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Hello vujsa, As glad as I am to hear that not everyone is having this problem, I'm getting more and more frustrated that I'm the only one. My usual luck never ceases to impress me . That seems like a very good strategy. And I'm quite sure that many members are quite familiar with the hosting system here and I'd certainly trust their opinions. The only reason I was wondering about admins seeing this was that I thought they had root access. Thanks for clarifying that . Again, thanks a lot. I owe you big time . Best regards, Mobham

I'm starting to wonder whether I'm the only one having this problem. I shouldn't be, since it seems like a system-wide error. Here's the message I get whenever I try to send my Xisto e-mail anything from my GMail account: As you can see, this is a clear indication of an Xisto server problem, which is why I'm surprised no other member hasn't mentioned it! And also, how come the admins aren't looking into this? Is it really that trivial?

Ruby never achieved the hyped that it deserved and along came this framework Rails, which set Ruby in stone.I always believed Ruby would succeed it just needed to get an edge over a long existing and powerful language like PERL. Now don't get me wrong, PERL can still use this framework, and is still a leader in it's own way, driven by huge mobs of programmers all around the world and there will continue to be flamed wars in which I can only see PERL actually standing it's ground due to it's long existence and major improvements, of course if it ever retired, then no doubt the other languages would be able to take that main spotlight. PERL is not in the dark, it's just slowly being tackled by simplifying it's complexities.PERL could have been made easier to use and some developers have done just that, but it would have broken what already existed, so it was not a feasible thing to do a complete language rewrite, these other languages could be seen as PERL's offspring, and that the attention they are seeking is really just to be known.RoR was something I looked at when the hype of Ruby started reaching people. I investigated into it and looked at whether now was the time to change, or whether I should continue with what I know and then later dive into it. I actually stuck with what I know now and will dive l ater in when I see reason to, it was quite similar to the transition I took with C to C++, I never changed overnight, it was slowing dawning on me that C wasn't efficiently doing what I needed which ultimately made me change. Other languages came about but to me C++ still proved to be efficient enough for my doings and unless there is a must to change, I will start going down different alleys until I come across the language that does what I need.My change from PERL to PHP was not due to efficiency, but because PHP reflected a likeness to C++ that this familiar ground I was so use to was a must, so that I could maintain the same awareness when developing in C++ or in PHP. I still believe PERL to be a far more superior language and would not ever consider trying to outperform PERL with PHP, as I can say it's just not going to happen as easy as it sounds.Ruby does deserve some lime light, but it's claims to be better than PERL can only be resolved in an ultimate test for supremacy. Rather than it's newer it's got to be better. If there's any PERL to Ruby changers, I would definitely like to hear how they feel this language is or any PHP to Ruby changers, as it's always good to understand views from a programming aspect. Some people including myself find lazy programming inappropriate at times, but it probably leaves more hair on your head than some situations I've been in.Cheers,MC

No the +1 only applies to the font tag. Which gets it's initial size from the browser, then the size="1' means to +1 on it. The values are from -6 to +6, where you do not need to prefix the positive numbers, this is relative sizing for the browser, absolute sizing is also accepted by the size attribute so you can specify size="12pt" in the font tag. It's hard figuring out the exact (inc|dec)remental sizes used in the font tag but you have 13 alterations available to you, which either increases/decreases the browser's set font size, being proprietary and not suitable for international use, it's probably best not trying to understand it and just make do with what we do have in CSS and how we can use it to achieve our needed results. Depending on what browsers are capable of, I believe <font> was introduced by Netscape while some of the attributes were introduced by Microsoft. Their intended use was possibly not well thought out and caused a lot of confusion. I'm not sure whether all browsers understand it properly which may suggest why a browser set at 12pt font-size using <font size="1"> may actually ignore the size attribute or misinterpret it's meaning leaving it still represent ing the browsers default of only 12pt, which when styling with CSS will make it appear as 12pt without looking any different to the <font> tag. I could run my own tests on the actual behaviour for it, but I don't want to increase people's awareness of this tag, rather let it die it's deprecated life and start standardising. Cheers, MC

