[st_jimi]

did the admin code the free forum script him self??

[Symon]

Free forum script ???

How do you mean

[admin (no pm's please)]

We use phpbb2 which is an open source forums system, this has then been modified extensively by us.

But what you might call the "free forum script" is unique, there are some pale imitation scripts that you can buy, but ours is developed from scratch and makes our management system far superior to anything else out there.

It is a sorry fact that some people are touting free forums services which cannot expand beyond the bounds of a single web server, hence if they get at all successful they start having severe problems

We currently run three dedicated web servers for forums and two ancillary servers backed up by more 3rd party servers for "nameserver" services.

[st_jimi]

yes i do know what phpbb2 is guys

yes i was in fact referring to your forum managment script, ive seen a few on the net and all looked pretty crap to be honest with no thought for future expansion, i think people buy them as a get rich card with no real thought in the future and as they have no expriance of php they fall at the first hurdel.

have you got any qualifications in computing/ programming.

[admin (no pm's please)]

I didn't even realize you could buy scripts for the job when I set up myff and I'm glad I didn't

I have practically no paper qualifications, but I have been programming for more than 25 years.

I once ran a fairly popular BBC micro software company, I once wrote a software encryption system for a Ministry of Defense college. I can program in anything from machine code, basic, fortran, c, c++,javascript, php, assorted scripting languages, oh and I have written a couple of programming languages for good measure
I'd also have to boast that I have taken a number of failing software projects (and most software projects do fail) and made them successful by in essence turning preconceived notions on their head I think that is one of the benefits of being self taught, you don't have to think outside of the box as you were never in the box!

[Mike]

^ Now thats technical.

Do you have hacking skills, as in can you take over someones PC using command prompt or whatever it is?

[admin (no pm's please)]

Basically yes. I was one denounced as a hacker by a local council leader who accused me of hacking into council systems A totally baseless accusation as it happened, but I did have a certain reputation

Reputation is not the same as reality though, and nothing I have ever done was destructive or vandalistic. I have nothing but contempt for those that deface web sites etc.

[CodyT07]

[Bravo]

He can also cook a mean beans on toast

[Viper]

Basically:

Admin > Us.

[st_jimi]

very technicall, i really want to start to learn programing, im already good at html/ css and know a very little amount of php just enough to get by editing small bits of script, what language did you learn first, ive been recomended to learn javascript before php as js comes handy in php, what do you think?

[admin (no pm's please)]

What I learned first is of little relevance, BASIC was where it was at in the late 1970's

I do not think Javascript is at all a good language to learn if you wish to know about good programming It is a utility language to get web related jobs done, it has little formal structure to encourage decent design. php is better on that score but will not great.

I would have to say I'm a pragmatist with programming not into the academic purity wars that afflict some adherents of particular programming religions, but I would still recommend you learn something like C++ and read up on object orientated programming if you really want to learn properly.

I could tell you about a guy who write highfalutin books on object orientated programming, and who when I worked with him wrote the most perfect of objects, with just one slight problem he wrote the wrong object

Or I could mention the importance of understanding database design in programming and how important reducing things to "third normal form" is, if you want database perfection I'd then go on to mention getting an extremely rare thank you from one of the men in gray at a particular institution where I managed to unravel such "perfection" to make a database work 20 times quicker and thus save their bacon

I think the best route to actually learn all this type of stuff is to get a decent number of good books and give yourself a reasonably sized programming challenge that demands genuine design in a way a lot of scripting languages fail to do.

Frankly even something like phpbb2 is an insult to real programming, it is little more than a badly written script.

[Mike]

Hehe nice admin!
So without me sounding rude... You must be like at least 40?

[Hardcoregamer]

LOL. 40!

Anyways, I started out with Ruby then Oracle, then I moved onto Phyton and the fpi, then java, HTML, XHTML, CSS, and then C++! I almost master Visual Basic!

[admin (no pm's please)]

[CodyT07]

[admin (no pm's please)]

[admin (no pm's please)]

Another quick observation on the above, as when someone mentions writing a forum one can't help but think about it.

Now one of the problems with writing a forum is database design, phpbb2 for example elects to separate the text of a post from the post records, this may or may not be optimal, probably they would know better than me!

BUT both phpbb2 and phpbb3 totally and abysmally fail to "abstract" the issue, looking at viewtopic in phpbb3 it is a mess of database queries and cache stuff, code too long and sordid to want to quote and a nightmare to change or debug.

On the other my code to get post text would be something like:

$post = new forumPost($postid);
$text = $post->getPostText();

viewtopic would need not worry about whether the posts are even stored in a database. Let alone how the database is laid out.

By taking this approach code may start off a little slower, but the bottlenecks are easily identified and targetable for optimisation. What you end up with is readable manageable and much faster results.

[st_jimi]

[admin (no pm's please)]

To be honest whilst I still have government contracts on other stuff, what i quoted was from my younger hacking days, and at that stage being self taught there were enormous holes in what I knew

Which is one of the things that convinced me to invest in large bookshelves, whilst I have contributed a few pretty smart algorithms such as an effective sparse bitmap class and a hashed array class that outperforms the standard classes by miles, the fact is no matter how good you are you can't reinvent everything better than someone else has somewhere has done!

[st_jimi]

have you ever considered doing free lance scripting for people?

[admin (no pm's please)]

We do do web sites which need custom scripting. For example:

squatorange

is in development, I would point out that the custom screen is a first draft due an update.