I understand that the limited HTML editing for the new forum is a challenge for you CIII. You’ve created some fantastic charts and and tables in the old forum.

phpBB, the new forum software, doesn’t just disallow HTML table tags, it excludes ALL HTML tags. I’ve personally been on other less secure forums in the past, where spammers posted virus attacks, but finding weaknesses in their code (even once ended up getting a virus on one computer, due to the sneaky way they posted the forum post and then I innocently clicked on it… and I’ve been doing computer programming for over 25 years!)

Forums are one of the most common ‘vectors’ for new viruses: it’s a simple way to manually inject the new virus once, and get it disseminated quickly from there.

HTML Tables are not of themselves really suspect, but full HTML support would be. For example, full support would require implementing stylesheet support (i.e. the style tag), which is another attack vector to get into the forum code.

The end result is that the designers of phpBB decided that they would have complete control over the post formatting, and implement their own very limited tag subset for a few features. Forums operators, like me, can augment the bbcode set, which I’ve done to allow HTML-like tables for you. But, it does mean converting your pure HTML tables into the new bbcode format. If there are some new HTML-like bbcodes you want, let me know and I can explore adding them. It may also be possible to write conversion scripts to quickly convert some of your HTML tables into suitable bbcode.

By disallowing the direct inclusion of HTML in general, the phpBB designers are guaranteeing that no virus attack is possible on forum posts. But, this does mean that fancy formatting is a pain (in the you know where!)

I do use tables often so that the lack of align(left, right and center), nbsp, colspan, width, height, are causing me concern.

I could create a ‘td’ tag replacement (called ‘tds’, let’s say) that has most of those attributes. The challenge is that attribute are not optional in bbcode… if I add them, then you must specify them (hence, why I added a ‘tdc’ tag, rather than add an attribute to the ‘td’ bbcode.) I could add: align, colspan, width, height. And, I can add a new ‘nbsp’ tag to do that (which indeed is helpful in tables.)

Let me know if that would help… and it shall be done!

Ok… super advanced table support now implemented, see this post:

http://goldentouchcasino.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=302&p=576#p576

This is not for the feint of heart! But, it is scriptable (i.e. can autoconvert some of your HTML code, given fancy SED editor scripts or similar), and should support the vast majority of tags you use. If you need more attributes on any tags, let me know.

Dan,

Is there a substitute for the preformatted text command in html <pre> </pre>.

I found that the easiest way to present a table of text and numbers in columns and rows on the old forum.

Is there something comparable in bbcode?

Skinny

2nd question.

Frank did not bring over the thread replies to the posts he copied to the wisdom pages.

There were some replies I had in some of my posts that were pretty helpful.

Can I still get to them because they are no longer on the old forum.

I am willing to do the work to copy the thread over for those that I think are worthwhile. But I can not find them anymore.

Especially the post, "Are you controlling the Dice?". I remember doing some work with confidence intervals for the normal distribution in that thread that would be useful to me in the future. Being able to refer to those threads would save me the trouble of having to redo and remember how I did the calculations. People sometimes ask me questions where the data in that thread and some of the others can either answer the question directly or give me information I can use to work out the answer.

Skinny

Is there a substitute for the preformatted text command in html <pre> </pre>.

I have now added a "pre" tag, like this:

[pre]This is a fixed width font!
1234 78 9
Zwii a1 9[/pre]

Which was generated by:

[pre]This is a fixed width font!

	1234  78 9

	Zwii  a1 9[/pre]

"Skinny" wrote: 2nd question.

Frank did not bring over the thread replies to the posts he copied to the wisdom pages.

There were some replies I had in some of my posts that were pretty helpful.

Can I still get to them because they are no longer on the old forum.

Skinny

The old forum is unchanged yet, and still around for this purpose. Nothing has been deleted yet. You can get at it here:

http://astro.webcrossing.com

I’m not sure why any topic discussions would be deleted in the old forum, but please feel free to copy the replies over (as part of the main topic text, unfortunately, or you can try and reply and add them, but they will be under your name.)