The concepts of OOP may seem daunting to many programmers and trying to make use of objects maybe trivial. This guide is to help you unravel your own potential so that you can start Thinking in Terms of Objects and to help those who are just starting out or are switching to an OO language. Notice from mastercomputers: I had to change my description of an object after being hit over the head by my missus. Women are not Objects, though it did make it more interesting to read and hopefully by what I say you can make your own judgement. Sorry if I offended anyone but I was sure this would make people Think in Terms of Objects better. Introduction In everyday life we are exposed to Objects yet we may not think of them as such (this was where I got assaulted and made alterations, leaving me to be more serious and respectful). For instance, the TV is an object which connects with other objects like the aerial connection to the back of it or the electrical power outlet. This connection is how these objects are interfacing with each other so that they can take advantage of what these objects can provide it with. What these objects are providing one another is their implementation. Take the aerial for instance, this object is connected to an antennae which receives broadcasting signals and directs it back to your TV, how it is doing this is the implementation that this object was developed to do and in most circumstances does not need a thorough understanding by the end user of how it does it as long as you get your reception on the TV. This object can also accept a connection from your VCR which shows how the aerial can be a reusable object and suitable for other object. The electrical power outlet is what you would want your own objects to be like, it is such a large ordeal that many objects of all shapes and sizes interface with this yet how many people really appreciate it. Off-topic: We currently had another large scale black out that wiped the entire power of our major city losing millions in revenue, this is when people started to appreciate it and now many questions are asked as to why this happened, who is to blame but more importantly, how can they resolve it so it will never happen again, since this is the second time it happened and we did not learn from our first mistake. On-topic: This shows how great your own objects can become and there are many developers who have created such objects that have benefitted the programming community, just remember you could develop that next big thing. Again however, it is not vitally important to the end user as to what drives the power to this electrical outlet, it could be a nuclear power plant, hydroelectric resservior, wind powered or even solar powered. This is just the implementation that is behind the scenes and this is how you can make your objects act like, where end users should not need to worry about what goes on in the background as long as in the foreground it does what they want. So What Makes an Object? This is quite a tough question and to be honest, I would answer with something obscure and riddling that would sound good yet cause more confusion. It is best if we dissect it and take out what is common amongst objects in a programming language and although I don't claim to properly answer this question, I do claim to shed some light on what an object could be and hopefully that light clears up some of the things that helps you make your own conclusion as to what a programming object could be. If we look at real world objects which I believe a lot of programming objects are based on, we can see some concepts that are similar for programming. In another thread which related similarly to objects and classes I talked about a dog as an object. For this I'm going to use the dog, but I'm going to introduce two new objects to clarify it even more, the owner and the trainer. Objects usually share two characteristics that should be for any object. This is properties and methods, terms that are related to programming so don't confuse our numerous definitions used in the English language. The property is basically instances that gives meaning and description a place. A dog, owner and trainer can each have a name property which is how we can refer to these objects individually, indirectly or even in a group. Sometimes you will call the dog by it's official name, other times you may decide to change it's name depending on the dogs behavior (which is another term for method). If DOG is BAD call it MUTT. The object is the dog that we are doing a comparison on, we are evaluating it's behavior or state that it is in or performing at that time (instance) and then using a method to change it's name property and then triggering an action or event that then makes us use our own behavior or method as a result of it. Now how was that for psuedo-code or shedding light on the subject? As you can see these things usually come naturally to us, which is how we would want to model our objects. The more natural you can make your object operate, the more likely you will be successful. So our dog consists of many properties, which can have many methods for how we can manipulate it. Some properties can not be altered which in our case are constants like the breed of the dog, other properties can vary like the name, color, state the dog is in, it's hunger, etc. Giving our dog a name and then providing it with natural methods that dogs may possess like barking, wagging tail, etc. Is just part of describing that particular dog, in a larger scale we can have an object that describes all dogs and what they are capable of doing, like for instance I'm referring to DOG which is a larger object that encapsulates those animals into that one group. This object is what makes it a good idea for interfacing all your dogs into, because they gain all the same functionality and it should be common, of course there are some things you must change in the object but you provide these methods so that those changes can be made without much hassle. There's some things in this object that classifies that the particular animal I am actually talking about is actually a dog and can fit perfectly in this