Arbitrary

I can see the hospitals filling with people trying to lose weight, as well as a few brain cells, now. The next thing I want to know is who worked out how many calories it takes? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) Well, wouldn't it depend on how hard you ban your head against the wall? So it'd almost be like the force your head gives to the wall is directly proportional to the amount of calories lost. That, sadly, is what, the majority? I seriously wonder what led people to vote him for second term...but then again, the other countries who followed Bush into Iraq were definitely not any better. They made him look as if he actually had international support when the majority of countries hate him. No wonder he's trying to figure out the mystery of why so many people dislike him... This leads me to thinking about something else--the electoral college seriously sucks. It really would be better if our democracy were a true democracy and actually depended on what the majority of our people vote for. Unfortunately, we instead choose to pick representatives to vote for us, which is basically just putting up a barrier between the government and the people. Sad. Not quite true. The population is actually rather stable, now, isn't it? I'd like some more context on this one, but seeing how old the thread is, I guess that's not possible. Sure, in the rural areas there are more births, but there are also more babies getting abandoned and dying. The cities just stick to the one-child policy.

I also use Google because it's simpler than the rest. Most of the times I'm just doing a quick search and waiting forever for a page to load (i.e., the search page), is just not worth my time. I'd rather spend that time actually browsing my destination sites. Besides, Google *does* offer other features (i.e., Google News, Google Maps etc), they just take a click longer to get there. Google doesn't clutter them all on the homepage but instead chooses to separate them to make them easier to deal with.Msn's ads are rather annoying. Granted, I use adblock, so I see nothing, but whenever I'm not on my home computer, I definitely do not want to touch Msn. I have a rather large aversion to ads, and Msn's flashy banner ads do no more than piss me off.

Umm...why shouldn't you use Photoshop? I mean, assuming that you can afford the software, Photoshop's a great way to create logos and other areas that are more graphics-orientated on your site. Obviously if you can't afford it, then use GIMP, but Photoshop's got plenty of good features. Are you denouncing it because it's Windows-only? That still doesn't mean its quality is any less. Now, I agree with the not-recommending Dreamweaver and Frontpage points--neither creates semantically correct HTML. When you do decide to edit something by hand because Dreamweaver and Frontpage were unable to do it for you, you'd end up dead while wading through those series of nested tables. This is not quite true. When you're testing the website, you do need to consider what a Windows user on IE would see, and not just what Linux users would see. Most of your audience, after all, do use Windows. Key point in making a website is to cater to your audience. If you're going the PHP way, I'd recommend CakePHP (currently using it as well) and symfony. There are plenty of other PHP frameworks out there and I've tried a few, but those two seem the most well-developed, though they still lack in good documentation. A good way to learn PHP (after you've brushed over the basics) is to look at an existing codebase and either contribute or at least understand what's going on. So instead of just using CakePHP, try to look under the hood and see why everything is being coded the way it is. I also use Notepad++ for editing, though I don't think it makes a huge difference what editor you're using if you're just building a site. Notepad++'s got the basics expected from a text editor: highlighting, collapsing sections of code, macros, etc.

None of these have much relationship with basic HTML though. ;-) I'd suggest you add more information on other basic HTML tags rather than taking about server-side languages and javascript. Those could (and should) be covered in a wholly different tutorial. Actually, no, this is not true. For HTML, you don't have to close every tag the way you just did to the meta tag. You can write it like this <meta ... > and it will still work. In XHTML, you're expected to close every tag (i.e., <meta .. /> and not <meta ... >), but even then, browsers will usually still display it. It's not proper semantics in XHTML but it's fine in HTML, so it depends on what your doctype says. I believe browsers display it either way. There's a slight error in this code of yours. The ending tag ought to be </html> and not just <html>. ;-) Technically you can--just resave it as an html file and then load it into your browser. Most of the basic things on the page (i.e., tables, paragraphs) will be loaded, but (1) the html file won't be standards compliant (it wasn't made for the web after all) and (2) it might not render the same way on all browsers. Just sayin'. ;-)

You want to make a server? I'd think that, considering you're using Apache, you already have a server at hand and just want to make a website where your game will be located. ;-) Anyways, if your goal is to make a web-based text game, then you ought to consider what language you're going to use first. PHP is ubiquitous, but not necessarily the best choice if you happen to have other options at hand. If you intend to use PHP and are currently on a Windows machine, it would benefit you to install http://www.wampserver.com/, which basically sets up (almost automatically) MySQL, PHP and Apache on your computer. If you're using Linux, then check out this page http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ for some possible ideas of what to get. (LAMP and WAMP both stand for Linux/Windows Apache MySQL PHP) After you've got that set up, you can check out one of the numerous PHP tutorials out on the web, i.e. http://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp You ought to beware, though, that these tutorials are rarely comprehensive and tend to lack on the security side. So you ought to either buy a book to learn "better" PHP or check out the code sources of other projects. I would say more, but I think this should be enough to get you started. Everything else is up to how you want to mess around.

