BB code help, please?

[Arcayne]

Code: Select all

<img src="http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e173/kaharu1/sangrewolfhallolrg.png" ><img style="position:relative; top:-550px; margin-bottom:-550px; display:block;" src="http://l.yimg.com/g/images/spaceball.gif" alt="" width="450" height="550">

Everytime I see CS pets, I always wonder how it is that they can print our names on the pet's picture so it isn't stolen and how to replicate it on another website to deter the 'sneaky collectors'. Unfortunately, it requires knowledge which I absolutely don't have and probably never will so I decided to look for another way to do it: by covering the image with a sort of "protective layering" which kind of functions like a glass case for the image. Now, it's not foolproof like the CS system. In fact, it's super-easy to get past if you know what you're looking for but I'm not going down without a fight. Doing it like this requires a lot of patience from the HTML illiterate 'sneaky collector' as he or she is going to have to go through tons and tons of source code(seriously, there's a lot) just to find the image code and the possibility of missing it is pretty high.

However, there's one problem. I don't know nearly enough to convert it to BB code for forums and so, I am, stuck...

If anyone has a solution for this problem, please tell me and I'll be forever grateful.

P.S. The file spaceball.gif is borrowed from flickr.com. This is because my MacBook Pro is at the Apple Service Centre currently and I'm stuck with an obsolete iMac G5 which doesn't seem to like Photobucket very much.

[Icesky]

I have wondered the same thing. Hmm.

[Nick]

BB code is extremely limited and you will never find a forum which has the features needed to do this, sorry.. .

[Icesky]

Is there a way to share how CS does it? Or is it to complicated or just a secret for CS :3 -Which would be understandable-

[Nick]

There are two parts to the problem:

- Remembering what adopter name the pet had in a way that the user can't fake up (so the URL for the pet's image can't mention the adopter name, you could just edit it).
- Creating a custom image on request which has the name printed on it

The first bit is probably the hardest, you have to store this information somewhere on the server, like in a database. The second bit is then reasonably straightforward with the GD2 image library for PHP.

[Arcayne]

So for that you'll need a seriously large database or one with unlimited space as well as a professional web programmer... Dang...

I'll, er, ask my cousin about this. He'll know about it I think... I have another question though, how different is SQL from MySQL apart from the fact that MySQL is newer?

[Nick]

You really don't need that much storage space in your database. You can expect each pet to take about 50 bytes to store. That means that 100,000 pets only takes 5MB to store.

SQL stands for Structured Query Language, it's just the language that you use to communicate with a database. MySQL is a popular database that understands SQL .

[Arcayne]

So does that mean I could just buy any old book on SQL and learn from there?

[Nick]

More or less. There are some small differences in the language between different implementations (for example, the syntax for manipulating dates is very different between MySQL and Oracle), but the basics are the same in every database provider which understands SQL.

[Mausoleum]

I've been trying to figure out how to tag stuff too..... I'll have to learn some day.