Arbitrary

While I agree that a lot of the player interaction is gone with the recent updates and that donating things to friends is now a pain, I disagree with the idea that if you die, you'll lose all your stuff. Just have your friend stay close to your grave stone and repair it once it becomes damaged. A single repair gives you five minutes extra time to get there and pick up your stuff. It's really not that different in terms of chances of losing all your items; you can still save them with a friend around. Also, where is this data that they lost 40% of their client base? Just curious... :-) On the other hand, the unbalanced trade issue, is, IMO, quite annoying. Obviously the update was meant to help curb the real world trading and scamming that was rampant, and though the amount of RWT has probably gone down due to it, it still causes a lot more problems than it solves. First of all, it really kills the idea of legitimate players trading. Secondly, free market is essentially dead, which is a huge problem. If player A had an object that he desperately needed to sell, he might be willing to sell it at any price, even if it were 3000 coins lower than the grand exchange market price. Likewise, if someone wanted to purchase something desperately, they might be willing to spend more than 3000 coins higher than the market price. With the new trade limit of 3000 coins unbalanced, it becomes impossible for prices to properly reflect demand. Moreover, not all Grand Exchange prices are accurate, so by forcing players into constraints around the wrong prices, Jagex makes it more annoying for players who have played before to buy or sell objects whose prices they know are wrong. For instance, if a player had bought a rune scimitar before the implementation of the Grand Exchange and afterwards, the scimitar's price took a huge dip, they may be unwilling to sell their scimitar at only 5% deviation off the market price--the loss is simply too big. Thirdly, some people are charitable towards their friends (and maybe even family) on Runescape, and putting the trade limit there simply discourages people from helping each other. That's quite annoying. There are times in the game where I want to purchase a couple of rune weapons for my little brother only to realize it was impossible to help him. Also, unrelated to the update, I say the prices of certain objects in Runescape are simply pathetic and insane. It's quite sad to see people valuing a party hat, of all things at 750 million gold pieces. I mean, come on, at least buy things that have practical value instead of wasting your time on something that's nothing more than just for show. The sadder thing of course, is that Jagex will have a hard time getting rid of these items (or making them non tradeable) since the players who have spent so much time saving up to 750 million gold and then bought the hat only to find it worthless will become really angry. After all, 750 million is no chump of cheap change... On another note though, I say that Runescape as a model of a government-controled market is quite interesting... Now something addressing the bots: I always thought Jagex should've thought through this one a little more--one of the reasons many people use macros to do certain tasks for them is, obviously because those tasks are highly boring. No user would be stupid enough to get macro to perform a quest since those are relatively engaging and interesting. A game's fun factor goes down quite a bit when it employs constant repetition to get people to stay in the game. Runescape would be much more interesting if Jagex allowed these tasks to be automated so that a player could set their character to do something and leave them to do that for some period of time (say 4 hours), and then come back 4 hours later to pick up the results. Jagex doesn't seem to realize that people would never bother using macros if the game were designed in a way that engaged their mind fully during all hours of gameplay. The way it's currently designed, a large chunk of the time is spent doing repetitive actions like a robot--and being programmers, shouldn't they know that all repetitive tasks deserve to be automated? :-D