Hahaha...amusing, but not that amusing. Google's Sharing ordeal probably won't make it big--this time Google isn't the innovator but rather the follower--it has decided to follow in the footsteps of delicious. Besides, unless Google adds a lot of new stuff, its sharing engine isn't much better than delicious's. (See, unless it offers something brilliantly different like Gmail, it won't be upheld before the masses.) I'm guessing that Google's sharing will end up looking something like Google Video--a "failure" in comparison to Youtube. Can be done in Firefox without Google too. Look at that plethora of extensions. Actually we have no idea if it's bloated, but I can definitely agree it's crap. I see no point in something like this when it's already been done before and can be easily accomplished without this option. I'm not sure what Google's trying to accomplish--perhaps they're just running out of good ideas.

I do as well. However, I do question what the advantage really is. People say that XHTML is a lot more strict so webmasters are forced to do things the standards-compliant way. However, this is only if these webmasters actually bother checking to see if their website validates. If they don't bother to do this, then XHTML will have the same problem as HTML--there will still be many mistakes. Moreover, there are some changes in XHTML that I think are rather pointless----<strong> instead of <b>? What's the difference besides an arbitrary change in wording? Besides, <b> is actually shorter than <strong>, so why the change? Then there's <center>, which is actually a very very useful tag. There isn't an easy way to do centering with CSS on all browsers. (It's a hack, basically.) Nonetheless, XHTML still has its good points, or else I wouldn't be using it. I've heard that it scales nicely to other non-computer platforms like cell phones and such. Always useful, I guess. Though that does make me wonder why Google doesn't switch to XHTML...considering all their new mobile technology and all.

Well, I think it might be better if we had not only less technically-inclined topics but also other topics. There are plenty of other topics worthy of discussion that are not technical, such as the more serious life-related discussions. Constantly posting technical stuff can get really tedious after a certain amount of time. I understand that Xisto was created on the idea that most topics would be technical, and that Trap was supposed to be the place for non-technical posts, but I believe that Xisto can still remain professional (i.e., with posts that are meaningful and well-expressed) even if it had topics that aren't solely related to the computing industry. Also, I think Xisto could do without the really repetitive topics such as "What's your favorite browser and why" because there isn't much to say on these topics after a while. I haven't seen any new topics in these categories, but the favorite browser topics seem to come up a lot. Older posters who have already posted in that thread can't really say anything because all that they say will be repetitive. Moreover, newcomers won't be able to say much either because the same thing will happen. Maybe we should encourage people at Xisto (or maybe the mods and admin could do this) to post at least one news-related topic each day to discuss. I'm sure there's at least some piece of technical gem daily if Xisto doesn't want more life-related topics.

Hey, this sounds quite interesting. Well, I know both php and java, so depending on what you need or want, I can always adapt. I'd like to know what this game is about though, just so I can get an idea of what you'll be working on. I don't really mind no pay...I guess currently I'm more interested in messing around and learning different ways to do things by working on projects and the like instead of earning money for what I do.But I've got to say, this kind of stuff does take forever alone. I've done something similar before (not exactly a game, but a custom-built CMS), and it took forever. Staring at code all day basically killed my brain. PHP is actually really really tedious...the last two PHP projects I've done practically fried my mind. My code's not a mess, but PHP projects are still mind-boggling tedious. I can't stand all the minor, repetitive details that are involved every time I have to code it. Maybe that's why I've found frameworks (like cakephp) to be really useful...

Well, frankly, there's a lot of stuff that can interest teens. It can range quite a lot. Facebook is nice--it's like the newer, spiffier version of Myspace. Not that I ever liked Myspace much though... Anyways, most people I know have a Facebook, though I wouldn't quite say it's taboo not to have one. I have one that I never really used--it's mostly for comparison purposes that I kept it there. There's also this teen bloggers network called Random Shapes, which is quite fun. If you join, you'll meet lots of people who're interested in (oftentimes tech and) other things related to blogging. Of course, there's also the incentive of traffic and the sense of community. It's just amusing to talk to other people like you. I think I most agree with this. You just have to pick a topic, and a lot of people will be interested in it regardless of whether they're teens or adults. Just pick a topic, and you'll get an audience. Doesn't matter if it's for teens or otherwise, really. I would assume that the topic poster's aim is to create a successful website. Though after I initially read his post, I thought he sounded like a marketing researcher who wanted to find what products attracted teens.

