Upgrades, some help needed
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- dr-spangle
- Technical Advisor
- Posts: 13072
- Joined: Wed May 30, 2007 12:20 pm
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Upgrades, some help needed
Hey, I'm planning a couple little upgrades and new features, and might need some help on a couple, I'll outline them all here, and then say which I might need help and how.
1)Captcha (The funky letters image thing), I need to add a captcha system to descriptions and modifications, to stop spambots doing stuff, I might use recaptcha, I think they have good documentation on how to install it all.
2)Language tags, To replace the text entry parts for websites and forums, saying what language they're written in, so people select that the website is in english and french rather than typing English, French. which leads to a lot of variations in spellings of English, somehow. also you would be able to see how many sites are in French compared to Russian, etc, make some pie charts and stuff
3)Safe files, basically, my culture upload and flag upload were insecure, I knew it, I simply denied it but someone uploaded a shell script through the flag upload, (a c99, crappy old one) and changed the index page, I fixed it, and removed the shell script and blocked file uploads, I need a way to make them safe again, I need some help on this, I can't find a decent way, (I'm trying to check mime types, but I'm actually checking the mime type the browser tells me, which means the browser can tell me whatever it wants)
4)Graphs page, Everyone loves graphs, let's collect them in a page for graphy glory.
5)Cultural items categories, Making categories for cultural items, maps, backstories, etc it would help people see what kind of stuff can be uploaded as cultural items, also I could make a plaintext upload for backstories, so you can copy and paste the story in, rather than save it to a file and upload it
6)Screen-shot websites, I've been wanting to do this for a while, make a system that can take a screen-shot of each website on the forumlist every day/week/month/whatever so you can look through and see how their site changed, I tried to do this long ago, hit a million stumbling blocks and basically, I can't do it. I would really like some help with this
[POSTBOX]
Factuality: Low, mostly just ambitions really.
Opinions: Some, interpretation of why features need to exist and how they could work
Joking: Low, not a lot of jokes in this post really
Emotion: Mostly , bits of and
Spelling & Grammar: Rather Reasonable, might be difficult to follow in some places, but spelling is probably all ok
Research Sources: http://www.google.com/recaptcha
[/POSTBOX]
1)Captcha (The funky letters image thing), I need to add a captcha system to descriptions and modifications, to stop spambots doing stuff, I might use recaptcha, I think they have good documentation on how to install it all.
2)Language tags, To replace the text entry parts for websites and forums, saying what language they're written in, so people select that the website is in english and french rather than typing English, French. which leads to a lot of variations in spellings of English, somehow. also you would be able to see how many sites are in French compared to Russian, etc, make some pie charts and stuff
3)Safe files, basically, my culture upload and flag upload were insecure, I knew it, I simply denied it but someone uploaded a shell script through the flag upload, (a c99, crappy old one) and changed the index page, I fixed it, and removed the shell script and blocked file uploads, I need a way to make them safe again, I need some help on this, I can't find a decent way, (I'm trying to check mime types, but I'm actually checking the mime type the browser tells me, which means the browser can tell me whatever it wants)
4)Graphs page, Everyone loves graphs, let's collect them in a page for graphy glory.
5)Cultural items categories, Making categories for cultural items, maps, backstories, etc it would help people see what kind of stuff can be uploaded as cultural items, also I could make a plaintext upload for backstories, so you can copy and paste the story in, rather than save it to a file and upload it
6)Screen-shot websites, I've been wanting to do this for a while, make a system that can take a screen-shot of each website on the forumlist every day/week/month/whatever so you can look through and see how their site changed, I tried to do this long ago, hit a million stumbling blocks and basically, I can't do it. I would really like some help with this
[POSTBOX]
Factuality: Low, mostly just ambitions really.
Opinions: Some, interpretation of why features need to exist and how they could work
Joking: Low, not a lot of jokes in this post really
Emotion: Mostly , bits of and
Spelling & Grammar: Rather Reasonable, might be difficult to follow in some places, but spelling is probably all ok
Research Sources: http://www.google.com/recaptcha
[/POSTBOX]
- pawelabrams
- Posts: 3207
- Joined: Sun Jun 24, 2007 8:14 pm
- Location: Novograd, Interland
- Contact:
Re: Upgrades, some help needed
@1: reCaptcha is possibly the most simple solution that can be found these days. I've coped with it's installation on my site (with complex skinning system) in a few hours - with choosing which background it should use (default red didn't suit me - and for Forumlist black should be the best option).
@3: As the files which may be useful for culture don't have many extensions you can list them - and disallow any no-extensioned etc. This will be safe if Bluehost doesn't allow any php code in png files (And I know people who would make all files executable on their server just to have no problems with php code which they saved in html files ). Additionally, you can make a search for <? and any html tags. Those should avoid simple php attacks.
I hope you do use mysql_real_escape_string's as well ;p
@5: Don't forget about strip_tags - but don't be too restrictive, someone might want to use bold or italic text.
@6: I don't know if it can be done with PHP. Maybe a service like http://www.websnapr.com/ would work for you.
EDIT: http: //images.websnapr.com/?url= <insert url here> &size=s&nocache=89 - it's that easy! (Sometimes it says 'thumbnail has been queued' - you must wait a bit then)
( e.g. http://images.websnapr.com/?url=www.web ... nocache=89 )
EDIT2: Oh, just to be sure, you should register first, I think ;D
@3: As the files which may be useful for culture don't have many extensions you can list them - and disallow any no-extensioned etc. This will be safe if Bluehost doesn't allow any php code in png files (And I know people who would make all files executable on their server just to have no problems with php code which they saved in html files ). Additionally, you can make a search for <? and any html tags. Those should avoid simple php attacks.
I hope you do use mysql_real_escape_string's as well ;p
@5: Don't forget about strip_tags - but don't be too restrictive, someone might want to use bold or italic text.
@6: I don't know if it can be done with PHP. Maybe a service like http://www.websnapr.com/ would work for you.
EDIT: http: //images.websnapr.com/?url= <insert url here> &size=s&nocache=89 - it's that easy! (Sometimes it says 'thumbnail has been queued' - you must wait a bit then)
( e.g. http://images.websnapr.com/?url=www.web ... nocache=89 )
EDIT2: Oh, just to be sure, you should register first, I think ;D
Pavel' Abramovic:, the President of Interland
IRL just a random guy from Poland. Still learning English.
IRL just a random guy from Poland. Still learning English.