Feedback

I've made a few changes made to this site. Jedi had suggested that when I believed my additions were completely debugged, I should just set them up and see if anyone notices.

The new additions should be obvious enough. But a couple details that might go overlooked are the fact that you can have more than one avatar per character. I've also added a new text style, meant for things like a demonic voice, or one that has been electronically altered. M_Ma_ak_ki_in_ng_g t_th_hi_is_s h_ha_ap_pp_pe_en_n w_wi_it_th_h B_BB_Bc_co_od_de_e m_ma_an_nu_ua_al_ll_ly_y i_is_s e_ex_xt_tr_re_em_me_el_ly_y t_te_ed_di_io_ou_us_s._.

I went to great pains to make sure everything is seamless and works 100% of the time. I'd like to go into how, in case anyone's interested, because it was damn clever and took many fucktons of work. But I know many of you aren't actually interested in that part, so I'll just get to the point first.

I want to know what you think. If you've had any kind of problems, or some suggestion on how to tweak things, tell me. There are two issues I'm already aware of though. The first is that I don't think the character profile page will work for those of you with a space in your username. I'm working on that. In the meantime, if you don't mind, it might be faster to just replace those spaces with underscores. I can also tell you that nothing here will work quite right if you're using Internet Explorer, because browser-recognition and universal comparability is too much of a bitch to wrestle with before I've finished a few other things here.

If you have IE, allow me to pitch to you why to switch to Mozilla.
- It loads a little bit faster.
- It doesn't get hijacked by adware nearly as often.
- It has a built-in popup blocker.
- It will automatically transfer all your favorites and homepage setting from IE.
- The browser is actually the default one used at IBM, as well as the college I go to.

By the way, that popup blocker may actually block the dice roller. But what'll happen is a bar will appear at the top of the screen letting you know something's been blocked, with an option button. Click the button, and you can tell the browser to always trust anything coming from forumotion.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html

So... business aside, I'd like to show off now. The hardest parts about my script are all about what you can't see.
As stated before, the general concept is that as soon as you enter the site, you're redirected to an iframe that fills the entire screen, containing the original site. Anything that's saved through my programs is actually saved to a post elsewhere on this site, through a hidden frame. This iframe knows what pages you're looking at, and will occasionally generate a copy of that page with my additions. (In other words, through this process, I can literally alter absolutely anything.)

But the iframe itself was suppose to be completely hidden, and its default behavior would have given it away. I had to get rid of the scrollbars, and instead make it change its height dynamically, according to the page it's looking at. This was one of several reasons I had to figure out some way of getting it to instantly know when you've clicked on a link and where it lead to. I also had to get it to write a cookie of its last location the instant before you refresh the page, so that it returns to that location instead of the hard-coded value of the homepage. Since the first thing the page does when it loads is look for that cookie, it had the potential to accidentally direct you to that page upon opening a new window as well. So I set it to expire after 5 seconds. And I had to manually tell the parent frame to scroll to the top of the page whenever you click on a new link.

Other things I had to make invisible were the changes my iframe makes to your post after you submit it. The code that makes character names and avatars is actually inserted inside the post. It's just that the first tag therein is something that makes forumotion think the posting area has ended before it actually has, placing everything else above the player info bar.

Also, when it does a word search for the tag that Double-text font button inserts, so it knows what to change, the resulting change is an incomprehensible mess of bold, italic, and sub tags surrounding a duplicate of each letter.

So when you go back in to edit a post, where you might otherwise see all that code, my iframe kicks in again. Recognizing that you're looking at a text area, it scans the contents and removes all the things that a user shouldn't have to be bothered with.

The result is that the only evidence I haven't actually changed the original site is that the URL never changes.