Hahaha, really? Well, they're really unneeded if you're going to wear them in the streets. I mean, you could just take off your jacket and you might be cooler. It is quite amusing, but unneeded unless you really have to have that jacket on (i.e., under conditions where there's lots of sun or something...) I think I like that idea of an air-conditioned bed. Now that really would be useful....I don't have to keep windows open at night then.

I think they capitalize the beginning of every noun or something. I have used the big three browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera) and they're all installed just in case I need to do cross-browser testing. I have to say that if you're looking for speed, go for Opera. It's the fastest--Firefox takes forever to startup; even IE is faster at loading than Firefox. Opera (shockingly), also has Adblock. (I believe it came with version 9.) It's under the alias of the content blocker, as Opera is still run by a commercial company who can't endorse advertisements. For more information, see: http://operawiki.info/OperaAdblock If you're looking for something akin to Gmail manager in Opera, you can just subscribe to Gmail's RSS feed and let Opera automatically notify you whenever you have new mail messages. That being said, my main browser is still Firefox as Opera still doesn't have many things that I really need. For instance, it's javascript support isn't exactly up to par--I am unable to load Zoho writer on it. Moreover, it doesn't have something similar to FireFTP or Chatzilla, all of which make my life much, much easier.

Indeed, that is a good idea. Most of my passwords are random, and after much overuse I've managed to remember them all. Something else I've been doing with passwords: I tend to keep my passwords in what I call 'tiers'. Basically, there's one tier for the 'stupid' passwords, as in passwords used flippantly to register at some forum that I'll probably only access once. Since I don't care much for these passwords, I tend to reuse the same password over all these 'stupid' websites, as it doesn't really matter if someone else finds out.My second 'tier' is for the relatively important ones, and I tend to (1) use a more secure password and (2) create three passwords that I alternate between these relatively important websites. Then when I get to a site I just pick one of the passwords.The third 'tier' is for the most important accounts (such as email), and there I have no two passwords that are the same. This way, I can minimize on memorizing too many passwords, but I'll still leave my most important accounts with a secure password that is not used elsewhere. Besides, at times I want to reaccess some forum I registered at long ago, and if I had chosen a new password for every registration, I'd never access any of my old accounts.

Yeah, I prefer to stick to text editors too. I remember once, a while ago, I decided to try out Dreamweaver because it seemed so much easier than writing HTML manually (and the program was recommended by a couple of friends), so I did. However, after I'd added numerous elements, I discovered that I couldn't move and shift the elements to my pleasure (Dreamweaver refused to let me move it the way I wanted), and so I ended up looking through the code and trying to move elements around to suit the design. To my horror, the code was a huge mess and I barely knew what was going on behind the scenes. That was definitely not worth the trouble, and it actually took me less time to just code the thing from scratch (again) instead of fixing it from Dreamweaver's generated version. To me, it's just a lot easier to organize when you actually know what's going on behind the scenes rather than jumping into the mess after the mess has already been created. Now I obviously can't comment on bluevoda, but I don't suppose I'll be using it either.

