Hercco

I guess I'll better start by explaining by what I mean by these post templates. The idea came to me as one online-friend of mine has a habit of posting all his posts with same colour on a certain forum. We had previously talked how it would be cool if vBulletin (in this case) would have option to save a "post template" which it would automatically load to textarea everytime a new reply or thread is posted. Well as it is not implemented on the server side, why not do it clientside! What you may have not realized is that "bookmark toolbar" or "personal bar" bookmarks (the links usually at the top of your browser window, below location field) can be used quite similarly as links on an html-page. And thus can be used to execulte Javascript. So simply create a new "personal bar" (or whatever, depending on your browser) link and paste one of the following codes into the "location" field. And naturally make your changes before saving it. This is for vBulletin: javascript: window.document.vbform.message.value='[color=Burlywood]'+window.document.vbform.message.value+'[/color]';window.stop(); For phpBB: javascript: window.document.post.message.value='[color=Burlywood]'+window.document.post.message.value+'[/color]';window.stop(); And for Invision: javascript: window.document.REPLIER.Post.value='[color=Burlywood]'+window.document.REPLIER.Post.value+'[/color]';window.stop(); Even if you are not familiar with javascript you can probably understand what these scripts fo. they simply add "" in front and "" after the contents of the message. Naturally you can change the contents anyway you want to make it add any tags and text you want there. For example some ASCII art would be quite neat at the beginning or end of all your posts. For those who do not know JS: you can use '\n' to make line change and '\t' for tabulation. One annoying thing about this is that, if you want to use same template for different forums using different forums software you will have to have separate links for each. One way to get around this could be writing a script that checks which elements exists and adds the template to the one that's real. Hopefully someone will find this useful.

And more importantly, don't use your friends primary email. About the privacy policies... most of the companies that has sold their email address databases had similar privacy policies....

You cannot mask your IP address to the proxy. Proxy has to know your address to work. Anonymizing proxy does what any proxy does, acts as a "middle man" for your traffic to the web, but does not keep logs on its usage making it impossible to trace who was the sender and receiver of the traffic.

If I ever wanted to go anonymous on web I have access to my university's computer club's anonymizing proxy. SSH tunnel there and I am untrackable.

Word. I've been in quite a few webhosts too (Lycos.co.uk, FR&T, as-hosting, anyxhost and now Xisto) and Xisto beats it's competitors all at once, blind folded, left handed and without breaking a sweat.

My opinions on p2p-networkd I have used: Soulseek: You can find lot's of music there that isn't available elsewhere. Suits well for those who listen underground stuff. BitTorrent: Very fast downloads for relatively new files. Edonkey: And emule for SW. Lots of files and older files are easy to find (unlike torrent) Direct Connect: I don't really like it. It's good for large inner networks where outside p2p traffic is blocked. I've downloaded some rpg books here. The hubs often requite ridiculous amount of data to be shared. And clients: Soulseek (slsk), BitTornado(BT), Azareus(BT), eMule(edk) and DC++(dc) all spyware free. Soulseek, BitTornado and Azareus are quite a memory hogs and all are quite equal on CPU usage. Emule tends to use bit more CPU as it is often used to download lots of files at same time (that's where it really excels).

Computer no. 1, "The Joker"CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (Barton)Motherboard: MSI K7N2 DeltaRAM: 2x 256MB Apacer DDR 400 (running at 333Mhz, CL 2) Dual Channel ModeGraphics Card: Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro Atlantis 128MBHard-drives: Samsung SP 160 (7200rpm) % Samsung SP 40 (7200 rpm)Optical drives: Samsung DVD-rom & Samsung CD-RWMonitor: Hitachi CM715 19"OS: Windows 2000 ProfessionalComputer no. 2 "Penquin"CPU: AMD Thlon Thunderbird 1200MHz (266MHz bus)Motherboard: ASUS (don't remember the model...)RAM: 384MB 133MHz Graphics Card: Elsa Gladiac GeForce 3 64MBHard-drive: Samsung SV40 (5400 rpm)Optical drives: Phillips CD-RWMonitor: Samsung Syncmaster (something...) 17"OS: None ATM. Will be Debian GNU/Linux most likely.

I shamefully admit that I have never used a Mac. Strange as it may sound, I believe there is not a single Mac in our university.