If anyone does actually play Runescape, then they might be interested in something I wrote up a while back while playing it.Runescape Times---------------------I didn't originally intend this to go public, but yesterday evening I found a stash of Runescape time records in Opera Notes. I decided that they could be quite useful if anyone was interested in the fastest way to make money on Runescape. The way I'd left it in Notes was unorganized (and had no conclusion!), so I went ahead and edited things a bit to make it cleaner.I went ahead and timed a number of tasks that supposedly brought in money. Note that many of the Grand Exchange prices on these items will be outdated due to market fluctuations, so check before you balk at the net profits (Kebab prices are crazy, for instance. Why they don't go down is beyond me...).From what I've noticed, the rune collection area in Dark Warrior's Castle (wilderness) is both the best place to train magic and make money. I trained magic with fire bolt spells only (as it is the fastest way to do so), and ended up with numerous runes for sale. A thousand or so of any rune can fetch somewhere from 9K to 10K worth. So a trip to the Dark Warrior's Castle can bring back at least (>9000)*(7 total types-1 fire-1 chaos) = a profit greater than 45000 coins. Now obviously, if you don't cast fire bolt, you'll bring back a lot of chaos runes which sell quickly at hefty prices. So, YMMV.----Buying Kebabs in Al-Kharid (full inventory or 28 kebabs)----Trial Time in (min) (sec)-------------------------------------------------- 1 3:00 180 2 2:37 157 3 2:46 166--------------------------------------------------Average: 2:48 167.67Bought for: 1 coinGE price: 46 coinsNet profit: 45 coins.Notes: I quit due to sporadic demand and slow selling.----Buying Pizza Bases in the Wilderness ----Bought for: 4 coinsGE price: 53 coinsNet profit: 49 coinsQuite profitable, but quite dangerous too. Revenants are everywhere.----Getting Anti-dragon shields in Lumbridge Castle----Time it takes to get the dragon shields:Trial # of shields Time in (sec) (min) Time per Shield (s)-------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 18 167 2:47 9.28 2 25 210 3:30 8.40 3 22 175 2:55 7.95 4 22 175 2:55 7.95 5 22 185 3:05 8.41-------------------------------------------------------------------- Average: 8.398Time it takes to deposit in bank:Trial Time (s) Round Trip (s)------------------------------------- 1 22 44 2 21 42 3 18 36 4 20 40 5 21 42-------------------------------------Average: 20.4 40.8So, to make g amount of gold, it takes (g/233)*8.395 seconds or (g/233)*8.395/60 minutes. Gold per second: 27.7447 coins/secNote: The above does NOT take into account the amount of time spent going to and from the bank, as the amount of shields I get per round varied. I should probably do a retrial with a constant number of shields, but I'm far too lazy.GE price = net profit = 233 coins (lowest price)In conclusion: Why do people buy these things?!This so far is incomplete...I might edit this as I experiment. (Highly unlikely though, given my current opinion of the game.)

Well, first of all, they're all really the same logo; they just have different color schemes. Which color scheme you use probably depends on where the logo is going to be placed. Is this going to be used on a website? Then the colors should fit with the scheme of the site, so I can't really say which one is best. If it's a standalone-type thing, then I'd say three and five are nice. I can imagine four fitting pretty well if the logo were big, but as acettea7 said, big logos usually don't scale well, and scalability is obviously important. If the logo is being used in a website, then six and seven seem like nice choices, depending on the color scheme of the site. Obviously six and seven don't work well as standalones, since there's a colored-in background.

GIMP is definitely a great alternative to Photoshop, though I have to say if you are switching from Photoshop and are used to Photoshop, making the switch can take some time. A lot of the locations of buttons in GIMP are quite different from Photoshop. (Personally, I don't really like their icon set...some of the icons, such as the one from "cropping" are really unintuitive. Then again, it took me quite some time to find the cropping icon in Photoshop without a manual, so I can't really say Adobe's is better...)The GIMP, IMO, covers most of the things your average user would need. Most people don't need all the flashy things that Photoshop has to offer, and only really use GIMP's subset of Photoshop's features, such as layers, replacing backgrounds, lighten, darken, etc---basically things that pertain to image editing for amusement. The difference between the GIMP and Photoshop lies in their support for print design. Photoshop supports CMYK, which is very important for anyone designing for print. The GIMP, unfortunately, does not. (I do wonder why...)Anyways, if anyone is annoyed at the GIMP's ui, they can always download Gimpshop (https://www.gimpshop.com/), which changes the ui to feel similar to that of Photoshop's.--arbitrary

Well, not exactly...their logo was quite a bit different back in 1998. I have to say it was uglier, and the new logo looks spiffier. Anyways, I agree with many of the posts above that Google doesn't really need to change their basic layout. Perhaps a few tweaks here and there (such as when they moved their Web, Image etc bar up to the top of the page instead of underneath their logo), but any major changes are mostly not needed. Their users are fine with their layout---it is nice and simple after all, so there's no need to change it. That's not, of course, to say that just because something's working we shouldn't change it, it's just that in this case, it's working really well and changing will probably cause a ruckus. iGoogle is interesting, but personally I've never taken a liking to it. This is mainly because iGoogle is horribly slow, and I prefer Google loading quickly than anything else. Well, apparently a representative from Google mentioned that they were not creating their own OS; it was just a rumor. The rumor started because they had modified Ubuntu for their use, which is nicknamed "Goobuntu" and because of this, many people assumed that Google would make its own OS. Goobuntu's just for internal use only. As for the cellphone, I have no idea. ;-)