class. I may have gone too far and out of basic scoping so I'm going to bring it back now. So we have a dog, an owner and a trainer. I was never good at telling jokes, so I'll leave that for someone else. So we have a dog, an owner and a trainer, the dog can interface with the trainer to learn new tricks. The trainer has methods to teach the dog new trick. Basically the trainer is extending the dogs capabilities and providing it with new methods or functionality that allows the dog to perform new tricks. This is showing objects interacting with each other, which is what objects should be capable of doing if the interface is correct. It's not meant to be possible to plug the aerial into the electrical power outlet, but it is possible none the less, though the electrical power outlet may not provide this object with what it provides the TV with it still has a method to handle it and that is what you must think about too, what other methods must your object provide to make sure that it's intended use is not abused, thi s should help you think about error handling and not missing the aerial, it too must have it's own way of handling errors too. The electrical power outlet decides it'll send a current down the aerial, the error supplies the current with a means to travel its wire and when it hits the atennae the atennae uses it's method to explode or catch on fire, or something drastic that it never knew it could do before. The owner as an object, sets some of the varying properties of this dog, by giving it a name, the owner has methods of handling this dog, though the owner may not know what the dog actually wants, the owner still has a means to work with the dog. So we have 3 separate objects, each having similar properties but different methods, when thinking about objects, it's a good idea to think about building blocks and separating your code so it does not become hard to maintain. Also helps that you do not need to have the trainer around all the time, because once the dog learns the new trick, the object of that dog should now reflect that it has learnt that method and can now perform it successfully without a trainer and the owner should now understand that the dog has learnt this new trick and has learnt a method of calling the dog and making it perform that trick. These are all happening at different times, but are happening, and the objects are updating themselves to reflect these changes. So back to the question, What is an Object? Well you can see that objects can be anything and everything, that is why explaining it in programming terms is quite hard, because literally everything in your program is an object, each character, each defined type, everything. Even properties are objects, even methods are objects, they each share characteristics of objects that suggest it's an object, so no matter what your missus says or methods she takes towards your actions, it's true. However chosing the right class to define the object is where all this error handling and assault usually arises from. Properties are more commonly the constants or variables within the container or other containers, Methods are more commonly the functions and actions that are triggered or called upon to manipulate our properties or properties of other objects. You Talked Too Much and I Still Can Not Think In Terms of Objects Look around you everything is an object, the toughest part is the implementation, what actually drives the object to perform its operation. I just pressed the switch on the TV to turn it on. I changed it's state property to being powered-off to being powered-on, the implementation that works with the action of me pressing that button is the coding you must think of performing for it, so I changed it's state, I must now call on another object to supply me power, another object to supply my reception, while inside my own contained object, I need to direct the electrical current to the correct components which means I have objects inside of my own object. If I were to explain every little detail about objects then I would be here forever, e.g. Now that the electrical power outlet is supplying the power, I must direct it to a fuse, the fuse being it's own object determines what to do with it and possibly passes it off to a capactitor (another object), which then performs it's methods and then sends it off maybe to a resistor, diode and so on. I know if I did explain every little detail, I would have written the ultimate guide, but time is a factor that controls my methods. That is why I'm leaving the coding aspects up to you, thinking about every object you require in your program is the daunting part about programming but must take place, but one thing I do think everyone needs when programming is to have fun with it. Try things out, make it perform badly, correct it, do everything you can possibly think of for your program, especially trying to get it to interact with incompatible objects and you're on your way to wasting time I know, but there's too many serious programmers out there who want to get the job done, and want it done quickly while the efficiency of their program and programming style reveals their true nature. I do not want to be known as a serious hardcore programmer with years of experience behind me and the ability to help many succeed in life, I just want to share knowledge and help others improve where I left off and in the same respect they can help me continue my quest for more knowledge. I could have based this purely on code but I find reflecting it against real and known objects easier to think of than saying I'm going to write a file handling class, the properties I want to have is the name of the file, the extension the file uses, the attributes I can set on this file, the owner and location, etc and for the methods I would like to have the ability to rename the property, change the attributes so that it makes the file read only, etc. These are the things you have to sit down, jot on a pad and really dig deep into what you really want to get out of the object you are going to develop. This message was proudly brought to you by MC with additional input from my missus. Cheers, MC

