Doesn't anybody who knows how to write software run a web board? I mean, damn, it's not particle physics or brain surgery.
At least RobBoard worked. The code was kinda icky and it wasn't open source, but it (like YaBB) was Perl, so it's not like I was really kept from messing with it. I fixed a bug or two and added several cool features that made it work better, imo, but I couldn't publish my changes without permission. That was OK since I wasn't doing it to publish, I was doing it to run a board.
But YaBB doesn't even work very well! It's open source
(well, theoretically: it's under the GPL with the serial numbers filed off) but it forces you to do things certain ways--like credit the YaBB group. Are we assumed to be adults who know better than to let people think we wrote this leet board script? No, if you remove the token that puts the ugly-ass copyright notice in your page, it puts big text at the top of your page saying you're running an unauthorized version. It's supposed to be free software and it does that. Someone just doesn't get it, methinks.
It also depends heavily on JavaScript. Heavily. So heavily in fact that if you're configuring a YaBB and decide you don't want to allow UBBC--the pseudo-standard for minimal web board HTML--well, I hope you weren't planning on anyone using the Preview
button. Of course it doesn't take the button away, it just breaks it: it depends on this WhichClicked
function that dynamically changes the real form element--type=hidden, natch--that says which Submit button you pressed. This function, otherwise unrelated to UBBC, is in the ubbc.js it includes when UBBC is enabled. So if you turn off UBBC, both the Post
and Preview
buttons post your message.
And it's not as if they don't know they could use document.write to add the button only when it will, to the best of their ability to predict, work, since half the widgets on a fully-decked page are added that way. It's like they went out of their way to break it.
They also use user-agent rather than capability checking, in their JavaScript. It's an arcane subtlety, but if you understand capability checking is The One True Way, man, but that pisses you off. It's so antithetical to how the Web works, it's basically blasphemy.
And why, oh, why does it seem like no one--not LiveJournal or UserLand or anybody else, it seems, who works on the web--actually uses these standards for web protocols that have been fought over so hard for us? Why do so many, in the dawning age of 6.x browsers, create such <table/>-ful markup? Radio UserLand's desktop website is all tables, all LiveJournal's templates are tables, and YaBB claims to let you control your own pages with a template but then embeds the operative parts--all tables, of course--into umpteen Perl scripts. It's all a sham of fucking tables.
A simple little web board script is apparently way more than one can ask. Next time I'll just use Quick Topic or something.
