I read that year extension (ie 98 -> 1998) only works for years 1970 to 1999, anyway.

____________________
Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?

There was more to this dream, but a part I remember particularly well is about a weird ancient device.

It was a CRT screen, but apparently more than just a screen. Hovering something electrostatic over the screen revealed a frame of what appeared to be a text editor opened in an ancient operating system (Windows 1.0 or so?).

But continuing to do so also caused the screen to refresh and show different frames. As if the CRT tube itself was somehow dead but the rest of the device was working.

While I was hoping to somehow save those frames and extract more data from that interesting device, mom thought it was junk and threw it away somewhere, to my disappointment. That broke the CRT but it didn't implode. And somehow it still shown frames when hovered with something electrostatic.


There was another part with dad and me in a computer part store. Me wanting to acquire ridiculously big RAM sticks for my computer (2x16GB or even more, don't remember), and thinking about switching to 64bit windows because that was more than 4GB of RAM...

____________________
Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?

There were many things to this dream but most of them have been forgotten, as always :/

What I remember starts with me taking a bus. Had a feel that the bus was slow, too slow. There were one or two other buses that were faster and overtook us.

Bus stops in some town place. It starts doing weird things, you know, like those buses that are able to lean towards the bus stop so that it's easier to get in, except it's leaning way too much. It even almost fell on the side.

Once the driver is done having fun with that, he finally opens the doors and I leave the bus.

I walk towards some mall building. There's a fire truck going, pretty similar to the ones in GTA V. It's going fast as if there was an emergency, but it doesn't have its siren or flashlights on.

I get to the entrance of the mall. The town is apparently a vacation place or something. The mall is right next to the sea. The area in the entrance is even somewhat flooded. We're walking in shallow water.

The mall is also a restaurant, there are several people eating in the entrance park. I give someone a thumbs up to tell them that I'm enjoying the place.


There's another part, with no connection whatsoever, possibly just a different dream. I'm at my grandparents' house, with some friends. We're in a bedroom that is under the roof.

I notice that someone didn't turn the computer off, and turn it off, including the monitor and the mouse, which for some reason is the wireless USB mouse I use with my laptop (despite the fact that said computer runs Windows 98 and afaik doesn't have USB ports).

It's very cold and windy outside. I take notice that a roof window isn't properly insulated. Oddly, it looks like it IS properly insulated, but coldness blows in as if there was a huge gap somewhere.

Then there are more windows. Three windows, which weren't those Velux things but standard wall windows mounted horizontally. Those are very high. Of course, someone manages to accidentally open them. It's a pain to close them back, and someone has to stay outside to help (and end up locked out on the roof-- he has to find a way to get down).

Oh well, eventually we get them closed.

____________________
Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?

Since activity on this project has declined quite a lot, I figured I'd make this thread.


Basically, we can either just provide Acmlmboard as-is to whoever has the curiosity, or try to be on par with the popular forum softwares.


If we're going for the latter, it will require dedication from everyone. The final product needs to be clean, polished, stable, intuitive, easy to use, and all that junk. It's time-consuming. We will also need to find places where we can show it off or yet better, find people who are sick of their phpBB install and want to switch to something else, and convince them to use Acmlmboard.


Blargboard has mostly been my attempt at going this route.

When it first went live, it was private, pretty much being to Kuribo64 what 'Acmlmboard b378.03' is to Jul-- my own ABXD version, tweaked to fit Kuribo64's needs.

Eventually, I offered Treeki/Ninjifox to use Blargboard as a replacement for RVLution's phpBB. This is when Blargboard went public, and adopted some features of popular forum softwares such as templates. RVLution was converted to Blargboard, and it was cool.

Since Blargboard was going that way already, I figured, hey why not attempt to distribute it?


In the end, how has that worked? The only serious board that ever used Blargboard (and wasn't mine) is RVLution. I attempted going out and advertising Blargboard. When it wasn't called spam and deleted, it just mostly went ignored. And that guy at TAZ shat on it because it's not up to today's retarded enterprisey standards (apparently, in that world, rewriting your code every two months to match the new standards is more important than adding features or fixing bugs).


So why am I mentioning Blargboard? Certainly not to try advertising it. At this point I don't really care anymore about it. I'm mostly using it as an example of what it takes to get your forum software popular these days. Needs dedication, and with the current amount of motivation within the AB2 team, it's not going to happen anytime soon.