Pyost is right--you definitely need more than just FrontPage. Okay, if you've already created a database, then just paste the code that was given to you in a file. I'll go with PHP for now: PHP $dbh=mysql_connect ("localhost", "deatncom_shnabo", "<PASSWORD HERE>") or die ('I cannot connect to the database because: ' . mysql_error());mysql_select_db ("deatncom_logindb");Paste this in a .php file and replace <PASSWORD HERE> with the password you specified while creating the database. Once you run the file, the database connection will be opened. Also remember to put <?php and ?> around the PHP code. Then, afterwards, you want to create a table in the database to hold your login information. (Use PhpMyAdmin if you're using MySQL) You could go with three fields (username, password, email, id) for a very very simple user registration. For the username, password, and email you should leave the field type as varchar with a length of your choice. For the id, use a type of int and set it as a primary key. Also, under extras, set the id to 'auto_increment'. The id is mostly for internal tracking purposes and won't be of much use to the end-user. Under the different options, you shouldn't need to touch collation, attributes, and null. Default you can set if you want there to be a default value for each field. (Not really applicable in your situation, I think) Clicking save should also generate PHP code that can be used to create the exact same table if you paste it in a php file. Then, in order to access the table, you should use mysql. First you'd want to create a registration page (let's say called register.php). In it you'd have: <form action="register.php" method="post"><label for="username">Username: </label><input type="text" name="firstname"><br /><label for="password">Password: </label><input type="password" name="password"><br /><label for="email">Email: </label><input type="text" name="email"><br /></form> As a side note, I typed this in the browser, so there's no guarantee it'll work right off the bat. Now, to break apart the tags within <form></form>... [a] the action attribute within <form> -- this is where the form directs to, and it's also where you want to put the php code to execute data received from the form the method attribute within <form> -- this tells the browser how to send the information. It can either be POST or GET. If it's GET, the data will appear in a website's url--ex: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ If it's POST, the data is hidden. For something sensitive like registration or logging in, POST should always be the one used [c] the name attribute in the input tag -- this is the name that's used by PHP to access the data--you'll see later. Moving on... Now, to access the form data that a user has entered, in register.php we'd want to have: <?php$username = $_POST["username"];$email= $_POST["email"];$password= $_POST["password"];?> Suppose the user entered helpless as the username, iowf83M as the password and weoiwho@gmail.com as the email. Then the variables $username, $email, and $password should contain the respective data. The array variable $_POST is defined by PHP to access data from a form with a method of POST. The ["username"] part of the variable is the value defined in name in the input tag. Before you do anything with the password, you should md5 has it for security purposes. Ex: <?php$password = md5($password);?> md5 is a (nice) built-in function in php that does what it says. Once you've got the data within variables and hashed accordingly, you'd want to use this to insert the data into the database: <?phpmysql_query("INSERT INTO <table_name> (username, password, email) VALUES ('$username', '$password', '$email')");?> To break the mysql query down, INSERT INTO is very obvious. Replace <table_name> with the name of your table. (Most likely users or something like that). The stuff between the parentheses are the fields you want to insert into--username, password and email. The values correspond to their respective fields. Now that the data is in the database, to retrieve it, we use another mysql query. $username = $_POST["username"];$email= $_POST["email"];$password= $_POST["password"];$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username='$username' AND password='$password'"); The select query gets the user where username is the username entered and password is the password entered. If $result exists, then the user can be logged in. This is the most basic aspects of a login system, and it's not even fully complete yet. For a secure login system, check out http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ . Of course, you'd need stripslashes to make sure that sql injections won't work. And as incoherent last words, it's best to use a framework for larger projects (I recommend CakePHP)

Ah, it's those. I made one for my own testing preparation purposes...but they're not in PHP so I did a quick Googling. Here are some possibilities: http://www.multiwebvista.com/testzone/download.php http://www.interlogy.com/products/content/quiz/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/simplequiz/ http://www.hugedomains.com/domain_profile.cfm?d=flashlightbrown&e=com [i thought this one looked promising] http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Then for the poll scripts: http://www.stadtaus.com/en/php_scripts/voting_script/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ (these are not all free. You might want to look through them and just get the free ones) http://www.plus2net.com/php_tutorial/php_poll.php http://www.chipmunk-scripts.com/scripts/poll.php http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://www.mr-corner.com/LittlePoll/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://prestopoll.sourceforge.net/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://www.thetechex.net/?place=downloads That's it for now. If you searched Google you might find more that suit your tastes. Good luck. :-)

And this, of course, is the number one reason why I read manga instead of watching anime. You get even more choice out there, as the mangas likely to be animated are usually the shonen power-up ones rather than the ones with some substance. (I'm sitting here loving 20th Century Boys, but it's not animated ) To your becoming a bit more patient point, some things are worthy to be patient over, while others, say watching anime, usually aren't. I'd be patient in the process of getting to know someone, but not in watching something I'd probably forget in a couple of months anyway. Yes, of course it has advantages, but not everyone cares about quality. Speed is more important for some people, and it takes less time to stream something of less quality. Ah, I usually read the manga, then watch bits of the anime for parts of the manga that I enjoyed and would like to see over again in an animated form. That, and I'd like to see if some of the voice actors matched what I thought they'd sound like.

