JoomSlot, a slot lobby you could bolt onto a Joomla 3 site

Sixteen slot tiles in a four-column grid, blue captions under each one: Age of Egypt, Age of Privateers, Alchemists Secret, Amazing Fruits, all the way down to Aztec Gold Megaways and a white lion with Chinese characters. That lobby was the whole pitch of JoomSlot. Install one component on a Joomla 3 site and your visitors got a page of slot games without leaving it.

JoomSlot is retired. The component (version 1.0, built between August and October 2021) no longer works anywhere I know of: downloads, API keys, agent and affiliate sign-ups, member accounts and the shop are gone, and the demo site now reports a game-server problem. This page and the guides linked from it are an archive of the old manual, kept so people who find the name somewhere know what it was.

How it actually worked

The component was only the front end. The games themselves ran on a remote game server, and your Joomla site talked to it with an API key that joomslot.com issued after you filled in a short form with your site URL and server IP. No key, no games. That's also why the zip is useless today: there's no server on the other end.

Visitors who weren't logged in could still play. They were given a temporary game ID with 1,000 demo points. Registered members could buy "game points" (the manual also calls them credits) in Bitcoin through a BTCPay store, and ask for withdrawals to a Bitcoin address. Those withdrawals were paid by the webmaster, by hand. The default 2021 rate was 1 BTC to 100,000 credits.

The old home page split the features into two groups. The basic ones: guest play, a lobby that updated from the game server, and a small back end. Then a list of optional "agent features" for webmasters who wanted to sell points:

• player management, with a manual "add game point" button
• purchase, withdrawal and balance records
• daily and per-request withdrawal limits
• game stats and pay stats per player
• a jackpot module
• a Bitcoin payment plugin (the default gateway)
• an automatic top-up of 5% when a player's balance dropped under 5 points
• "happy hours" that multiplied bonus points by the hour (off by default)

The old page also promised more than 500 games with new ones added every month. I can't check that, and the one lobby screenshot shows sixteen.

The manual, one page at a time

If you're here for the webmaster side, the guides follow the order you'd have done things in:

1. Download JoomSlot: what was in the package and why it needed a login and an API key.
2. Installing the component: uploading it through the Joomla extension manager and entering the game server URL and key.
3. The Kickstart setup guide: the all-in-one package with Joomla 3.10.01 and Akeeba Kickstart, plus the VPS, MySQL and web server steps.
4. The backend screens: dashboard totals, players, orders, withdrawals and the stats pages.
5. The BTCPay payment plugin: store, wallet, webhook and API key.
6. The frontend: what a player saw, from the menu to the purchase and withdrawal histories.
7. The agent scheme: bulk credit at a discount for resale, and the terms that came with it.

The same site also gave away a small crypto price module that showed CoinGecko prices. Both extensions are listed on the products page.

The part the old page left out

Selling game credit and paying out winnings from your own website is running an online casino. Without a gaming licence that's illegal in Malaysia and in most other countries, and a Joomla extension doesn't change it. The agent and affiliate schemes (the affiliate one paid 15% in BTC with a 30-day cookie) were built on the same idea, and both are closed.

If you only came for the slot games, JoomSlot can't give you those any more. You'd have to get a game ID from a platform that's still running, and check it out yourself before you deposit anything. More about this archive is on the about page.

You must be 18 or over to gamble, and online gambling is restricted in Malaysia. Set a limit before you start, not after a losing run. See responsible gaming.