Yes, I know it doesn't have to happen by word of mouth, but it very often does. I am not imagining anything--I've had plenty of religious people stop me and give a speech about how I ought to join their religion because their religion has done X, Y and Z for them. Of course you don't force someone to accept a religion, but the fact remains that the spreaders are taking up other people's time, and oftentimes don't leave when asked. The point is, Islam as a whole may not force anyone to accept it, but there are certain people who do. It's these people who are the problems, not the normal religious folk. I've had many instances where the messenger chooses to continue to "spread their message" despite the fact that I've already told them I'm not interested. It's this kind of aggressive advertising that turns many people off. In general, I'm fine with non-obtrusive advertising, such as those in books and on the internet. Haha, to take this on a lighter note, I always liked to pretend that they were just too smart for their own good and knew how to manipulate other people and give excuses by believing in something crazy. Hmmm, I don't know if you're completely right here. According to this link: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/, suicide in defense of Islam is tolerated, so these people could very well believe that their actions are justified as they are defending Islam. I also wanted to add that what the religion approves and disapproves does not necessarily reflect the beliefs of those who use religion to justify their actions. It's like what Gandhi said: "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." Islam as a religion may preach good things, but many so-called believers of Islam twist the religion and use it to justify whatever they wish to do. I think, though, that we're really talking about the same point--we're talking about a person who has twisted Islam to suit their needs and has, in reality, abandoned Islam, just like those "Christians" that Gandhi mentioned. This may as well be one of the reasons religion seems to be losing its foothold on America--the Christian right has finally realized that they've accomplished something horribly hypocritical.

See, this is part of where the conflict lies. A lot of non-Muslims are, frankly, not interested in getting other religions shoved down their throats. They are not interested in listening, and have a right to politely tell that person to leave. If they do it impolitely, then it's an obvious lack of etiquette, but if they do it politely and the person does not leave, then I would say it's a lack of etiquette on the part of the religion-spreader. This is obviously all a matter of perspective, but I would say a small amount of courtesy on either side would go a long way. Ummm, I'm inclined to say I didn't get what you were saying, because the two parts of this paragraph seem to be talking about very different people. In the first part, you seem to be saying that some people believe that religion is what brings about morals, and without a religious upbringing, a person cannot have morals. Then, you say that these same people are the people who believe that religion is the cause of holy wars. This does not compute since one person is condemning religion while the other is a proponent of religion. :-) The last statement that if there were no religion, then there would be no holy wars is actually quite accurate. A holy war is entirely based on religion, so obviously if there were no religion, there'd be no holy wars. Religion doesn't necessarily create suicide bombers, but it does give the bombers an excuse--they can think to themselves that they are doing their deeds to serve a greater good, and use religion to justify that. (Even if the religion doesn't justify it...) This, I think, goes for any type of fundamentalism, not just religious. After all, we've all heard of stories of environmentalists who were crazy enough to stage violent protests, and they too, were fundamentalists---it just happened to be about the environment. EDIT, from the OP: For this matter, I think it's because many religious folk who claim to follow whatever their religion teaches do not actually follow through with actions. Actually, Gandhi said it better than I ever could, "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ." Interestingly enough, there is also a group called Atheists for Jesus (link: http://www.atheists-for-jesus.com/) who support Jesus' moral ideologies, but not God. To add on to this, I would say that the lack of tolerance in general seems to be rampant. Look at all the folks out there who are intolerant of gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, who are anti-semitic, anti-American, anti-everything-that-is-different-from-me. This tolerance issue really doesn't only apply to religion, it applies everywhere, and personally, I think there is little that can be done about it. People will continue being intolerant either because they've been raised that way or they've been exposed to some negative aspect of a particular group. So, if when you were young you were attacked by a group of crazies with green skin, you would probably discriminate against all those with green skin. That's a natural reaction, and even if it's not a helpful one, it will continue to happen. Besides, I highly doubt nature selects for "tolerance" genes, if such a gene even exists. If it does, then it nature would have to balance out selecting for aggression (which plays most of the negative part in intolerance) and tolerance since aggression is very important to survival. I.e., if a marketer is not aggressive, he or she would not be able to get their products out as quickly. This same sort of aggressiveness is then used whenever a person disagrees with his or her opinion, and they head straight on for the attack. On the other hand, if all people of a population are aggressive, then there would be much bloodshed, not achieving the end goal of evolution--reproduction. Bleh.

