The internet is swithing to a new address protocal called IPv6.
Overview:
http://www.stltoday.com/news/science/tech/article_f51af2c2-38b1-11e0-bdd1-0017a4a78c22.html
Details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6
Does anyone have any ideas on how this might affect SWBF, if at all?
For the most part, IPv6 will not affect SWBF. By the time IPv4 (the current tech) is completely phased out, SWBF should be long gone and dead.
The IPv6 infrastructure is not yet really developed enough yet to support any large-scale use, seeing as there is pretty much one spearheading ISP (Hurricane Electric) and not many residential US ISPs have implemented any form of IPv6 in their core network backbones. While it's certainly possible to use it as of now, there is very little to see on the IPv6 internet.
If you do have an IPv6 server and want to join it, SWBF will not support it because of how radically different IPv6 addresses are from the current ones. So essentially, once everyone drops IPv4 in maybe five to ten years, SWBF will die for good without a patch. The same goes for a large amount of games currently on the market, as well as a good amount of general software products.
Sure, SWBF might be dead in five years, but its stuck around for this long...whos to say that it wont die? I can see it becoming like the next pong or something.