The lonely forum

Gosh this forum is Lonely and not a lot of posters posting to brighten anybody's day. "What Up"--must be the lazy days of summer here on this forum...priscella

Well, it takes energy and effort to post. I think that's in short supply nowadays.

[img=400x400]http://www.clipartbest.com/cliparts/jTx/o4z/jTxo4zjrc.gif[/img]

Thanks finished and that's how I feel....The forum is picking up a little and this is good....A few nice new members posting--how nice...p

How the forum is now is how it's been for the last year, at least.

Maybe it will pick up a little with members posting more if not that's what we have...lol lol

At least you have members. I've had a board up since March for short story writers. The only person to register posted a few stories, took what we had to give and never came back.

I get that exposure is the lifeblood of a forum, but with a unique hit counter of more than 1100 I'd have expect more than just a few registrations.

A Lonely Life is not the loneliest forum on the web.

That's sad maybe you should switch it to some kind of other forum that draws in attention and have "short stories" among the items...Forums take time to set up but they are just too complicated for me and my lack of knowledge about how to do things on the net....Don't give up and just try another way and be sure to send us your address if it is allowed or even a private pm message....It will do fine if you protect it and assure privacy I think...priscella

priscella said:

That's sad maybe you should switch it to some kind of other forum that draws in attention and have "short stories" among the items...Forums take time to set up but they are just too complicated for me and my lack of knowledge about how to do things on the net....Don't give up and just try another way and be sure to send us your address if it is allowed or even a private pm message....It will do fine if you protect it and assure privacy I think...priscella

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I'd never pollute another board with links to mine, not out in the open.  It would seem to be taking advantage.  But there was a permissible web location in the profile edit.  That's mine.

There is much there aside from stories...at least in the planning.  Writers like to have fun too.  But my mentality revolves around writing so that's the premise of the board.

I had an inventor's board up for years...invitation only.  I ran it from a home server so there was no registered address for it (ouoooooooooo  dark web).  There is no way I'll let Google or Bing exploit my unregistered ideas.  But changes to my internet provider made a home server unreliable.  I took it down.

I can put up a new forum in a matter of minutes.  I use this same software that Lonely Life uses.  It's pretty easy.  All it needs is a home and a few minor tidbits of information.  It installs itself.  Populating it can take some thought.  The hard part is finding interested parties to breath a life into it.

Thanks did not know any of that--thanks.....priscella

Yeah, I used to program in PHP and MySql. I created my own full blown forum site from scratch. It was pretty much high jack and spam proof. It had real interactive games, instant messaging, and lightning fast posting capabilities. I also included a full blown dating site along with it. You could have both public and private friends and enemies. I incorporated anything I thought was cool.

But, pulling in repeat users is very difficult. Also finding anchor members / moderators that are fun and that like to interact with users is very difficult. I sure didn't want to do it. Ha! Ha! A lot of the sites pay people early on until membership grows. I didn't want to do that either. I tried other avenues but decided it wasn't worth the effort.

In the past it worked pretty well to setup an Apache server at home to host sites. But, that pretty much ended. I renter a server on a server farm and sold space on it. But, it was too much effort. Then I switch to normal hosting. But, I didn't feel like paying for hosting, domain names, and increased traffic. I never got into generating income via advertisements. That might have changed things. But, I was part of the old free Internet where ideas and software where freely traded.

Finished said:

Yeah, I used to program in PHP and MySql.

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I have a PHP issue I'm dealing with now.  I wrote an editor based on Firefox wysiwyg.  It was for the sole purpose of writing.  I got it to work.  It had a library that let me add new titles or edit older titles.  I could go to any of my work and it would save when I quit typing.  That was the whole inspiration for it.  I got tired of the Mesa power-outs costing me work all the time.

So, what it was was the editor and supporting files were copied every time I started a new title.  Everything was in the title folder.  It worked fine but that meant if I had a dozen titles then I had a dozen copies of the editor.  I only need one copy of the editor.

I moved the editor files to the root directory, but now I can't figure out how to make the editor understand the directory tree for individual titles.  It loads the selected data file but tries to save in the root (overwrite disaster).  I ran across some PHP code today that might eventually solve the issue, but it's over my head.

I know how to make it work with one title.  It's easy enough to hard code a path.  But I need to understand global variables and directory management to be able to use the library.

If you could point me to some code examples I might figure out what I need to do.  But for now I don't even know what I'm looking for.

Yeah, hard coding locations works just fine on your local machine. But, it really sucks when something changes. It's best to use relative path addressing. It makes everything more portable and re-usable.

https://www.w3schools.com/Html/html_filepaths.asp     Good Basic Site

https://phpdelusions.net/articles/paths

After reading the documents go below and look at all the code samples. You'll usually learn something from others
https://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.dir.php     Folder Operations
https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.scandir.php

As far as global variables just use a search engine for that. 

https://riptutorial.com/php/example/2496/global-variable-best-practices

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1909647/make-all-variables-global-php

The best thing to do is look for as many examples as you can find, load them onto your server, and see what happens. Then comment out different lines to see what happens then. But, before you get to far along read up on PHP Best Practices and how to avoid code injection and authentication. Look up Honey Pot. I started out by figure out what works like many others do. Then I had to go make many times to correct all of my bad practices.

Good advice. Thanks for the input. I'm not a programmer. But I need a certain application and I can't afford to farm it out. It's just me.

I am so glad "that old finished " is good for something....priscella.. Seriously I think he is a very smart young man...I am now being nice...smile smile..

^ I don't think anybody can call me a young man any more even you. IMO, you begin being old at age 40.

You have plenty of good years ahead of you and to me your a young one even at 50..but I like to call you the "old one" because of your smartness--sometimes..lol

Finished said:

^ I don't think anybody can call me a young man any more even you. IMO, you begin being old at age 40.

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priscella said:

You have plenty of good years ahead of you and to me your a young one even at 50..but I like to call you the "old one" because of your smartness--sometimes..lol

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You are only as old as you feel.

^ Then I guess I'm 100!

lol lol I guess so..

Finished said:

^ Then I guess I'm 100!

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But if you live to be two hundred you are only middle aged.