Might as well talk about what I found lacking in the development process. We'd need to agree on coding standards and a good base framework.

In the current codebase, there are several styles mixed together making the thing messy. Hell there are even unused things that were never finished.

For example, HTML output. All the old files output hardcoded HTML with the help of that $L thing. There have been attempts to improve that. Kawa and DJBouche coded some layout functions. Some files are using them, but they aren't flexible enough to be used for the whole board. The way they work also causes nested array hell.

In my opinion, no predefined layout functions are going to cut it. We need to either use templates or stick to hardcoded HTML.

By the way, why is $L still a thing? It made sense to have such layout variables in the early HTML days, when CSS wasn't widely supported and color/background/whatever attributes had to be replicated all over the place. But now? All it does is allow to type less.


There are also a few other things like that. Some unused database code comes to mind.


Agreeing on coding standards would also avoid things like Scrydan going and turning all the codebase into a hopeless mess that eats all the server's RAM. Oh well, that's not an issue anymore, because he got butthurt and left, but you get the point.


Oh also, increased complexity. Although that's bound to happen with things like the permission system. But for example I still think the average query counts are high. Far better than the 100+ we'd get before, but still high.



So basically, what are we doing with that?

____________________
Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?

The issue is that anything else than PHP will raise the entry barrier.

Moving would be good though. PHP was designed for quick, lazy progamming from day one, and that shows.

____________________
Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?

Haha, I like that comparison. Well, PHP itself is okay security wise, as long as you disable shit like magic_quotes and register_globals and remember to do things right.

It definitely lacks safety code wise, though. Typo in a variable name? It automatically declares another variable for you. Typo in a constant name? It assumes you meant the corresponding string. And so on.

PHP notices warn you about that shit. But in a codebase like AB2, they get drowned among a ton of warnings about shit like $user[name] and other meaningless shit.


Another language would be good as long as it's sane. Python could be a good choice I guess. I'd have to take a while and learn it, but who knows, can be useful.

____________________
Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?

I don't think outdated practices are directly a security risk. AFAIK all the queries have everything escaped, register_globals isn't in use anymore, and so on, so it should be pretty secure.


I'm not against OOP when it actually makes sense. Like, when certain things are better represented with objects, because it makes the code more modular or whatever. Or even cases like the MySQL interface, where it's nice to have the internal variables encapsulated and not global.

But OOP for the sake of it? Fuck no. If Acmlmboard turns this way, I'm leaving. Sadly making every damned little thing an object is part of 'today's retarded enterprisey standards' as I put it. They want to make code more modular, which is a good idea, but overdoing it turns your code into a big tangled mess of objects and references. There are some variables, like in our case $sql or $L, which are going to be used everywhere, and having them globally accessible is far better than putting them in some classes forcing you to go through 15 layers of classes to find what you want.

They also enjoy splitting stuff in tons of separate classes, which is also not so much a good practice. For example, this is init code for Smarty vs Twig.

require_once '/path/to/lib/Twig/Autoloader.php'; Twig_Autoloader::register(); $loader = new Twig_Loader_Filesystem('/path/to/templates'); $twig = new Twig_Environment($loader, array( 'cache' => '/path/to/compilation_cache', ));

Twig init code taken from their site.

include(__DIR__."/smarty/Smarty.class.php"); $tpl = new Smarty;

Smarty init code from Blargboard.

Ignoring that autoloader thing I don't get the point of (maybe I missed something there, but what's wrong with just include()ing code files?), notice how many objects are involved. $loader is apparently meant to be the part that loads template files, while $twig is the 'environment' responsible for rendering them.

What is the point of separating the two like that? An environment without a loader would be pointless, and vice versa.

Being able to load templates from different sources is an interesting feature, but in this implementation, it comes to the price of having to keep track of two objects instead of just one.


Oh well, maybe I'm being rusty. I dunno, but when I code shit, my main concerns are simplicity and performance (and security when it applies). Their main concern is... making everything an object. And making even more objects for creating and managing those objects. And retardedness doesn't only apply to PHP; everywhere programming seems to be like "who cares if we waste resources, we have plenty of those!".

____________________
Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?

Could be an interesting idea, heh. The best part is that portability wouldn't be too much of a concern since all sane webservers run Linux.

But this'd raise the bar even higher than, say, Python. You'd need a VPS to run such a thing.

But my God, if that shit works (and is secure, with all the risks of buffer overflow and shit), would it be fast!


