Spectre

Try changing it to: setcookie("auth","1",time()+3600,"/",".trap17.com");As Chameleon more or less suggested. Although you could leave it as it is, you should probably change the domain name to whatever your domain name (or Xisto subdomain) is. saga, that has already been mentioned by Chameleon, although both suggestions were incorrect. It should be: if(!isset($_POST['username']) || !isset($_POST['password'])) {The posted values are going to be strings, not boolean values. So checking if they equal 'false' or not will do little to help.

Don't be impatient. Don't be pushy. Don't try and manipulate or 'force' anyone into modifying your reputation. I don't want to be cruel, but you were almost certainly warned for a good reason - i.e. you deserved it. So kindly don't waste everyones time by complaining about it.Just stick to the rules, be a generally good member to the best of your ability, and your warning level will be decreased when it is considered to have been in place for a fair amount of time.

Also look at Xisto's record. It has been around for over a year and a half, with very few problems (certainly none that are uncommon amongst long-standing hosting providers). Whilst CDNHost may offer what seem like fantastic packages, they have only been around for a very short time. Although I could turn out to be wrong, I think they are going to realize what it takes to keep a quality free host running, and most likely shutdown without warning. A quick glance shows no ads on their site, and they presumedly don't put ads on peoples accounts - the chances of them continuing to put up funding for a service which is going to cost them a great deal of money if they give away such packages for free isn't all that likely. Apart from the use of Yahoo!/Hotmail email addresses (which I agree as being unprofessional), take a look at the quick profile the owner has placed there: Now, I mean no offense to anyone of or under that age - I'm only 18 myself - but young people tend to have unrealistic views on things, and not foresee problems that someone with a little more experience might. Such as money, for example. Most 16 year olds are in school, and if they aren't, then they almost definately don't have a high-paying job. Unless they are severly overselling (which is entirely possible - even likely), providng such resources is going to cost whoever is paying for it a great deal. Granted, it could be the kids parents or friends pooling money to help him run it, but I have high doubts as to how long it is going to last. It also seems as though the kid is trying to bignote himself, which is fine, but shows lack of maturity and reveals him as just being a typical 16 year old. I don't want to put anyone off CDNHost and their free service, but I would be cautious of free web hosts offering packages that do seem too good to be true - because they usually are. Personally, I would much rather have 250MB that was available at all times than 3GB which disappeared after a couple of months.

Just for the record, cookies are very, very easy to forge. All someone would need to do is alter a HTTP request to set the cookie element 'auth' to '1', and they would be considered an authorized user. What I would recommend is generating unique session IDs for each user and storing them in a database, so you can actually check that each user is authorised to view that particular part of your site. And you should never, ever directly pass unsanitized user-entered data to a MySQL query, as this is also very easy for the user to manipulate.Also, 3,600 seconds is one hour, not six. Unix timestamps are in seconds (the number of seconds passed since the first second of the first hour of the first day of 1970 - ie. 00:00:00 01/01/70 - to be more specific), and the time() function returns such a timestamp - so adding any number to it is adding it in seconds. Other than that, Chameleon is on the right track. A cookie cannot be given an infinate life (although it can be marked as not expiring for many years, which is close enough to forever), so setting it to '0' will cause it to expire the second it is set. I also hope you aren't literally using "yourdomain.com" as the domain which has access to the cookie.

I'm reasonably good with PHP. I do some freelance professional coding here and there. I'm happy to help out with any further problems.

The DocumentRoot directory is where all public content is served from. On a correctly configured, secure and reliable server (such as Apache), it is impossible to access anything at or above the level of that directory. Referencing '/public_html/file' for client-side usage will result in the sever attempting to serve '/your/home/path/public_html/public_html/file', if that makes sense. When using server-side languages, however - such as PHP - you have to remember that the paths are relative to the server, not the DocumentRoot directory, so '/file' is literally '/file' in the root directory of the current hard disk. When internally referencing other files within a script (such as via PHP's include() or require() functions), you should always prefix it with $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] so as to ensure the correct file is being accessed.