You know szupie, you jumped an idea in my head, because of the punctuation comment.Morse Code is real time beep beep beep pause beep beep beep, the pausing is the punctuation , SMS Messaging isn't real time. Guess where they could take it next, bringing instant messaging or maybe call it live messaging to mobile phones. Maybe they've done this already?Cheers,MC

I feel #FF00000, #00FF00 and #0000FF are strong colours that should not be used in a major way. Usually dulling them out or fading them makes them more pleasing. Possibly #FF6666, #009966 and #6666FF would be suitable to use in a major way, had to alter green even more because it would have been a bright lime color.. Though it's entirely up to you. You can test out many colors on here if you like using BBCode's color tag and using either hexidecimal representation, common web color names or rgb representation (I think). The replacement for <font size="1" color="blue"> is <span style="font-size: ?; color: blue"> because I don't believe it is a block level element. Now I left out the font-size because the sizing is based on your font preference but using something like 1.1em; might be close to what you are wanting. If you've set it so you have 12pt, then it's 12pt + 1 font increment which could mean the next size is 14pt, who knows I never liked the usage of font. Avoid using the font tag, it's known to increase your document size ridiculously and is deprecated since HTML 4.0. CSS can handle it far efficiently now. Cheers, MC

I use to play a lot of text based games (known as Interactive Fiction) in my younger days and that increased my typing speed, probably improved my spelling and grammar. It is a good idea to get children to play these types of games, which I think is better than a mouse-click type game. I then went on to learning how to write these games using BASIC at the time, it was a completely text-based game with no graphics, similar to choose your plot story combined with fighting monsters using a dice, holding inventory, and completing puzzles. There are now many Interactive Fiction engines around so that creating your own games are much easier now.I don't know of any sites but a search for Interactive Fiction will provide you with many related things.Cheers,MC

Why did you come to Xisto, presumably for getting a Free Web Hosting service. So, it is assumed that you are going to host your own website once you have registered with Xisto.com today or tomorrow. To get great ideas for a website you need to ask yourself few questions first . Now ask yourself 1. Do I want to earn money (Business site)? 2. Is it a hobby site (personal, non-profit site)? 3. Do I want to make a site for R&D? For #1 or #2=> Always make a site on a subject in which you are quite conversant, and you can add fresh content regularly. It is always encouraging to see some people visiting your site from search engines, so optimise your webpages after conducting a thorough keyword study, using Keyword selection tools like Overture!. For #3 You can consider trying out existing CMSs first and then try to create your own website either from a template or from scratch. So far as website themes are concerned I'll state the rule of thumb once again: You must be very much conversant with your website subject, otherwise, it will lack originality and you will find it difficult to maintain the site in the long run. And a word of caution: "DO NOT SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO THE SEARCH ENGINES BEFORE GETTING YOUR SITE REVIEWED IN DIFFERENT FORUMS". Infact you will love and devote more time to your site, if you get visitor. So try to build a site based on YOUR OWN KNOWLEDGE , on any subject you feel comfortable with, share your knowledge/experience and views on that subject with your visitors, that will give you as well as your visitors much pleasure. Regards, Sid

Thank you, pawitp, for an excellent tip . Unfortunately, yes, I've tried the method you suggested even before I posted this question. I created another e-mail account, say lk@lestan.astahost.com, and tried on it everything I tried on the default account, with the same result. I even tried creating an alias/forwarder e-mail and directed it to one of my working e-mail accounts, but again nothing was forwarded. I want to assure everyone that I tried all those methods more than 3 times, so the likelihood of my having made a mistake or forgot something is rather minimal. Thank you all for your help . I believe I'm going to take the easier, though more drastic, route of terminating the account and requesting a new one. Unfortunately, when I try to do that, I get redirected to an error page telling me that some of the services may be offline. Regards, Mobham

Well, cyborgxxi, I do have other e-mail accounts as well, some of them are very reliable, but still I really need to work this e-mail account as well . And vujsa, thanks a lot for your lengthy explanation, but I'm afraid you're talking about setting up POP3 e-mail clients to work with my hosting e-mail account. But that's not the problem. All I described above happened while I was using Horde or SquirelMail, the webmail scripts available right through cPanel. Nevertheless, I'm grateful for your trying. Thank you . Hopefully, now that I cleared it up a bit, someone can tell me what the problem might be. I actually visited the https://support.xisto.com/ page, in order to understand how the termination process work, just in case this is what I need to do. I already have enough points to terminate and re-create a hosting account, and I'm desparate to get things fixed . Regards, Mobham