Ummm...I would think that you'd have to pay for the space the file takes up. So yes, I'm sure there's some service that offers a large amount of disk space for your files---it's the same thing as just any kind of space you use to store your regular files. It depends on how big you are expecting your audience to be, but if it is particularly big, you might consider setting up your own server. Otherwise, there are services out there that offer large amounts of disk space (for equally large amounts of fees). You might be able to work with the paid version of Xisto, i.e., Xisto - Web Hosting. Or you could use something like NearlyFreeSpeech which charges depending on how much disk space you use up, how much bandwidth you use etc. (They have a flat fee per unit).

Well, it's to keep track of the number of days you were inactive and have to make up. It's sort of like, let's say you had 20 credits one day, and 10 days later, it was down to 10 credits. At that point, you'd have to post 10 credits worth of words in order to get it back to twenty. Using that same logic, if 5 credits of posts dropped down to zero and stopped dropping from that point on, you'd only have to make up five credits, which wouldn't be as fair. Man, I have quite a bit of problems posting (in fact, as of current posting, I'm in the negatives. I'll get it back up tonight), mainly due to school. I probably wouldn't be able to get a job until next year...but next year I'd also have more time to keep up with the posting. Oh what a quandary.

Personally, I'd say Tor is an easier (and better) way to change your IP address. Tor is meant to help people browse anonymously, so it automatically assigns a random IP address available to you. It then routes the data to several different computers before finally making it to you (to obscure the location of the actual data transfer). The downsides, are, of course, that Tor can be highly slow, since it chooses to take the data through a more complicated route than normal.I basically just use Tor whenever I find the need to hide my identity, so I use the Tor extension for Firefox. This extension lets me turn Tor on and off quite easily (it's located on the status bar) whenever I need to. Granted, turning Tor on and off in the actual program itself isn't all that hard either, but now I have browser to browser control of Tor's enabling/disabling, which is quite cool.

Any reasons? ;-) Personally, I would recommend the GIMP. For the most part, it is very similar to Photoshop in terms of functions, though at first it can be hard to find where the functions are located if you're switching from Photoshop. The one thing about the GIMP that annoys me is its handling of windows--if you open a new file, it opens a new window in your taskbar instead of containing it all in one window the way Photoshop does. Then when you open the layers and colors palette, it opens even more windows, so if you happen to be switching back and forth between the GIMP and some other program, opening those windows can be a pain. Paint.NET does indeed look very cool (I tried it a few times on a friend's computer). I might download that to see if I like it, but since I'm not in the mood to relearn a a graphics program, I probably won't switch.

Well, I think most of these webhosts were not really what you would call "professional". They were probably just created by some person who decided (randomly) one day that they were going to create a web hosting company. Perhaps they thought that it would loop in a lot of money and decided to try it out. Then, after a few months or years of working on it, they might give up either because they run out of money or they run out of determination. Obviously, it's often hard to tell if some random host you've found on the Internet is "unprofessional" and liable to go down quickly, so really leaves a lot of people in huge messes. And incidentally, good things usually have been around a long time, either that, or if an outsider who is closely tied to the industry has recommended it, it's probably trustworthy.Interestingly enough, none of the free hosts I've been to are actually down yet; I was always the one who took the initiative to leave them when the going went bad. But then again, my list of free hosts were the cookie cutter FreeWebs, 50webs, Byethost etc. Xisto so far has been great. How long have they been providing their service again? For me it has lasted and been very convenient.

Wow. Did I seriously see this as a title? I'm shocked. No, brain control is not magic. I'm pretty sure that could be paralleled with mind washing, and I see a lot of people being mind washed by the government. That's no magic----that's just an arena we don't understand well. The psychologists (and psychology is a science) are attempting to understand it, but pretending that it's just magic implies the lack of a need to understand. And come on, how does magic explain any of this? What has "magic" done that would explain any of this? What is your purported magic anyway?Magicians on TV are just doing something for entertainment; it's not as if they're junk. It's not like we all don't know that they have their little tricks that allow their illusions to succeed. We just don't know what those tricks are, and it's often amusing to watch them and try to figure it out.