*Sigh. Thanks to gullible people, vast numbers of networks have been shut down due to the forwarding hoax emails causing traffic to block up. No offense intended - it's in our nature to be optimistic, and wanting to believe what people say comes with that. Falling for 'pranks', 'hoaxes', etc. happens to the best of us. But there is no way this is going to happen. Neither Microsoft nor AOL (or joint efforts) can track every email on the Internet. Whilst in theory, AOL would be able to track emails sent through their servers (and knowing their privacy practices - or rather, the lack there of - they may well), it is not possible for anyone one company to track every email floating around the Internet. If - and only if - one single body had an undisputed monopoly on mail servers with literally no other competition, then it might be possible. But as email passes through any given number of servers to reach its destination, it's impossible to track it unless it passes through a server operated by the tracker. I would advise that you simply delete any emails that urge you to forward them on to others. If they are genuine, then they don't need to try and convince you to send them to other people. There are millions of 'chain' letters floating around - both in electronic and physical form - and they are usually started by someone who has little else to do and would like to see how far their hoax can spread. Any message following the line of 'Forward this to all your friends / x amount of people / everyone and something good will happen to you' are almost definately rubbish, and should be ignored. Helping them propagate is just helping the idiot who started it. And now, onto the logic. Just pretend that part of the email was true, and Microsoft and AOL had teamed up to pay you money just because they have it (and, let's face it, they are known for their generosity and tendancies to throw all their money at people). Microsoft is obviously nothing short of an empire, and the Time/Warner/AOL group follows pretty closely. Being such enourmous and wealthy corporations, don't you think they would have ways of publicizing their events other than sending unsolicited email to random people, promising them that riches will follow if they help 'spread the word'?

I don't think that's what he's asking. You will have trouble getting a free generic top level domain name (such as .com/.net/.org/.info), but there are plenty of free redirection services, of which you seem aware. You can also pick up a free .be domain name until the start of 2006. You can add new top-level domains to your account whenever you like, either parking them to work with your existing site or adding them on as new websites, provided you don't exceed your account's limits. You can also change the main domain here if you want.

Oook then...Windows NT and 2000 were not designed for gaming. They were not even designed for home computers. They are both more 'professional' operating systems, pitched towards the developer/administrator/etc for network or corporate use. Whilst people certainly use both at home, that's not really the area that Microsoft was targeting - Windows 95/98/ME/XP were aimed at the home user.All of the Windows NT family is built on the same technology base (Windows NT/2000/XP/2003). The NT-based system has always been more secure and stable than their DOS/95-based counterparts - whilst certainly not flawless or without many a bug and error, they are far superior to the other Windows versions in terms of stability and security, as anyone who has ever used them will tell you.And if anyone replies with 'micro$oft blowz lol', I will have to kill them (not so much because I disagree, but because it's old and annoying, not to mention most often hypocritical and under no circumstances 'cool').

Nice score. Three character domains are definately worth picking up where possible, especially if it's an actual word of sorts. I don't know about the .tc ccTLD, but as you are probably aware, three letter .com domains sell for a small fortune - upwards of $5,000. So it would be worth hanging on to.

Google recently started lowering the rankings of pages (or just not ranking them at all in the first place) which suddenly have a very large number of inbound links. The idea was, amongst other things, so that sites which offer paid placement links cannot increase the rankings of other sites, as paid links are usually added all over the website in question. So don't go and get heaps and heaps of IBLs to your sight too quickly - a few won't hurt, but too many in a short time will. It's better to build them slowly and surely, and if you provide genuinely good quality content, you will get many natural one-way links, which are worth far more than the reciprocal type. Also, automated search engine submission methods probably aren't a good idea. I don't know for a fact if any search engines actually penalize sites for using them or not, but there is evidence to suggest that some of the larger ones do - so for engines such as Google, it is definately worth taking the extra 15 seconds to submit it manually. And yes, they do know (Google not-so-recently implemented a randomly selected image which acts as a turing key, to tell the difference between automated submissions and manual). As for the hundreds of small search engines floating around, they aren't going to play a major role in your sites traffic, so using automated submission methods for them wouldn't do any harm - even if they do reject the submission, it isn't going to hurt a great deal.

I would just like to point out the TOS: The design itself isn't bad, but you better translate it to English. It doesn't appear to contain anything illegal, but as I don't speak the language it's in, I don't know - and neither would most of the Xisto staff.