I saw this in a magazine but I'm uncertain where credit for this should go, as I was just at a news stand looking at everything to fill time in.The cartoon strip showed many historical events of the transition from Morse code to SMS Messaging and it related back on it's similarities.It starts off with a person doing morse code by tapping the buzzer in this means of communication, then shows the phone's history and it's means of communication by voice, then off track it shows how the phone changes from corded to wireless and then to mobile phones where it shows communication by tapping buttons to send text messages.The backwards step is we are tapping buttons to communicate, which similarly reflects the morse code method. It did get me thinking about what we should expect in the future though and looking back in history you would be surprised at knowing what we can expect in the future. I also pondered the ridiculous side of it wondering if it'd be faster to write messages in morse code using your mobile than actually the numerous keypresses needed to get to certain characters :(If anyone knows where I saw this cartoon strip, then I'd really appreciate giving credit to them.Cheers,MC

Hey vujsa,I have a concern about part of your code that is used in .htaccess.The problem here is you're specifying .inc .include to be used by the PHP interpretter, it may not seem like a problem until you start wondering about what mime-type .inc or .include would originally use. Just because you specified that it should be handled by the PHP interpretter and said application/x-httpd-php what if this did not work?In a situation where .htaccess could possibly fail (1:Million?), be overwritten (does happen), someone forgets to configure it, etc, these files are vulnerable to being viewed as plain/text (possibly?) and you don't want that. At least if you maintained the file extension of PHP, then it's a known mime-type by the server and it should not need to be told how it's handled, though older versions you had to still specify this.I think it's better to call the file something like filename.inc.php rather than just filename.inc as you're not making it compatible across all servers doing this.By allowing this other extension, although I know it was used prior (so was short hand coding and see how that went with compatibility), you now have to be aware of your doings, and that if you had to prevent someone creating a .php file from user input, you need to remember also using .inc .include as well and prevent that too.To sum up what I'm saying, if it's PHP keep to PHP's extension, if it's PERL use PERL's extension, if it's HTML, etc, stick to that extension, same goes for those who like changing the PHP interpretter to handle .html files, it's not the best thing security wise or performance wise for that matter. Keep to what's known.As a semi-related thing, also your code editors will display the right colour coding syntaxing if they knew the filetype correctly.Apart from that your tutorial seems good, though you don't seem to handle situations where include fails. Include will commonly fail if the file does not exist or unreadable, so include('thisfile.php') or code_to(... handle it ...); or better an alternative to display in it's place or if no alternative, then obviously this might need to have been required using require(), where if this fails your script terminates at the point it failed with an allowable error to be displayed.Another security bonus that you missed is that you can store your include files outside of the web root, meaning it's inaccessible from viewing it directly by it's link, which probably destroys the need for the defined() but better safe than sorry.Cheers,MC

To describe my problem, I need to give an example. Let's say my hosting account here has the subdomain http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ , with the username khayman. So now my default e-mail account for this hosting account is khayman@lestan.astahost.com, which is exactly what I see when I log into Horde. But whenever I try to send myself an e-mail from another free e-mail provider, I don't recieve anything. I try several times with the same result. I even tried e-mailing myself from khayman@lestan.astahost.com to khayman@lestan.astahost.com. Nothing! The strange thing is that I can easily send e-mails from khayman@lestan.astahost.com to any other e-mail account, with absolutely no problems. I tried everything I know of, but unfortunately nothing worked. So I hope you guys know a solution for this. If the only solution was for me to reset my account, I'm willing to do that, even it that requires my terminating my current hosting account and creating a new one with the deduction of 30 of my points. I just want to get this fixed since it's essential to me. Thank you in advance . Regards, Mobham

Good luck with that, Hercco . But if I may give you a little piece of advice, play around with this script on a test forum first. You'll probably run into a couple of misconfigurations at first, so it's better to keep your working forum safe from that, and do all your experimentation on a temporary one.Keep notes of your steps, and when you're finished and satisified with the test result, apply them to your working forum.Regards,Mobham

That's true, xboxrulz. But neither I nor the article author are really concerned with the novelty of the concept, but rather with the social implication that may or may not be associated with it. To be precise, the reason I wrote about this was to know how you guys would feel if an aeroplane suddenly turned into a flying cyber-cafe? Would you be annoyed with the kid behind voice-chatting with his/her buddy? Would you want to jump the man in the grey suit sitting next to you, tapping on the keyboard so loudly you can almost hear the plastic cracking? What about the air-attendants having to answer all kinds of technical questions which they shouldn't, but probably will be forced to? Is there a way to handle all this, so that we could enjoy the advantages of technology without worrying about its hassles? Or does any of that even bother you at all? That's what I'd really like to know . Oh, and I thank everyone who contributed here. Your input is very interesting and most certainly helpful . Regards, Mobham