Make sure that you've uploaded your files under the folder public_html and not in one of the other folders. In order for some scripts to run, you might need to set a folder to 777. Don't set your whole public_html folder to 777. And you might want to not just set the folder to 777, but set all files under that folder to 777 as well (I believe there's an option for recursively setting it to 777. Use that.)And finally, make sure there's an index.html or index.php or index.htm, because this is what the server will default to when someone visits your site. If none of this works, you might want to pm someone and explain the situation because they'd probably need to know more information to help you out.

You said you had WAMP. The information I gave in that was for WAMP, which is on your own computer, not on Xisto. If you follow my post, you should be able to set up the code on your own computer. Xisto is slightly different. If you're doing it on your own computer, then follow this: If you're doing it on Xisto, then follow this: The host name for Xisto is still "localhost", I believe. The username, on the other hand, is the name you used to create an account for the database. If you go into cpanel, you should click on MySQL Databases. Then scroll down to "Existing MySQL Users", and you should see a box that allows you to create a new user. Apparently your usernames will be prefixed with your login name. Copy what you entered as your username and password. Scroll up and you should see a list of MySQL databases--pick the one you want to use and copy and paste that. EDIT: In fact, if you look under each database, you should see a string that looks something like this (my quote is the PHP one): Basically, the parameters of mysql_connect are mysql_connect($host_name, $username, $password), which means that you can figure out what the host, username and password are just by looking at it. :-)

Ah, just fill out the host name with "localhost". That's what it usually is as well on shared servers. The username should be "root", unless you created a new user account to access the database. There should be a warning in phpMyAdmin as soon as you login telling you to set your password, so if you set that, then that's your password. The database name is just the database you created. Usually, if the hostname is not localhost, they'll tell you what the MySQL hostname is. (I believe Xisto does...)

I rather like many features that Xisto provides, and it's been a great two years here. There is one proposal that I'd like to make concerning the credits. And no, it's not about getting more credits per word or anything like that, but rather that an email reminder every time my credits fall below a certain number. (Say five or ten credits?) would be really, really nice. I think it'd be easier to post on time that way as my current schedule is very tight and I often end up estimating my post/check cycles on Xisto to be slightly off.Just a suggestion that I thought of after I saw a reminder system on another site. (Granted, this site is for paid hosting, but its payment is dependent on the amount of bandwidth and server space you use)EDIT: Sorry! I just realized that this post might not fit in this category. I looked through all areas of the forum though, and I wasn't sure where this would go under, and since it was related to talking about the good/bad points of Xisto, I decided to put it here.

Hmm...well, first of all, you can't install MySQL if this is not on a shared server --you don't have control over what they support on their servers. You can politely request that they support it, but they most likely will point you to a paid version of their web hosting. MySQL is available at Xisto (check out its front page for details), so once you've reached enough posts, you should be able to get the game code to work here. However, if you are looking to edit the code and test it often, you should definitely look into this "localhost" you mentioned earlier. :-] This is otherwise known as installing a server on your own computer. There are many different bundles that (quite easily) set up a server on your computer for you. If you're using Windows, I recommend something along the lines of WAMP (http://www.wampserver.com/en/) or XAMPP (https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html). Those are two of the more popular ones, but you can also check out the others at http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/. You might consider XAMPP if you intend to run an smtp server (one that sends out emails. WAMP does not have this feature, so you'll have to custom install it. Very annoying and messy, from what I've seen.) Both WAMP and XAMPP set up two things closely related to a good development environment automatically: php and MySQL. (As a side note, WAMP is an acronym for Windows Apache MySQL PHP, so it all makes sense.) Once you've installed WAMP or XAMPP (I have WAMP, so I can only tell you about that), you can probably check out one of the many tutorials on the internet for getting them to work. WAMP I'll explain right now: Installing is easy; just follow the steps on the screen. When WAMP is running, there should be an icon on the system tray (it should be lit up, not gray). Click on that, and it'll open up another menu. Under this menu, there should be a headline "Services", under which the subtitles "Start all services" and "Stop all services" exist. Click "start all services" and Apache and MySQL will begin running. Then, simply enter "localhost" into your browser and you'll get the default WAMP page--WAMP5 logo on top, a list of tools such as phpMyAdmin, a list of your websites if you scroll down a bit more. The rest is very easy. Access the folder where you've installed WAMP, and go to the folder www. Any folders you put instead here will represent a project of yours, all of which will appear under "Your projects" when you access localhost. So, create a folder with your game code and leave it there. Then, if you go back to localhost in your browser, you should access one of the tools (most likely you'll end up using phpMyAdmin) and create/edit a database. Granted, perhaps this code your friend bought has php scripts that generate databases for you, allowing you to not need to create them manually, so find out if that is the case. Otherwise, there should be directions about what tables to create and what fields to add to each table. Good luck! :-) EDIT: Ooops, I just noticed that you mentioned cron jobs, which is only available on Linux. In that case, look into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundle). Check out this tutorial for more information on setting up a cron job: https://www.sitepoint.com/introducing-cron/. I remember using cron jobs on Xisto; I stopped because they were superfluous. So you can look forward to that once you host here too.

