Grizzly: your bbs

[rock]

Grizzly, I've been trying to DL the Bazooka Board, but it looks like bazooka.wox.org is down. Is there an alternate download source?

[Grizzly]

Nah it's not down, it's just on port 81 because my ISP is blocking incoming port 80 requests

The correct URL is:

http://bazooka.wox.org:81/

Definitely let me know if you have any questions.

[rock]

Still can't seem to get in there (BTW, I had the port right in the link part, just got lazy typing). Is it possibly our firewall here? Can others out there see this site?

[Grizzly]

Yeah it's most likely your firewall at the office. I get new hits on that site everyday, so I know people can see it fine.

But....as a quick solution for you, I'll post it on some port 80 webspace I still have up.

http://www.asharpdesign.net/BazookaBoard_25.zip (WINZIP)
http://www.asharpdesign.net/BazookaBoard_25.tar.gz (GZIP)


Note that this webspace is about to die on me, since I haven't paid the bill for it in quite some time. So if that link doesn't come up tomorrow, you'll know why

[rock]

Grabbed it fine from there. I untarred it and will hopefully have time to play with it at lunch.

Thanks.


edit: As an aside, what are you doing on that site that our firewall is not allowing? :rolleyes:

[Grizzly]

It's nothing but HTML, I swear! I'm guessing that you have port 81 blocked for whatever reason. Good luck with it rock.

[yoshi273]

THAT BB ROCKS YOUR SOCKS!!

[yoshi273]

btw griz, i think ive got like 2-3 ppl using it. The main complaint if that anyone can post w/ any name... I know the only way to prevent that is thru a user system tho... got any ideas?

[Grizzly]

Yeah, I'm still undecided on the user account idea. The entire point of the Bazooka Board is to be simple...and not require a database. If I were to integrate a user account system into it...than I would:

a) Need to create a second writable file for storing user data.
b) Get carried away with user profiles, permissions, post counts, etc etc.
c) Inevitably make the Bazooka Board less "simple"

I'm just not sure if it would be going to far at this point...I mean, if I want to go all out, I would use a MySQL database and make the next vBulletin or phpbb, but that was never my intention since there are already a thousand different Bulletin Board systems out there which do just that.

The thing is...it would be very cool, and very robust for a non-database message board system. I'll have to keep thinking on that one. Right now I'm working on the next version so the templates can more easily support different languages. I've had requests from lots of different countries who want multi-language support for it. So that's my next focus, after that...who knows...I'll definitely put some serious consideration into the user account system.

[yoshi273]

Just an idea.... i wrote this set of functions that pretty much covers all aspects of storing data in text files. Ive used it with some of my more recent projects. It seems to work well, havent had it screw up any data or anything yet. Here is how it works:

The data in the file would look something like this...

3432|^|Name|*|Adam|^|Status|*|Elite|^|Username|*|Grizzly|^|

I like to call it an associative array database. When I parse that line of code through my data functions, ill get something like this:

$Userinfo['Name'] = Adam
$Userinfo['Status'] = Elite
$Userinfo['Username'] = Grizzly

the 3432 at the start is for the database's use. It is just an ID number so it can sort data and allows you to have multiple identical data still be different. I think it still needs some optimization. It gets kinda slow when processing a few thousand records...

[yoshi273]

oh, one other thing. I had to store important user data (password hashes, etc) for the News script in a file. If you store your data like this...

<filename: profiles.php>
$userinfo = "user data separated by funky characters";
</filename: profiles.php>

When they view the PHP file over the internet (if the user doesnt have a non-web visible directory) then it wont show anything. As long as its a PHP file, it will be good.

[rock]

So, I haven't been able to get this running since I can't seem to get php-4.1.1 to build on the Solaris box. I finally got around a READDIR problem, but now am getting another error no one else seems to ever get....

But, I have found a jsp-based form called WebForum, but half the docs are in French, so it's slow going there.

[Grizzly]

Hey yoshi! Sorry for the late reply here...been extreemly busy lately. But thanks for sharing your file storage methodology with us. I kind of like it...I might give it a shot someday. The only drawback I see to it, is data redundancy. Speaking in database terms, your file storage method basically defines column headings for *each* and every record, which will end up making the file 2X larger than it really needs to be in the long run, and might slow things down a bit when you get into huge numbers. But I kind of like the fact that you can load up an associative array like that with only a few lines of programming.

Also, thanks for the tip on keeping bad people out of datafiles in the webroot. But I do think that if you keep the file permissions to 666, than no public eyes can read the file. But in an NT environment, permissions work a lot differently.

And rock...that's really odd that you can't get PHP installed on the Solaris box. It almost sounds like there's a previous built-in version of PHP on it already, which is conflicting with the version you're trying to install.

That's cool you found a JSP forum, I did some looking but didn't find much myself. Post a link to this JSP forum so I can check it out.