For more than 5 years, I’ve been an SEO consultant. Not a brand name, mind you, but I’m one of those people who get no satisfaction in life unless they know everything from the inside out. So, naturally, I had spent a tremendous amount of time researching all about keyword brainstorming and placement, vector analysis, theme-based Websites, link exchanging, meta tag optimization, etc. So perhaps you could imagine how frustrating it was for me to see Webmasters gradually abandoning all this, and diving headlong into Google’s PR system. And like anyone who gets attached to something for so long, I initially got defensive and jumped at every opportunity to show how PR was the Devil! But then, I went to study the PR system from a neutral perspective. As I considered the subject in its many aspects, I started to understand why people were taking to the PR phenomenon, even though most didn’t understand it themselves. And so I decided to share my thoughts with you guys, so that we could study this from various points of view and hopefully come to a reasonable conclusion. * * * First of all, we should understand the mindset of the people operating Search Engines (SEs), like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search, etc. These people are in business, same as everybody else. And their business is to provide searchers with the most relevant, most comprehensive, and most suitable Websites pertaining to the search keywords used. In the old days, SEs used to do that by examining the HTML code of all the Web pages they had in their databases and indices, and applying certain algorithms to decide the frequency and the importance of keywords in those pages, and then presenting searchers with the most relevant of those pages. With time, SEs noticed that a lot of Webmasters employed scheming techniques to trick the SEs. Most notable among those techniques was the use of what was called Gateway Pages. A gateway page is simply a page that’s maximally optimized to score highly with the SEs for certain keywords, but doesn’t have proportionally decent content. The only goal of those pages is to lure visitors in, and then redirect them to another page, usually an irrelevant one. Can you see why this was a problem for the SEs? Because it messed with their business of providing quality results to searchers. So the SEs came up with another set of algorithms for ranking Websites. They started ranking them according to the overall focus of the whole Website, a method called Vector Analysis. Simply put, when a searcher searched for “football”, the SE would rank a Website that was totally focused on football higher than a Website that has one page on football, another on basketball, another on ballet, and so on, even if the second Website was more optimized for SEs than the first Website. Naturally, that was a major step in the right direction for both the SEs and the searchers. But unfortunately, this method wasn’t bullet-proof, since occasionally, a Website wasn’t dedicated to a specific subject and yet covered it much better than a Website that was dedicated to it. I suppose it should’ve been obvious to me then that the PR system was the next logical step for the SEs. I’m not going to discuss the PR system in detail here, since this is a subject that deserves a separate discussion. Plus, most of you probably know a lot about it already . Suffice it to say that the PR system is a measure of popularity of Websites. The more Websites link to Website X, and the higher the PRs of those linking Websites are, the higher the PR of Website X will be. In Google’s own words, 'the PR system is a voting system'. So why is the PR system more accurate than the Vector Analysis system? Simple, really. Websites with high PRs are essentially very high-quality Websites. They wouldn’t risk giving a link to a low-quality Website, since this would dramatically hurt their reputation. And on the Internet, reputation is everything. So indeed, I think that the PR system is a strong model for SE ranking. But an extremely important question forces itself now … 'Should we totally dispense with SEO in favor of PR?' After careful consideration, I came to the conclusion that the simple answer to this loaded question is Yes, within limits. You see, let's say Website X is an excellent Website on books, with tons of excellent content. It has a lot of incoming links from various high-quality, high-PR Websites, and so has a high PR itself. But if someone searches for a specific book, say Story of Civilization by Will Durant, would that Website rank higher than a low-PR Website dedicated to that book? Absolutely not. Try it yourself . So what’s the lesson we might learn from all this? The PR system is an exceptionally efficient system, providing a Win-Win-Win situation. Searchers are guaranteed to get high-quality results. SEs are able to provide high-quality results. And Webmasters only have to focus on improving the quality of their Websites, and quality incoming links will follow subsequently and automatically. But even though the PR system eliminated the need to spend too much time and effort on SEO, it didn’t obliterate it completely. Webmasters still should implement basic, old-style SEO, in order to guarantee that the PR system will work for them as well as it does for searchers. * * * I’m sure that, soon enough, Webmasters won’t have to know anything at all about SEO. A better system will rise to replace the PR system, with its own advantages and disadvantages. But for now, we have to make the best use of what we’ve got. And what we’ve got now is the PR system. So … what’s your take on all of this?