Ah, no, that is so not worth it. There are plenty of ways to get money, especially now that the Grand Exchange has been added. (It's a market whose prices continuously fluctuate, but still remain very high.) There are numerous items that you can sell on the Grand Exchange to receive gold for. Me, for instance, I started by killing chickens and selling their feathers at a store in Port Sarim. But selling feathers is a rather annoying task, and after I found out about the price of bones on the Grand Exchange (it's 80-90gp each, I think, which is insanely high considering that bones are easily collected), I began killing NPCs for their bones (burying half, selling half depending on how much gold I needed) Selling rune essence was a nice deal for me too (currently 24gp on the Grand Exchange), since it's easy to mine (I don't have to watch the computer while I'm mining...unlike when I'm fighting monsters that are waaay stronger than me). The only annoying point is transporting the runes, though Aubury's Rune Shop is relatively close to the bank in Varrock...) As for whether or not Runescape is good...well, I'd say it's too repetitive and can get quite boring. It's always amusing when I'm finally up to par and can fight a stronger monster and get more interesting drops from their death, but training (especially in the variety of cutting down trees, fishing, cooking, etc) can be quite annoying. Sure, people say that macros are a bad thing, but the only reason people use them often on Runescape is because it is highly boring to spend time watching your character cut down a few hundred trees or continuously click in a river while watching them fish. I would prefer it a lot more if I could just set the amount of time I want my character to fish, and have him/her just do the fishing. Unless there's actually something interesting for me to monitor while fishing (minus random events--those don't come all the time), why would I want to wait there? Of course, I am playing it, so at least part of it is interesting. I'm not sure what makes it interesting, though I have a feeling it's because there's still parts of the game that I haven't yet seen, and new monsters are always a refreshing scene. So far it's been easier for me to train skills if I multitask and glance up at the computer every five minutes or so and give it a click. Doesn't really waste my time or leave me bored (since I'm doing homework), I still get training done and I rarely get killed by random events. (But ents (on trees) are really annoying. Only one warning, how sad!)

This is infinitely quite interesting. However, I would like to add that the Acid 2 Test doesn't necessarily mean IE 8 is actually up to par in terms of standards. The Acid 2 test doesn't have all that is most important in terms of standards that IE should support, just little details that most browsers happen to miss. It is quite possible, I'm sure, to just work on getting Acid 2 correct and neglect the other standards, which is pointless. Now, if IE 8 were actually working toward achieving CSS 2 and at the same time it also passed the Acid 2 Test, then it deserves commendation since it then really has built a standards-compliant browser. I'm of the opinion that the latter has probably happened, but I'll just taken into account all possibilities just in case. Perhaps, but considering that hardware is improving all the time, that is probably the reason why Microsoft thinks it can release software that uses up more resources. Software is always capable of expanding the room that it is given to fill. In any case though, I agree with you that funtionality is more important than cosmetic value, so all the new "prettiness" of Vista, was, IMO, rather pointless.

