That was hilarious. Bring it back!

It was like a chat room, but everyone just used each other's names to slander each other. In the end I got Aaron to implement IP checking to stop this (basically so you could compare the IPs or different posts).

Yeah it was brilliant. The original yiyi.com website let users post in a type of guestbook, while retaining complete anonymity. Very much like 4chan's /b/, but without the paging, and without the deleting, and without the pictures. It was just a text based 'anonymous' slander-fest adventure. Very fun. I'll bring it back.

woop all the way with anonymity, and its not only /b/ that has anonymity.

No, just no. If you must bring it back, atleast have IP checking.

The registration script works now...

At the moment, there is a lot of error checking, but no error messages

This means that if you make a mistake, it doesn't throw back a cryptic error, it just goes back to the main screen without any indication as to why.

This will change soon, but it's not one of my priorities. Though I was confused as to why I wasn't able to register a user called "testy" and login as that user, then I remembered that I had already registered a user called "testy" with a different password earlier!

Heh, surely it should be pretty easy/quick to make a screen that just says "FAIL"?

I thought about what you said, and thought I should get 10 minutes work in to the thing...

And here is the result...

I try to register as "azcn2503"


... but "azcn2503" already exists


So I fill out the form for "azcn2503v2"


... and it works


So I try to log in as "azcn2503v2"


... and it works


It automatically picked up that I should be in the "users" group and this sets the permissions for the forum.

This is actually a changeable option. It is possible to set a user to automatically join in to a "pending" group that lets them view posts, but not make them, or even put them straight to "banned". This was pretty easy to set up and the option is changeable in the SQL database, and will become an administrative type feature available through my own custom control panel.

Aww, you should have gone with "FAIL"

Heh, phpBB3 does the thing with automatically assigning the user to the "registered users" group (upon email activation, I believe, there's also an unregistered group, but they have no function on here). It's certainly an effective system.

So hows it going for an actual posting system?

Hmm, yes... about that.

The database is ready for it, it's just waiting for me to code up the interface.

Heh, OK. So what kind of posting system you going to have, anything special?

Yes, I am going to use something quite different but I can't give away too many details.

I modified the UGPM so that guest users can be assigned permissions through use of a group. It is possible to assign guest users to any group. Guest users are users that are not logged in to the website with a secure cookie set.

I have modified the information, error and success messages so that they appear in different colours for the moment. Error messages appear in red, information messages appear in yellow, and success messages appear in green. You'll see the information messages in the screenshot below. The code supports multiple messages from any page loaded previous to the message printer, so it's possible to load messages from a user variable collecting page, and also from the database functions page and put them all together. It's handy because it doesn't just let you know if there is an error in your code, but a contextual message at the point in your code that you specify... You know the code is at least reaching that point before halting without an error message, for example.

OK, so less of the crap and more of the screenshots.

Below you see a screenshot of a user that has just come to the website and is not logged in, therefore they are classed as a guest user, and the guest group permissions are loaded up from the database:



In the screenshot below, you can see the set of permissions that are loaded up when I log in under my username. I am an administrator and can do a lot of things:



And in the screenshot below, I am logged in as a test user. This test user is a member of the users group that normally cannot edit all posts, but a user-specific permission is put in place that allows this user to edit posts and this information is displayed on screen:



Of course, I had to modify the UGPM code...

Secure Cookies in Action... Rejecting a User

Here we go...

I log in from Safari as myself:


Then I log in from another location, let's say (I'm just using Firefox as my other location):


I try to do something on Safari that invokes a page refresh, and...


Quite self explanatory, that message!

You're probably thinking... how annoying!? But what about when you sign on to a public computer and forget to untick the "remember me" box? By using the secure cookies system, an old log in will be invalidated by the new user hash and get logged out.

The same message appears if the hacking attempt fails (hence the "cookies may not be set correctly" part)

Interesting. So does this mean you won't be able to have yourself set to always log in on 2 computers?

At the moment that is correct.

That could be kinda annoying, though I guess the security is worth it.

Yeah, I think you're right in both ways. It's annoying in some ways but the security is worth it... if I put security in to the users hands and let them disable secure cookies, they could leave a system logged on at a public locatiom and put the security of the whole website/forum at risk because the login will not fail if the user logs in elsewhere unlike in the example you see above.

Big query this morning...

And what might that do? I'm guessing it's a major part of the forum structure kinda thing.

Just picking up a load of last-post information, like what the post number was, when it was posted, who posted it etc.

Ah, OK. For the thread list or thread browser?

It's a possible inclusion for the forum index. It isn't a particularly special script, just one of the longest so far, but there are many more to come... probably that I won't make any fuss about.

Yes!

I've just coded up 40 lines of PHP and tested it thoroughly, and it works perfectly. No errors at all! I'm really becoming a natural at this. The only thing it lacks is features, and that means more lines of code.

Awesome, what does the new code do?

Question, do you separate like repetitive code (like ) with echos or just do a ?> code <?php ?