Carry on with your childish ways as you wish. I don't care as long as you keep it somewhere else.

When you want to host sig pics somewhere without paying for a server, these tricks are the most reliable way. This trick has worked with geocities for years, and will likely work for years to come. Free sites that don't block hotlinking are hard to find, and rarely last long before A) they shut down your acct and delete your files B) they block hotlinking or C) close down service.

1) 'default' setting says nothing! As I've heard from many people, EI for example doesn't give a shit about MIME type definition of the server 'by default'. I thought the others browsers were smarter, but then, I had to help NetDanzr into getting his Opera to display png-images properly because it always showed it with a Quicktime plugin a few weeks ago. You see, it's not always the same.

2) Only fools need such 'tricks'. It's one of the lamest things I've ever come across - face it.

1) All my browsers have the default settings for mime types.
2) Tricks like changing the extension of a pic at geocities to .txt are used by many people I know, and everyone can view those images without altering anything in their browsers.

I don't know exactly how it works, I just know that it does.

Ahem.... do you have your browser set to override MIME type settings?

You can do it in reverse too. If you want to hotlink an image from tripod or geocities or some other site that blocks it, changing the file extension to .txt will almost always work.

If you rename a script file to .gif or something and it still works, you really have a shitty server - because it means the gif-filetype is not properly defined.

Edited by Mr Creosote at 13:40 on October, 20th 2002

Just checking something. If this works you can edit it out, if it doesn't then it doesn't matter.
Well, that was interesting.... {img}http://togarten.netfirms.com/cgi-bin/random-img.gif{/img} alone worked fine, but when I also put in {img}http://togarten.netfirms.com/cgi-bin/random-img.cgi{/img} neither one worked. I guess you set it so that any post that included an img tag with a cgi file extension disables all image tags in that post?
Anyway, my guess was right, renaming the file to a gif extension lets it slip past most script sniffers.

Edited by Cypherswipe at 23:34 on October, 19th 2002

You know what I think about images in signatures in general. And allowing scripting in forums is just foolish! That's like an open portal for anyone who wants to misuse the platform. If scripts are allowed, I could for example run one which reads all cookies from someone's browser if he only reads the topic I posted it in! And there I have all your passwords. That is only one example - 'creative' minds should have no problems coming up with more.

Yeah, netfirms says to include it, I was thinking of marhost.com. Marhost says to include it for cgi files but that it's not needed on pl files.

I want to use the script for board sigs, that's why I can't use SSI.

Looked over it and it doesn't say anything about leaving out the path to Perl (in fact, it says you should use it on every second point). In addition, it says you can use SSI, so you really shouldn't bother with lame image-tag-script-calling. What's the point of doing it wrong when you can do it right?

I see in the faq that it does say to include the #!/usr/bin/perl, I also see that the scripts I've been using do have it at the very beginning, but I didn't notice it because of the copyright section.

hrmpff :-

Anyway, here's the perl faq for netfirms in case you're interested- http://www.netfirms.com/supportSearch?BROWSE=advanced

And such behaviour is extremely amateurish and childish, yes. Now you finally got it right

...and all I'm saying is that it's like programming webpages for IE, it may not be proper, but it is very common. There are many free scripts that work this way, and there are even some hosted scripts that work from an image tag. (Several people on the one board I frequent use it.)

Look, what I'm trying to tell you is this: I can't help you if you're running on such an extremely lame system which doesn't follow any official standards because I follow them - how should I know what your provider allows and what not? It is obviously not a proper Perl version.

I've never denied your little scripts might be working, but they're not Perl! They won't work anywhere else, they won't work in this forum. I wish you the best of luck with your project, but that's all I can (and want to) do.

This script works if you paste the url, and the script I used to have worked in a tag as well. (This one does redirect the url within a tag, but doesn't seem to randomize.)

Well, it doesn't

Well, I neither know nor care about 'correct' programming, I just want something that works.
Also, nearly everything I've come across indicates that if a file uses a pl extension it doesn't need the path to perl, but if it uses a cgi extension it does. I saw somewhere one time that either linux servers need the perl path and windows servers don't or vice-versa, that might be related to the pl/cgi thing too.
I just put that img up to demonstrate that it does work.

Edited by Cypherswipe at 22:05 on October, 17th 2002