(although 'reinvent the wheel' syndrome should also be avoided)

____________________
Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?

I remember a part of my dream where Gohan had a server. He was banned from this board for hosting malicious stuff (password stealers I think) on said server, but the ban reason wasn't specified clearly. Instead, his title read "Banned: I don't know why!".

Oddly, Chpexo was banned as well, for teaming up with him.


Another part was about me playing Giants Citizen Kabuto, destroying big buildings with Kabuto to demonstrate his fierce attacks to mom.


Oh and there are even more parts... god it's a mess.

____________________
Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?

The issue of SQLAlchemy and ORMs in general is that they apparently tend to make simple queries really simple... and more complex stuff a nightmare.

IMO sending raw SQL would work best. Maybe with something like ABXD's querybuilder, so we're sure there is no SQL injection anywhere.

____________________
Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?

First question, why do we have the option to choose the redirect type? Most people are going to either choose instant redirects or not care. While it's nice to give them the choice, I don't believe it's very useful.


Then, I looked into the code, and the way it's done isn't the cleanest. I may give some help in adopting a cleaner code structure when I find some time/will.

How I typically do these things is basically:

1. check if a POST action was requested (if not, jump to 4)
2. if so, run the appropriate checks on the input. Raise some error flag if something is wrong.
3. If no error happened, perform the action, send Location header and die()

4. start HTML output (pageheader() for Acmlmboard)
5. if an error was raised, display it
6. display the form, with the appropriate data


That's basically how I did it for editprofile. This method also addresses the issue of 'when to send header()s/cookies without getting "headers already sent"'.

It also makes error reporting more user-friendly. Right now, if your submission has an error, it sends you to a separate error page that invites you to just come back to the forum/thread instead of going back to correct your input.


Relatedly: newthread/newreply/editpost/sendprivate have their form code duplicated between normal and preview modes. That has no reason to be.


This isn't to complain about the code, but to give pointers for the code cleanup/refactor that we're planning.

____________________
Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?

After watching this video yesterday, I imaginated a similar scene with me escaping from jail by using a guardian as a hostage.

Amusingly, my dream the night was exactly that. Of course, as dream logic implies, it was absurdly easy.

When I arrived in the jail yard, there were many guardians. They weren't trying to attempt something, except the ones behind me were walking slowly towards me. But I was constantly looking everywhere to make sure they didn't attempt something.

Then I reached the door, which was open. For some reason I mega-jumped over it instead of going through it normally. The door and wall were also unusually short for a jail (they were like 2-3 meters high). No barbed wire, spikes or such crap on the top either.

Right after the door, it was the sea, as if the jail was on an island. But there was a truck on the left. I started it in the typical GTA5 fashion. Given how little space there was between the jail walls and the sea, it was tricky to drive, but eventually I reached more normal road, back to town or something.

At this point, the guardian I had previously used as a hostage apparently just disappeared. No police or anything going after me, either.

Then I just came back to my hotel room to take a bath and relax. At this point, my sister entered the room.

____________________
Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?

Nice litte thing SquidEmpress

I'd make it distinguish between 'no email set' and 'email is set but not public', though. But it's just that I'm for transparency, I guess some people will prefer it the way you made it.

____________________
Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?

Also, make sure you don't leave any security holes in

____________________
Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?

You can look in lib/layout.php what values those variables are given.

Alternately, you can leave them out entirely. They don't serve a purpose other than letting lazy devs type less.

____________________
Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?

Like MrRean, I didn't know her much either, but I got the feeling she was a nice person, really. Rest in peace Taryn

It's sad to die this young, really.

____________________
Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?

I have to say, KP's dream was fucking amazing. Like, really. Usually dreams are just a bunch of nonsense (and I don't know about you but I only remember the end). But this one, man, it's so realistic and detailed, you could make a story from it.


Meaningwhile, blarg, I fail at remembering my dreams these times. Mostly uninteresting crap I guess

____________________
Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?

This theme gives backgrounds to certain tables, but not to table cells themselves. That may be why.

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Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?

Kinda pointless imo to have a panel for modifying the board version/credits. Same goes for the views and other stats.

Other than that, things like board lockdown are handy to have.

(also would be nicer if the date fields were actual date fields and not UNIX timestamps, but I'm nitpicking)


Also, nice style. I thought that was the actual Jul panel for once.

____________________
Kuribo64 - melonDS

want some revolution in your coffee?