You have to be very careful regarding what you store on the servers if you are going to be operating a site which some may view as 'questionable'. I'm not on expert on console modifications or the legalities surrounding them or anything, but remember to be very careful what you upload, and only do so if you are absolutely certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is legal. I would recommend taking a look at some of the existing, larger Xbox modification related sites which have been around for a while - those which are operating legally and haven't been forced to close down (that's not saying that all those which are still around are legal) may be a guide to go by.

You can register up to 10 free .be domains, afterwhich they will charge you at a reduced rate. The .be ccTLD is a 'real domain name' - it's not a redirection service or anything. It's identical to a gTLD, such as .com or .net. You get ownership of the domain name, and full configuration control, as you would with any other domain at any other registrar. They cannot force banners or anything else on to it. Just to set the records straight.

Oh, also note that this is only available to US, Canadian, and European residents.

Hmm, nice spot, Mike83. I'm sure there are a few Xisto members who are looking to get a top level domain name but are unable to who will appreciate it.

Interesting. He states in the FAQ that it only operates on the first and last letters of your name and somehow works out the 'Elvish' name based on that (not being a huge fan of LOTR - I do enjoy the books and films, but I'm fanatical about little - I don't really know/care about all that is Elvish). So whereas the rest of us sit around Googling our own names in our spare time, Google employees sit around creating name generators in theirs.

Mass-collected information whish is aggregated for statistical purposes and presented to the public is not in violation of ethical responsibilities regarding privacy, as it is not personally identifiable. A site may reveal that 40% of their visitors use, for example, Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6.0; but that could be any 40% of their visitors, and as long as they are not linked to an IP address or other identifiable information, it is completely anonymous (there are exceptions, of course). It is advisable to note such practices in your privacy policy, but unless the policy explicitly states that you will not make available such information, then it is generally fine to do so. Regarding Google's privacy policy: And from their privacy FAQ: As such, for them to make such information as browser and OS usage available to the public would be perfectly acceptable. They obviously have other reasons for not doing so (or maybe they do provide it publicly somewhere that you and I just don't know about yet).

The Hosts file redirects traffic based on either IP addresses or canonical names. This thread is very old - despite being a sticky, you might consider asking questions in new threads.

No, you can not, nor have you ever been able to. However, you may be able to arrange with someone to exchange points for a domain name or something - some people may have one or more unused domain names they are willing to trade for hosting credits.

That's pretty much the way AdSense and similar advertising programs work. But often, the advertiser has to seek out the demographic they wish to target by purchasing advertising on related websites (or the publisher can contact an advertiser who is offering something that would appeal to the publishers visitors). For example, on GameSpot, you often see a lot of gaming-related advertisements, because most of the people who visit GameSpot are interested in video games and are more likely to click through. This isn't targeting done through any automated ad selection processes, but rather well-planned campaigns that are likely to pay off for all parties concerned (the adveriser, because they will probably receive many hits from the ad, and then sales or leads etc, and the publisher, because they receive payment for it).

Ah ok. Don't let what I say put anyone off anyway - I was pretty tired when I posted the above. I don't really like 'crews' and whatever, but if other people want to participate in them, that's obviously fine.

I don't think so. Considering the money the company has, and the software developers that work for them, I'm sure they will come up with some fraud detection method.Of course this is a marketing ploy to try and get users to 'convert' from Google or Yahoo! to MSN. It's this little thing called 'competition', and Microsoft seems to be looking at turning up the heat a little bit. Biases aside, if MSN can outdo Google, then I would use it. At the moment, it's not nearly as good - but if they are serious about overtaking the search engine giant and actually succeed, then people aren't going to have a problem switching. The paid search part would just be an incentive.

Ugh. Ok, I'm aware you requested only to post applications for the 'GFX crew', which I would like to make clear this is not.But do we have to have 'crews' at Xisto? So many lower-quality forums create all sorts of member 'classes' - graphics, coding, modding, 'crews' for everything. And to be quite frank, it is stupid and annoying, and severly degrades the overall community - regardless of whether some members enjoy it. At present, there are standard members, hosted members, moderators, and admins - and that is, in my opinion, the way it should remain.

You can set up your own email accounts to be whateveryouwant@yourdomain.com (or @yoursubdomain.trap17.com). You can create as many as you need, and mail.yourdomain.com will resolve to Xisto's mail server (POP and SMTP).