1 Reply by ptlis

(36 replies, posted in Feature requests)

Jacq wrote:

E-mail thing doesn't really help. Database gets a new record, e-mail get's sent and so on creating dos effect without user ever responding to the e-mail. Been there, deleted accounts.

Can you run cron jobs? If so then you could write a script to remove accounts that have not been authenticated after some arbratary timeframe such as 7days.

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2 Reply by ptlis

(36 replies, posted in Feature requests)

You could always go the old authentication email way; it's not perfect and for somebody who know what they're doing circumvention would be relatively trivial, but then the same goes for images now (thanks to the major improvements in OCR software). It would mean that the user would sign up for an account with an email address, but not specify a password. When the authentication email is sent it would contain a randomly generated 8character password and a link to the authentication page, with a get variable containing a md5 hash of the password in it (eg auth.php?md5=9487FGH3424FG2FGR3432Q42C342R34), the user would then have to enter their username and password. A check would run to make sure that the md5 hash of the password the user enters is the same as the md5 hash stored in the database and in the md5 get string. The user would then be prompted to enter a password they could remember, this could then potentially be checked for complexity for extra security, the new password would be hashed and stored in the database.

Of course this method is probably not the best, but it is platform androgenous (will work for any webserver capable of running php & connecting to a SQL & SMTP server).

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3 Reply by ptlis

(16 replies, posted in General discussion)

[url=http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips#oth_memcache]Firefox Tips and Tricks page[/url] wrote:

Specifying memory cache usage
Normally, Firefox determines the memory cache usage dynamically based on the amount of available memory. To specify a specific amount of memory cache, add the following code to your user.js  file:

// Specify the amount of memory cache:
// -1 = determine dynamically (default), 0 = none, n = memory capacity in kilobytes
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capacity", 4096);

To disable the memory cache completely, add the following code:

// Disable memory cache:
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.enable", false);

That should help some.

Also, for some reason I get errors when I try to close the quote BBcode tag. hmm

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4 Reply by ptlis

(54 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 discussion)

I currently use powweb, i'd currently reccomend against them... navigating my site is painfully slow right now (and for the last month or so) thanks to some server problems they've been having.

EDIT: But then, they're really cheap for what you get $80/year with free domain registration, 5Gb daily transfer limit, 1Gb storage space and such.

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5 Reply by ptlis

(99 replies, posted in Programming)

Rickard wrote:

I don't dislike Java for ideological reasons, I dislike it because I have yet to try out a Java app that has been fast and especially responsive. Also, I don't like the fact that Java apps always use their own odd way of designing the GUI.

In that case you will be pleasently surprised in some respects; JEdit, once it's loaded into your memory (takes about two seconds) fast and responsive (otherwise it would be no use to me), the GUI is odd both using the X windows system under GNU/Linux & *BSD as well as Windows, but in to me it's not actually bad (and is certainly better than applications such as XMMS which has a damn near unusable default skin). I would advise you give it a try; I was as cynical as you (rightly) are now until I did...

ptlis

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6 Topic by ptlis

(2 replies, posted in PunBB 1.2 discussion)

For some time now I have been considering the current state of the popular BB software available, and frankly they're too bloated and all seem to be suffering from bad cases of feature creep. After spending some time looking for a minimalistic alternative and finding a number of projects which claimed to be so, but were not, I decided that I had no alternative other than making one myself from scratch (removing all the cruft from, for example, phpBB would almost certainly take considerably longer, and I would not learn nearly as much); i've been working on it in my spare time over the Christmas break (being a University student means that I don't have a great deal of time during the semmesters) and have a reasonable amount of the basic stuff implemented. And then an idle google search while looking for information for one of my assignments found a page with a link to this site.

Now punBB is almost exactly what I was looking for in many respects; it is minimalistic, well documented, themeable & (very importantly)uses valid XHTML 1.0 STICT & CSS. Unfortunatally it is not as bare-bones as I was hoping for/intending to develop; it has some features that I had not intended to have installed by default (for example Avatars, userdata pertaining to their location, IM usernames and the like) and lacked one major I did want installed by default, which the option to enable and disable threaded and flat discussion on a per-forum basis. To augment this there would be a number of supported modification modules which could be optionally installed to add support for the features not installed by default.

My question is whether the developers of PunBB would have any objections to a fork of the source tree with the intention of making the above BB implementations possible; my modifications would of course be released under the GPL licence and additionally any pertinant bugfixes and tweaks and such could (and almost certainly would) be shared between the two projects.

I am eager to hear the response of the developers, and if they would prefer that I did not fork the source code then I will respect their wishes. Conversely if there is interest in removing some of the features moving them into user-installable modules & adding support for threaded discussion I would be very glad to co-operate with the current team to that end (I hope that does not sound arrogant, if it does then I assure you that it was not my intention -- but many hands make light work & with an established community of users & developers who are familiar with the source such modifications would likely prove to be relatively trivial).

I eagerly await a response...

ptlis

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7 Reply by ptlis

(99 replies, posted in Programming)

JEdit, it's cross-platform (great for us GNU/Linux & BSD users), fast, GPL licenced, has a wealth of plugins meaning it can be transformed into a powerful IDE and has excellent syntax highlighting for (X)HTML, CSS, PHP as well as a wealth of other programming & markup languages (SGML, XML etc). The only potential downside is that it is written in Java, and so many people are unwilling to use it for ideological reasons (totally understandable, but unfortunate).

ptlis

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