Message Board Reader ====================== Version 1.40 Copyright (C) 2002-2005 Sebastian Reichelt Introduction -------------- This program is intended for reading and posting on message boards hosted on http://www.ezboard.com/. Its advantages are the ability to search through all posts on a board, download all unread posts at once, read posts offline, and distinguish between read and unread posts in a topic. Updated versions of this program can be downloaded at: http://tigcc.ticalc.org/download/boardreader.zip The source code (written in Borland Delphi 4) is available at: http://tigcc.ticalc.org/download/boardreadersrc.zip Disclaimer ------------ This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. Installation -------------- Copy the program to a folder on your hard disk and run it from there. Warning: The program creates subfolders in the folder it was started from. Start the program, click 'Settings', and set up your proxy configuration. Reading a Board ----------------- If you have been supplied with a package of offline-readable topics, copy the contents of that package into the program's folder first. Type the URL of a message board into the 'URL' edit box and press . If you installed a package of offline-readable topics, you will see them now, and the program will download only the first page (usually 20 topics) from the internet. To download the missing topics as well, right-click on a topic and click 'Refresh All'. If you did not install such a package, you are asked whether you want to download the entire contents of the message board. If you choose to do this, you can stop this action at any time by pressing . If you choose not to, only the first page is downloaded (again, usually the last 20 topics). After a refresh, you can check who recently visited the same board by positioning the mouse over the question mark in the top right corner. Clicking the question mark will cause a refresh. Reading a Topic ----------------- To read a topic, simply double-click on it. If it still needs to be downloaded from the server, this is done immediately, and the topic is shown once the download has been finished. You will see the posts in the order they were written. Unread posts have a white background, while read posts have a light gray background (depending on the colors in your system's control panel). Posting on a Board -------------------- To be able to post on a board, you need to have a global or local account. Along with this account there is a cookie on your local computer which enables a web browser to log in automatically. To post from this program, you need to set up a cookie as well. To do this, click on the 'Settings' button in the program's main window. Now you have two choices: 1. You can copy and paste the cookie which your web browser uses. Some proxy servers can show a log of all data or at least all headers that are transferred. The web browser sends a header line starting with 'Cookie:', which you can copy and paste into the appropriate edit box. 2. You can log in from this program with a user name and password. To do this, click on the 'Login' button next to the appropriate edit box. Then enter your user name and password and click on 'OK'. In the status bar, you will see that the program is trying to log in; when it displays 'Ready', the cookie should be filled into the edit box. If this is not the case, there was an error logging in. Note: Local accounts are local to the current message board and saved separately for each URL. Warning: Cookies are stored in the registry and in the message board files. They are not encrypted in any way and visible to all users. If you consider this to be dangerous, do not use them. Note, however, that the same holds true for usual web browsers as well. When you post a new topic or a reply to a topic, you send it to the server by clicking on the 'Post' button. Once the topic was sent, the screen is updated and the 'Post' button disappears. Do not click on 'Post' more than once if you don't have to; otherwise you run the risk of double-posting. For replies, the text is saved if you close the window; you are warned if you close a forum before it has been validated. This is not true for new topics, however. Depending on the permissions you have on a forum, you may also be able to edit and delete posts. If you want to edit a post, first you have to click on 'Edit', and then on 'Reload' if you want to load the original text (with tags) into the editor. Optimizing Program Operation ------------------------------ You can call the program with one parameter, which has to be the URL of a message board. You can also call it multiple times with different URLs. You can set up the program to check for new posts periodically. If you minimize the program, and a new post is received, the program restores itself to its normal size automatically. Moreover, you can enter a sound file which is played in this case, either in the program or (after the first run) in the system control panel, using sound schemes. You can let the program run as a taskbar icon. In that case, minimizing it causes the window to be hidden from the taskbar. Multiple instances of the same program use only a single icon. They are accessible by right-clicking on the icon. You can perform several operations anonymously, i.e. without sending your cookie to the server. With