[Resolved] Need advice on forums pleez!

Reapz

I'm currently writing the forum for my webby having been unable to find one that is customisable enuff for my liking. The mechanics of it are pretty much finished, posting, viewing, editing etc. It wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be. I've also got BB Code (well similar) as well.

I put the BB Code in for ppl who don't know HTML but at present you can still use HTML in your posts or signature. Basically I wanna know if this is a good idea or not. I notice that most of the forums I read have got HTML Code turned off so I assume its better that way. I suppose ppl can do all sorts of stuff in your forum if they have enuff know how. How can I get the forum to ignore all HTML in the post? I can't seem to get the regexp right!

Also, i have a row below the messagebody textarea that contains Smilies like most forums. How do you get the text area to update when you click on one without reloading the page?

Thanks in advance,

Andy!

eoghain

Allowing HTML is BAD. Any script kiddie out there will have some piece of javascript that they can insert into your Forum that could then be used to mess with your users. Never allow users to enter HTML text that will get sent by your system.

Now to get rid of the HTML you'll probably be best served by using a regex and they are all over out there but here is one that should work for you:

   preg_replace("/<[^>]*>/", "", $text);

That might need some tweaking but should work, note I didn't test this.

Reapz

Nice one m8, that did the job perfectly. The regexp I was trying to use was way more complicated. Sigh... so simple when you know how!

Cheers!

Reapz

I've got another question now... 😃

Most forums have a line at the top telling you which members are currently browsing that particular forum atm.

How's that done?

eoghain

It's done by having your users login, and then using a cookie to track there access to your site. Finally you use gather timestamp information and use that to "assume" weather a user is still looking at your site or not.

So when a user views a page you log the time they brought up the page, and check that data everytime the page is loaded so that when someone else views the page withing say 5 minutes of when another user loaded the page you can display that users name, if it's been more than 5 minutes you can assume that the user isn't looking at your page anymore, but hasn't logged out (possibly typed in a new URL to go to).

xblue

eoghain, I'm sure your regex works, I just wonder why you use this rather than simply strip_tags()?

eoghain

No reason I guess. It's just what comes to mind first. Plus if you know how to use regex you can expand this to do things like convert your HTML tags into text that will display the HTML instead of parsing it.