It is though not that new, but, still requires a review. Matter relates to Google Indexing and roaring Webmasters who have lost their rankings. In BigDaddy Google has changed a lot of codes in their algorithm to locate and penalise sites that use blatant SEO tricks to win a high rank in SERPs for specific keywords and also those sites that really add no value to its visitors. I have seen many webmasters simply shouting out to spell out their frustration and looking forward to optimise their sites for MSN even. You can check out this link Complain About Google to find people shouting at Google. They are utterly frustrated because some of them, if not all, have consumed Google juice and now being deprieved of that. Apart from employing known SEO tricks- like using hidden text, keyword stuffing- a site may be de-indexed by Google for it being not so valuable. To be more specific Google may not list sites that allow webmasters to list url in exchange of Money or a Link Back, as Google thinks that they do not really offer anything new to its visitors. LinkExchage/Link Trading was one practice that the Webmasters used to adopt a lot to get a high PageRank and resulting in a high position in Google SERP. Now the latest changes in the algorithm has struck those websites that would take part in such programs as well. Google apprears to be more skeptical about the links pointing to your pages and also taking into account different other factors including the ratio of Inbound Links to Outboud Links, PageRank etc. to gauge the importance those Inbound links vouching for your website before awarding your site with a PageRank. In fine, apart from employing know SEO Tricks, a site that does not provide fresh information to its visitors ("or what value does it add - as Google says it) will find it hard to get indexed in Google anymore.

Tell me something, CyberReaper. Do you have the faintest idea what spam is? Well, if you don't, just take a look at what you did up there and you'll find out . Copying and pasting content from other Websites and/or individuals without both Quoting it AND mentioning the source is prohibited. Here's one of the sources from which you plagiarized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(game) Please read the rules of this board before you decide to post in it. I'm sorry to say that I notified the moderators about this. Regards, Mobham

Thank you, mastercomputers .Yes, I understood all this before I posted my question in the first place, and I'm sorry for the inconvenience. Like I said, I don't have that big a problem losing the points (so long as it's not to the point I'd lose hosting ), I merely wanted to know whether this was an individual fluke or a general case. Since apparently everything is working just fine for everybody else, I'm fine with it myself.Hopefully, this topic will serve another member who faces a similar problem and doesn't know what to do about it.Again, I thank everyone for their helpfulness . Best regards.

A lot of people misinterpret "free speech" as you're allowed to say what you like when you like. Which is not correct, your "free speech" allows you to say what you like when you like liberally without intervention or a means to prevent your voice. However there are laws that override this due to the context of your speech. If you say the sky is green, no problem, that's your right to say, and people can choose to believe you or not, but if someone tried censoring you, then that's when your freedom is speech is violated.However, if someone said I'm going to kill the president, then that is not interpretted under your freedom of speech, that is a felony/offense/threat and violates laws that will override it and instead of preventing your free speech, it takes a different action towards it. They're not looking at preventing your free speech, they're looking at stopping a threat. Only the evidence that suggests it wasn't an act of free speech but an act of misconduct.Hopefully that's how "free speech" is interpretted. Mostly basing this off Open Source software though, where you are free to do what you like as long as you're within your rights to do so and abide by other rights in place.Cheers,MC

The point system we've tried to be cleared up about what unexpected things could happen, though I guess we'll continue getting posts like these because of strange occurences.Only 1 official knows the internals of this, so most administrators can only relay the information we've been told of how it works. If we knew more about it, we'd probably find means of exploiting it, so this is why it's kept hidden from us.If you reply to a spam post and the whole thread gets deleted, then you're bound to lose points, if the thread is found plagurised, etc and is moved to an area that does not gain points, you'll lose those points gained too, so we may not delete the thread.Other than that, we just have to trust that it works as intended and that you are not the only one who gets affected as it affects everyone in some ways.Cheers,MC