The function wouild be something like this: function bbcode($message){ str_replace(array('<b>','</b>','<i>','</i>'),array('[b]','[/b]','[i]','[/i]'),$message); //add other operations you want to do here return $message;} And you would call it like this, assuming that you have the stuff to convert in $msg variable. $msg = bbcode($msg); That would replace the contents of the $msg variable with that created by the function. Quite easy isn't it?

I think it is not allowed to use IRC scripts of any kind here. fsockopen() is probably banned in php settings.

And that would accomplish what? We're DYI guys, we want to write our own scripts

Well it's impossible to "steal" this. If you include that file from Websaints server the code will be treated as it was run on your server and thus will try to look file alle.txt from your server. If you simply request that file it will only add hits to Websaints counter. The referer checking would be pointless in this but I'd like comment it a bit in general. People do not seem to know or just forget that nowadays quite many users disable or block referer sending. In certain browsers it is an option and I believe most of the current commercial software firewalls include an option to block them. Not taking this into account can mean that users that do not want to send referers can't use the service at all. For instance one development version of the WordPress blog software required referer sending to make changing it's options possible. The referer checking was simply just for sending the user back to the page where he came from. Other example is a certain torrent site that refuses to work if not getting referer information. They reason is understandable though: there is apparently countless "mirror" sites that are not actual mirrors but simply index their files and points the user to download the .torrents from the original site.

Yeah, both FTP and email count for your bandwidth usage. It's in the FAQ.

If you got a succesful site configured to the address you likely want to keep the domain for more than a year. And after a year you'll have to start paying for it.

No it is not neccessary. You could have found out the IP address (which apparently happened to be the same as the FTP servers IP) from the domain name by simply querying it with nslookup. For example nslookup ns.yourserver.com

It's not only for password protecting. .htaccess is used for many things like determining which page is loaded on an error (like the everyone's favourite 404 document not found ), limiting and allowing access for certain IP addresses or ranges, etc. etc.

No. PHP and HTML are totally different things. HTML a markup language, PHP a programming language. XML for sure is going to become more popular in the future but it won't replace HTML as such as it is not a designed for the same task. I see that in future documents will be written in XML and and the content will displayed using different technologies, including HTML.

Meta-tags contains meta information. And meta information means information about information. For example typical meta tags are author and document languge

This is very cool. And probably not a bad business either. The space to store a gigabyte for a week shouldn't be a problem so there just the bandwidth for transfer. They get sender and the receiver to watch ads and probably tack some to the emails aswell. And if things start going bad they'll have huge database of addresses to sell

I use PHP regularly. I study information technology in university and have quite a good knowledge on programming and program development.

What language are you going to use to write your scripts?

At the moment I don't have any distribution installed. I'm in a Linuxlessness situation The reason i that my second computer, also known as Penquin (the one I'm using right now is called Joker. And yes I have given names to my computers and i'm only slightly ashemed of it) is still on pieces next to my dining table. Anyways when I get over this lazyness and put the 'Quin (Yes I also shorten my computers' names...) together I will install Debian to it. The reason is the same as Marijnnn's; you get to tailor your installation greatly. I also like the way how Debian is developed. Previously I have had Red Hats and Mandrake installed and both I was very satisfied to both. They are very easy to use and both worked like a charm and I can highly recommend them to everyone.

That indeed is a good website, thanks for the link! :)I read through most of the stuff and they brought up many interesting and helpful points and in future I'm certainly going to pay more attention to promoting my site(s).

In computer world HTML is quite an odd language if you look it from "standardness" point of view. See, usually things follow standards quite closely, and in some areas following and the existance of the standards is crucial. Take telecommunications for example. If there weren't strict standards for protocols and addressing it would all go to hell. If you think about it it'd make sense to have strict standard for HTML. Meaning that if the document isn't well formed the browser would return and error and don't view it. But as the companies behind browser development didn't opt to go this way, we have a web full of standard incomplete websites. As you might expect from the above to paragraphs, I respect W3C and their standards. And when ever I publish something in the web, I first run it through their validators. And you can call be standard-fascist, but my option is that every one should do this and hosting companies like Xisto could very well require it from their users.

May I ask why you'd prefer email over FTP or cpanel uploads?