Really? Hmm. I don't get the impression that people get flamed for posting something that has already been posted before (for instance, there were several people who posted threads about Gmail or Firefox and none of them were flamed). However, I myself do feel it's kind of awkward to post stuff that has already been mentioned before. It feels kind of pointless to mention the same things over and over again, but I do agree that it's difficult to consistently have new things to talk about. The posts that I find annoying are usually pointless tutorials. Although I don't usually complain directly to a tutorial maker, I have to say that a lot of the submitted tutorials are very, very simple ones, ones that can easily be found. They're not particularly interesting, and some of them look like they were put together at the last minute and still have a variety of mistakes in them. Also, I know that moderators are supposed to look over tutorials before they are posted, so technically the quality of the tutorials should be higher. However, I find that most tutorials I see look like paraphrases of some other tutorial on the web. This way, the user can post their paraphrase and not get nailed for copying directly. In any case, I can usually deal with unprofessional posts pretty well, since I'm used to going on forums where the posts are far more unprofessional than those here. Granted, the spelling and grammar there is top-notch; it's just not as serious as it is here. I do like a lot of the posts here--especially the ones that make an attempt to explain things. :-)

I remember when I used to use Awardspace--it was really quite annoying. The biggest deal breaker for me was probably that it didn't allow php's mail function, so I couldn't send out any emails. Since the site I was creating depended a lot on email funtionality, I couldn't do without it, and had to actively search for a different host. (and I eventually landed on Xisto :-) ) Ah, well, Awardspace does have ftp access, so you can always use that, I suppose. Personally, I find updating things on the web annoying----there's no syntax highlighting--something that I can't live without. In any case, the file manager also messed on me quite a few times--sometimes, for no reason, certain files just wouldn't upload. I wasn't sure what happened, and when I tried a few more times, it worked, so I never complained. But the move to Xisto has still been a good choice. :] I never noticed the issues with the different servers...but the first part is very true. Every little thing requires you to pay for it. It's quite obvious that Awardspace doesn't tell you that PHP runs in safe mode and that the mail function is disabled. I'm sure that would drive a lot of free users away right off. It's those little things that are hidden and really needed...

I thought it was good when I used it last ...I think Joomla should work fine on it--I was using Drupal and Wordpress, so the MySql use was definitely quite heavy. Interestingly enough, I had the same set of emotions when I got an account at Xisto - Web Hosting. I was quite afraid during that hour or so delay where the there was no response and no hosting. I think it might've been less worrisome for its customers if cComputing Host sent out an email confirming the fact that hosting was being set up and that the client would have to wait at least x amount of hours, just to placate us. :-) Afterwards, I must say Xisto - Web Hosting was great. It was always really fast, and I think there was only one time that I found it down. It was, in any case, down a lot less than Xisto was, though that's obviously expected since it's a paid service and there's less load on the server due to fewer clients. Just a side question...what's the difference between Xisto and Xisto? I always thought they were same, just that one had less-technical discussions than the other. Do they offer the same types of hosting as well? If they do, then what is the point of having two forums? Couldn't there just be one forum with all types of discussions to encompass all audiences?

I agree that you have to use reciprocal linking moderately. Obviously it's more important to link to sites that are actually operated by humans and not just based off of a link farm. It's also quite easy to check the pagerank of the site you're linking to and decide if you should link to them. Granted, if the site has great content and doesn't have a good pagerank (yet), it might be worthwhile to link to them just in case they spike later.I would say just link to other sites whenever there's relevancy--that's better than linking to a site just because. If you're going to get reciprocal links, search around for sites that are related to your site and ask them to link to you. Of course, they are supposedly your competitors, but it never hurts to work together (and ask..).Linking to a site that has no relevancy to your site and has a low pagerank probably won't help your site on Google at all. I'm not sure if they'd deem it spammy, but I'd rather not take the chance.

Actually, I believe there is already a service that emcompasses Gmail's storage space to use to upload any type of file--Gmail Drive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail_Drive Basically, it allows people to upload files from their computer to Gmail as if Gmail were a drive on their computer. In fact, the gmail account's contents shows up as a network share. Obviously, there are still restrictions, as Gmail doesn't allow the upload of .zip or .exe files, so those cannot be uploaded with Gmail drive either. There is, apparently, also a firefox extension that does similar things--Gspace: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Granted, neither service is condoned by Google (it's probably against the user agreement--I haven't checked). It could end with your account getting banned or suspended, depending on whether or not Google finds out... If someone were to test it out, obviously they wouldn't be stupid enough to do it on their actual account. :-)