So I went ahead and created a method that can make use of .htpasswd. You can still use the above code the alterations just differ in the handling of the file, so I created the htpasswd checking in a separate file: htpasswd.inc.php <?phpdefine('HTPASSWD','.htpasswd');function load_htpasswd(){ if(file_exists(HTPASSWD) && filesize(HTPASSWD) > 0) { $htpasswd = file(HTPASSWD); $auth = array(); foreach($htpasswd as $h) { $array = explode(':',$h); $user = $array[0]; $pass = chop($array[1]); $auth[$user] = $pass; } return $auth; } else return array();}function sha1_htpasswd($pass){ return '{SHA}' . base64_encode(pack('H*', sha1($pass)));}//function md5mod_htpasswd($pass)//{// return 'I wonder where apache leaves this algorithm in their source, since I can not seem to work it out';//}function valid_user($userpass, $user, $pass){ if(!isset($userpass[$user])) return false; $test = $userpass[$user]; if(strcmp(substr($test,0,5),'{SHA}') == 0) return (strcmp(sha1_htpasswd($pass),$test) == 0);// else if(md5mod_htpasswd($pass))// return (strcmp(md5mod_htpasswd($pass),$test) == 0); else return (strcmp(crypt($pass, substr($test,0,CRYPT_SALT_LENGTH)),$test) == 0);}?> and to use it as is: <?php// These are required...function_exists('valid_user') || require('htpasswd.inc.php'); $userpass = load_htpasswd();// ... End of requirements// Below is just a test example.if(valid_user($userpass, 'username', 'password')) echo 'User is valid';else echo 'User is not valid';?> The only problem I have with this code is Apache's modified MD5 algorithm, I don't seem to be able to figure this out, or locate anyone who has this, so the only other option would be using system calls, but I won't do this method. So it will only work with SHA-1 (strong) and Crypt (weak). This can be dropped into the above code (by TavoxPeru) which replaces everything after the first if(statement) and before the if(!validated) where you would change that to be: if(!valid_user($userpass,$_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'],$_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW'])) Hopefully there's no errors, I tweaked some of the code in this thread, so I could have caused some errors. I probably should have added a method to write an .htpasswd file and generate a hash for the password, though all it requires is creating/appending to .htpasswd a file that looks like: username1:the_encoded_hashusername2:the_encoded_hash Where the encoded hash is basically sending the plain password to the sha1_htpasswod('plain password') function to generate the password and storing that in the file, you could use crypt but it is a weak encryption. Could use a plain text file too, but you do not want to allow access to it, which is why you use .htpasswd, since you can not view these files online (well you should not be able to). Cheers, MC

I like this except for the usage of the plain text file, if you were to do that, you should encode/encrypt your usernames and encrypt passwords, since having the username and password like this is not good, and encoding/encrypting the username eliminates half the problems while encrypting the password eliminates the other half.You should really be using htpasswd for this, that's what their purpose is for and that has it's own encrypting methods for the file.If you want the code for that method, I could write it up, strangely it's not different from your text file method, the only thing is we have encryption to work with.Cheers,MC

123 * 11 is not more than 200 * 11. See we have 200, from my rules you take the outer numbers which are 2 and 0 and you put them on the end 2(?)(?)0 already I can tell you it's more than 123 because 1(?)(?)3 The only number missing from 2(?)(?)0 is the middle number 0 which we use to add with the first number and the last number to get the center bits. 2(2+0)(0+0)0 the answer is 2200 1stNum * 1000 + (1stNum + 2ndNum) * 100 + (2ndNum + 3rdNum) * 10 + 3rdNum If I were to use 205 then it'd look like this 2 * 1000 + (2 + 0) * 100 + (0 + 5) * 10 + 5 = 2255 You can basically eliminate the multiplication part of this, this is just determining their position, 1000s, 100s, 10s, 1s. I don't know how you can simplify it, basically you're not really using complex maths (or more commonly the maths we're taught) but using simple patterns and equations to get the answer. Now let's say I asked you what is 1234 * 11 and you had to work it out in your head, it uses the same rules, but adds and extra number. e.g. 1234 * 11 1 * 10000 + (1 + 2) * 1000 + (2 + 3) * 100 + (3 + 4) * 10 + 4 = 13574 but my way is: 1(?)(?)(?)4 where I know the outside numbers and if the 2nd digit i s going to be greater than 10, then I know I must adjust that outter number, the last digit is always the same. Then all I have left to do is 1(1+2)(2+3)(3+4)4 but this is not maths, it's just a quick method for getting the answer. To show how we usually do it in maths 1234+12340 So you could impress people with really large numbers using this rule, just making sure you can keep it all in your head would be good. Cheers, MC