Hmm. Not gonna disagree with you about the quality of the actual hosting, but wouldn't forcing you to post this much kinda defeat the purpose? If I have to spend this long getting my free hosting, then the length of time spent acquiring the hosting should be taken into account when deciding whether or not the free host is any good. This is like those neverending advertising offers--simply not worth it. Out of those, I've been at freewebs, geocities, and 50webs. Freewebs is about as crappy as you can get. It limits you to a certain amount of files that you can upload, so when I broached that limit, I had to switch to something different. It was also horribly slow when it came down to uploading, and the lack of support for php irked me. Geocities is obviously horrible, with their advertisements and all. It also is very restrictive and some of their paid options can be obtained for free elsewhere. After that, I tried 50webs, which was good in the respect that it did not have ads. However, it also didn't support php (like freewebs and geocities) and it had too many limits on file size upload. The need of a host that supported php was what drove me to awardspace. They were a fine host until I discovered (to my horror) that the mail function was not supported. That irked me to no end, and eventually I discovered Xisto and have stayed here since then. Though there is some downtime (more than I'd like), it has been the best out of all that I've tried.

Now I agree with Alegis that there's more to anime than just youtube or other streaming sites. However, not all of us are this serious about anime watching that we'd actually go and download them through torrents or otherwise. I understand that they are high quality, but with higher quality comes higher waiting time too. Those of us with superbly slow internet connections can take advantage of Youtube instead and not waste time waiting for downloads to finish.Meanwhile, no, they are not completely legal. In fact, Naruto, One Piece and Bleach are all illegal--they've all been licensed in the U.S. I don't think this applies if you live in another country where the licensing company does not operate, but in the US I'm quite sure it applies. But of course, I don't think that many people care to check up on you; they'd prefer just to talk to the hosting site.And on yet another side not, I don't watch anime, I read manga instead. Much much faster and I don't spend time complaining about any aspect of voice acting at all. And it's like the unwritten rule for books and movies: most animes adapted after the manga are worse than the original.

You can earn a lot of credits for just one post; it all depends on how much you write in that post. A post doesn't have a single, fixed value for credits, or else there'd probably be a lot of people who just post one-liners and get a whole bunch of credits that they don't deserve.I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with the credit system; it does reward people for the right kind of things. Although I wouldn't say that length necessarily equals quality (after all, it's very easy to bloat up your post by adding extra (big?) words here and there), but it's certainly a better measure of quality than post count.Just try to find some topic you're interested in and reply to it with lots of explanations and perhaps your insight. Or you could always write a tutorial. Of course, sometimes it's annoying when I discover that I've written something especially long in a section that doesn't count for posting credits, but that's just me not being careful enough to check the category title.

Ah, alright. I thought it might've been something weird on my end as Firefox wasn't displaying "Page cannot display" pages, but rather just a blank white page (with the title and favicon). Haha, it's summer...so I have lots of free time now to work on things.

Well, let's see. Look here: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/http://www.yellbox.com/ http://www.shoutmix.com/v3/login.php - this one's hosted on their site blog.jalenack.com/ajax/ - ajax shoutbox, might be what you're looking for http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ - I think this one's also remotely hosted shoutbox.sourceforge.net labs.mininova.org/shoutbox/ - another AJAX shoutbox http://www.shout-box.com/ - also remotely hosted http://www.shoutbox.com/ yurivish.com/yshout - yet another AJAX shoutbox http://www.shoutbox.com/ - hosted at their site http://www.shoutboxpro.com/rg-erdr.php?_rpo=t - same as above http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://www.smallbox.de/ myflashbox.sg http://www.gerd-tentler.de/tools/shoutbox/ http://www.lpassociation.com/forum/ http://www.shootbox.fr/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://www.hotscripts.com/listing/free-shoutbox/ http://www.needscripts.com/Resource/11127.html http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ http://www.shoutpro.com/ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ And finally, here's some links to tutorials to create your own shoutbox: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

