Re: Episode 13: Special guest echicken, Synchronet web dev, and Mr. Robot
By: echicken to Digital Man on Wed Dec 09 2015 12:50 pm
That was quick! Looks like you ran the verify step too! Normally, those will be run from Vertrauen the results (including login screen capture) will be distributed via the SYNCDATA echo, but it's good to have something
Yes - I noticed that the preview for each BBS wasn't populated after I imported the list from SYNCDATA, so I ran the verify step locally so that I'd have some "images" to work with.
Cool. Glad you figured that out. I didn't remember if I had added any command-line syntax help output, but you are skilled in the ways of the source, so that's good.
to test with. You're encouraged to help beautify load/sbbslist_html.js too, but the generated sbbslist.html is a stand-alone page (not integrated with any web framework) intentionally.
I actually think it looks okay, though it's a bit slow to load. It's clean and simple, which is good - and would look fine if iframed into another page. I could make a few cosmetic changes, but that would just be to make it suit my preferences and not because it's bad in its current state.
My brother asked me why I didn't use images rather than HTML-ified ANSI/CP437 test and my answer was because the text scales really well and it's searchable and indexed/scraped well by archiving engines. Images would probably be a lot smaller and load faster though.
I'm not sure if spammers harvesting addresses from mailto links is still / ever was much of a problem, but it might be good to omit the sysop email addresses from the list, or obscure them. There are a number of ways to do this with client-side JS, which would stop simple scrapers. (Maybe base64 encode the address when producing the page, then decode it on hover / click.)
I think there are still email address harvesters. I think I still some spambait addresses hidden on someone web-sites and they get new spam often. So yeah, obscuring that would be good. I've heard the harvesting programs have JS engines now too, but I don't know if that's a fact. Any help and feedback is appreciated.
digital man
Synchronet "Real Fact" #25:
The Synchronet Web Server was written predominantly by Stephen Hurd (Deuce). Norco, CA WX: 74.4øF, 30.0% humidity, 3 mph SE wind, 0.00 inches rain/24hrs
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