in the new version.

I'd like to kill three birds with one stone and address these (and yes, I realized there was a third while writing this).

The definitive source for updates is at https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/cross-platform-civ3-editor.15288/updates . As a human, you can see the latest version easily - the grey font that currently reads "1.48" by the resource title, and the version at the top of the list of updates. The latter also is the header for a section that includes the description of what's in the update.

Looking through the response, it's old-school HTML, no AJAX calls to load things dynamically, it's all server-side rendered and sent to the client. But the first occurrence of "version" is that header, so a straightforward dumb approach without intelligent HTML parsing would just go down the page and find that and start parsing out what we need.

Or, we could use the built-in HTML reading tools in Java 8, like we do for the no-longer-working unit downloader. They're aimed more at showing pages to users, but I think they would work, and know they have capabilities for modifying the page. One caveat is that I know Nashorn (the JavaScript engine) was removed in future versions of Java, and am not sure if the HTML improvements in general were.

Or, we could use the JSoup library, my preferred HTML-slicing-and-dicing library in Java, to slice and dice the response. It looks like we just need to search for the class "js-resourceUpdate" and grab the first one and go from there. JSoup is reliable; the main downside would be bloating the download by 441 KB. Which is probably even less important today than it was 15 years ago, and we've long since given up on fitting everything on one floppy disk.

But whichever way we go, we can also parse out the update, and then display the whole shebang in a Startup Widget.

This would be a significant improvement to New Version Alerts, at the cost of checking a 156 KB CFC thread each time rather than a 4 byte text file... that's the bigger network inefficiency than JSoup!