appropriate configurations, other users cannot see that you are online. Note that if you download topics anonymously, the program cannot see which kinds of posts you can edit or delete. If you do not see an 'Edit' button where you think there should be one, temporarily change the configuration to non-anonymous downloads, and re-download the topic. There is also another quirk: In anonymous topic listings, only the first page of topics with the 20 most recently updated topics is downloaded. Therefore, topics might get lost if you do not visit a message board for several days. Other ways to customize the program are, for example, changing the button layout, or defining aliases for users. Version History ----------------- January 9, 2005: Board Reader v1.40 * Implemented another workaround for broken tables due to ads. December 19, 2004: Board Reader v1.39 * Implemented workaround for broken tables due to ads. April 21, 2004: Board Reader v1.38 * Implemented relative URLs in topics, in case the server name changes. * Implemented server-side HTTP redirection (but not perfectly). * Slightly changed the HTTP headers sent. March 19, 2003: Board Reader v1.37 * Fixed a minor bug which caused my own name to be displayed as the poster upon a fresh installation. December 16, 2002: Board Reader v1.36 * Fixed the use of EZCodes after a software change on www.ezboard.com. December 13, 2002: Board Reader v1.35 * Worked around a Delphi bug which caused the Board Reader to hang after downloading large topics with a lot of preformatted text (code). * Fixed a small display bug when switching forums if there were unverified new posts. November 9, 2002: Board Reader v1.34 * Fixed a bug which could cause the Board Reader to crash if a topic was deleted while it was being downloaded. November 4, 2002: Board Reader v1.33 * Fixed a serious bug when switching forums: If a download was active, an illegal instruction error as well as data corruption occured. October 13, 2002: Board Reader v1.32 * Added the user name to the forum contents, to stay available if the initial download is anonymous. * Fixed source code indentation. * Added support for
tags. September 28, 2002: Board Reader v1.31 * Various minor bugfixes. September 22, 2002: Board Reader v1.3 * Implemented customizable anonymous downloads. * Worked around a bug (in Delphi or Winsock) which often caused data corruption during downloads, resulting in topics getting cut off. The program is now more tolerant with respect to the data it receives. July 2, 2002: Board Reader v1.23 * Implemented the possibility to use IP addresses instead of host names (may have worked before on some operating systems). * Added the display of the IP address of the current server to the question mark in the top right corner. June 30, 2002: Board Reader v1.22 * Fixed the hand-point mouse cursor on Windows 95 (which does not have its own, so a custom one is used). * Fixed an infinite loop bug in the search feature. June 28, 2002: Board Reader v1.21 * Increased the hide timeout for 'Who's Online'. June 28, 2002: Board Reader v1.2 * Fixed a bug which often caused the Board Reader to hang when the system was shut down and multiple forums were open at once. * Added 'Refresh All Forums' to taskbar icon. * Added 'Who's Online' capability. April 23, 2002: Board Reader v1.12 * Fixed the bug in the last correction which would cause the post to re-appear as not read. April 20, 2002: Board Reader v1.11 * Made the program automatically mark own messages as read. April 20, 2002: Board Reader v1.1 * Added the possibility to specify a time correction for each forum. * Added an option to play a sound if new posts are received. * Prevented scheduled downloads while displaying an error message. March 24, 2002: Board Reader v1.06 * Fixed a bug with automatic scrolling. March 24, 2002: Board Reader v1.05 * Fixed a bug which often caused the first refresh operation to fail. March 20, 2002: Board Reader v1.04 * Fixed a bug when editing posts. * Fixed a bug with the multiple instance management. March 16, 2002: Board Reader v1.03 * Added checking for another possibility of 'HTML Comments'. March 16, 2002: Board Reader v1.02 * Added checking of replies for 'HTML Comments' and other annoyances. * Made the program keep replies until they are validated. March 10, 2002: Board Reader v1.01 * Fixed the error handling mechanism for 'host not found'. * Fixed an access violation bug. March 2, 2002: Board Reader v1.0 * Added a drop-down list for all visited message boards. * Greatly improved the search feature. * Implemented name replacements. * Added the possibility to rename forums. * Made the button layout customizable. * Added buttons to move between topics. * Added detection of links to other topics. * Added detection of deleted posts (also to fix a bug). * Added detection of EZCodes and Emoticons. February 16, 2002: Board Reader v0.71 Beta * Fixed some bugs in the communication between different instances of the program. February 10, 2002: Board Reader v0.7 Beta * Implemented editing and deleting posts. * Implemented minimizing to a taskbar icon. * Made the message windows resizable. * Added a check preventing the same forum from being loaded twice. * Fixed a bug which caused the program not to download anything when started in minimized state. February 8, 2002: Board Reader v0.5 Beta * Initial Release