Okay, I'll go through what you want one by one. Yes, Xisto has PHP, MySQL and Apache. Those are pretty much the basics for the type of site that you're trying to make. Well, the best way to learn is to try new things. Just have a goal in mind, do some research, implement what you've learned from your research, and you'll have learned a lot. Well, of course. But for what you seem to want to be making, I don't think so. It's far far better to use PHP in this case, especially since Xisto does support it and all. Realtime? Okay, AJAX, AJAX, AJAX. That's all I can so. Here are some relatively good tutorials for Ajax-learning: http://www.w3schools.com/xml/ajax_intro.asp and http://www.tizag.com/ajaxTutorial/ and http://www.xul.fr/en-xml-ajax.html . You could, I guess, just skip most of the "explanation" fluff in the beginning that marks every single tutorial. Okay, first things first, email. That's pretty easy nowadays, just used the ubiquitous PHPMailer (http://phpmailer.worxware.com/). They have examples on their site on how to use it, and their class basically takes care of all mail-related worries. Next, the forum. It'd be rather pointless to go and make your own forum (why reinvent the wheel?) as you have lots of other things to work on anyways. phpBB (http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/) is heard of everywhere, but I've heard that the forum garners many security risks. (I'm not sure how the newest version's going though) There's a lot more out there; just Google. Then, of course, you should also think about the type of forum you want; do you want replies to be flat or threaded? Do you want themes? Image attachments? So on and so forth. Then, the chat system. I'd also suggest that you find some previously implemented chat system, especially something that seems established. Implementing it yourself, is, once again, a not-so-great use of time (unless you think you could somehow learn something while doing it. But you'll learn plenty just by working out the AJAX you'll have to use to make the game work in real-time.) You could probably Google for the chat system; some recommendations: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/, http://hot-things.net/, https://www.pcpin.com/, http://www.phpfreechat.net/, and http://www.x7chat.com/ Finally, the message system. That you'll be able to implement fine once you learn enough PHP and learn a bit more about databases. The same goes for the user login/registration system. Though I might warn you to read up about security--this article (http://www.securiteam.com/securityreviews/5DP0N1P76E.html) might help identify what you'd want to fight against. PHP's addslashes works nicely for this purpose. Read up on Javascript injections too (nexodyne.com/showthread.php?t=14736). You know, you'd probably want to make it free for unlimited access at first. It won't be the easiest thing in the world to actually get people to come, and not many will want to pay five to ten dollars for some game they've never tried before. At least suck them in and make them addicted before charging the money. They might not get into the game with all the restrictions you've placed on non-members, and they probably won't even feel that there's something good to get out of it. Oh, wait. Now you'd need something really secure to handle credit-card style payments. Umm...I'd seriously say don't touch this yourself until you're really experienced with PHP. You don't want a bunch of security holes that you'll have to patch up later. Google for more info. Ack. SQL statements are the bane of my existence, I swear. You might want to pick up some sort of PHP framework for this site of yours. It would be very very helpful to keep things organized as you start so that you won't find yourself with spaghetti code like I did at first. Try CakePHP (cakephp.org), it makes a lot of this database trouble waaaay easier. I'd still suggest you learn about SQL statements and not just entirely depend on CakePHP, but it'll be very helpful once you're ready to make something complicated. CakePHP takes advantage of the Model-Controller-View. Basically there's a Model that accesses the database, a controller that has most of the business logic, and a view that displays the data. It also has a really nice security component called sanitize. Sanitize can check for alphanumeric characters only, prepare it for sql statements with PHP's addslashes and so on. CakePHP also has a great scaffolder; it gives you functions such as add, view, delete and edit for every single database. You can always read more about it if you Google "cakephp scaffolding". Then there's also Cake's bake.php. Bake basically generates the PHP code behind the add, view, delete and edit functions and lets you edit them for more functionality. That's a good part of a project done. Before I found Cake, my PHP code was a mess (of course, that was also the first time I'd coded a major project). With Cake's forced structure, it was a lot neater. If you do get around to using CakePHP and need help, you can always ask me. Though there's always the IRC channel and Google Groups, both of which are very helpful. Anyways, good luck in your endeavors. :-D

Hum. Cpanel isn't opening for me. It just gives a blank page, and I'm not sure what's going on. On Firefox it gives off a blank page, and after I tried it on IE, it gave a "Page Not Found" error. Hosting isn't down, but Cpanel won't load either. Anyone know what's wrong and how things can be fixed? I'd appreciate any help I can get. Thanks.

I also agree--there is something called Internet freedom. Those companies really can't do anything to those who share cheats. It's like saying Microsoft should sue the person who made a cracker that was able to crack the password of a Window's machine. The creator wasn't performing a crime since you could use that password cracker for a legitimate reason (if you really did lose your password). It's those who use it that are accused as being criminals as they are the ones who are using the program for illegal means. Any tool can be used illegally. Another analogy might as well be the pencil. Pencils can be turned into weapons too, assuming that you decide to make use of them in the wrong way and stab people. But pencil manufacturers don't get sued for something like that. Those people could potentially be accused of a crime. Assuming that the hacking attempt is particularly serious, the companies probably would take action. But it all depends.