Hi,

vol7ron is right.  You can get to the install new forum but nothing is working.  You need to pm him and send your ftp information so he can set the permissions right.  You have everything uploaded but it's not working.

I went to your board and tried the login and password and got the error you get.

I can't get this to work.  This seems to be a problem with Perl.  I even copied my old forum over to your directory and fixed the paths in the Settings.pl file.  This should have worked --- you can tell because it loaded the template files correctly.

For some reason it seems like your Perl cannot handle parameters being passed to it.  It can run Blah.pl but can't call any of the subroutines like:
Blah.pl?v-register/

Justin may need to install this for you, but I think you're going to have to talk to your admin again about problems with Perl.

Ok, I will phone in the morning with the support of my host. I hope this will help.
Thank you very much for your help and time.
It's great to be here in this forum.

Hi everybody,

I phoned this morning with the support of my host. The guy at the phone told me, that he tested the server and Perl works well.
He puts a stratotest.pl in the forum dir, so now we can see the complete server configuration.

http://www.forum-freie-mystik.de/cgi-bin/forum/stratotest.pl

Perhaps it is possible to install Eblah with these informations.

I have both good and bad news for you.

Good: I think I have found the problem
Bad: I'm not quite sure how to solve it yet.

I think the problem is with your version of Perl, or you missing a Mod that the Forum requires.  I'm not sure which yet as my experience with Perl is dated and I've been just getting back into it.

The problem is what I suggested before with passing parameters to the program.  Traditional parameters are assigned to a variable with an equal sign (=), whereas E-Blah uses a minus sign (-) in the query string.  I am not exactly sure why, other than it's different and looks nice, but it works for the rest of us.  It could be some effort to deter bots away (who knows).

I'll look into conditions of the query string and see why this would be a trouble.
____________________________________________
To help depict what I was saying. Running:
____________________________________________

program.pl?variable=value
print "Query String: ".$ENV{'QUERY_STRING'};  # this shows 'Query String: variable=value'


program.pl?variable-value
print "Query String: ".$ENV{'QUERY_STRING'};  # this shows an error


Both of these work on mine.  One option is for you to go through all the code and change all the links from a minus sign to an equal sign.  But I would suggest waiting before you do that because you don't want to have to do that with each update.  Instead I'd talk to your admin about the problem and maybe figure out how to solve it from there.

The issue is for any argument passed into the query string without an equal sign.  All of these generate errors:
program.pl?test
program.pl?-test

And these don't generate errors:
program.pl?test=
program.pl?=test

The support of my host told me a few minutes ago, that the Perl installed on the Stato servers doesn't tolerate a minus-sign as an equal-sign. So I think, I have to change all "-" to "="
I hope this will solve the problem.

Tell your support host that your server doesn't tolerate anything.

Tell them to go to:
http://www.forum-freie-mystik.de/cgi-bin/forum/stratotest.pl
(There is an environment-variables section.  You'll notice that QUERY_STRING is blank.)

Then tell them to go to:
http://www.forum-freie-mystik.de/cgi-bin/forum/stratotest.pl?Test
(obviously an error will occur)

Finally tell them to go to:
http://www.web-critic.net/cgi-bin/stratotest.pl?Test
(now look at the QUERY_STRING in Environment-Variables)


The problem isn't just the minus sign.  It's the fact that there is no equal sign at all.  They need to fix that.

Another problem with changing all the links is that you'll also have to change the separator function from a minus sign to an equal sign as well.  I think it's in Blah.pl

Really we should be using the CGI mod to handle the URL form arguments.  Justin/Martin (whomever updates the code) should start converting all the links to equal signs and using the CGI.

$_ = s/(href=\".+?)\-(.*?\")/$1\=$2/ig

I wrote the RegEx above to replace anything like hReF="blahblah-blah blah" to hReF="blahblah=blah blah".  I didn't test it but I think it'll work.

Just make a program to loop through the forum directory and sub directories, read in each file line by line, make the change, output it back to the file and move on.

Again you'll still need to modify the Blah.pl, I think there's a split() function somewhere in there being called for the URL separator.

@ vol7ron
I mailed your ideas for solving the problem to my support. Unfortunatly they don't answer until now. I hope, they'll do so tomorrow.

Quoted from vol7ron

Another problem with changing all the links is that you'll also have to change the separator function from a minus sign to an equal sign as well.  I think it's in Blah.pl

Really we should be using the CGI mod to handle the URL form arguments.  Justin/Martin (whomever updates the code) should start converting all the links to equal signs and using the CGI.

$_ = s/(href=\".+?)\-(.*?\")/$1\=$2/ig

I wrote the RegEx above to replace anything like hReF="blahblah-blah blah" to hReF="blahblah=blah blah".  I didn't test it but I think it'll work.

Just make a program to loop through the forum directory and sub directories, read in each file line by line, make the change, output it back to the file and move on.

Again you'll still need to modify the Blah.pl, I think there's a split() function somewhere in there being called for the URL separator.

1.) I changed them from = to - for SEO reasons.  It's worked very well.  Old versions of E-Blah had the =.
2.) CGI is used some, but not for every call.  I tried to limit usage of modules to speed E-Blah up.   CGI is used for things such as attaching files.

We should open a new thread on how to speed things up even further.  I think if we obfuscated the Perl code, it could potentially speed things up dramatically.

What I'd recommend is having two files.  One, a source file, that allows users/programmers to easily write and make changes to the code.  This would also be good to include as many comments as possible.

Then we'd run it through a Perl obfuscator and it would output our compressed production program without comments, linebreaks, or anything.
Also, I think Perl allows you to load parts of the Mod into memory to speed things up.  I think CGI has a lot of security features that help make things inpenetrable.

Quoted from vol7ron

We should open a new thread on how to speed things up even further.  I think if we obfuscated the Perl code, it could potentially speed things up dramatically.

What I'd recommend is having two files.  One, a source file, that allows users/programmers to easily write and make changes to the code.  This would also be good to include as many comments as possible.

Then we'd run it through a Perl obfuscator and it would output our compressed production program without comments, linebreaks, or anything.
Also, I think Perl allows you to load parts of the Mod into memory to speed things up.  I think CGI has a lot of security features that help make things inpenetrable.

CGI does.  There are features in place that make sure that nothing can be put into a URL without CGI though.  CGI is just big and clunky for something you only need a few parts of.  I try to use modules sparingly.  

As for the comments -- have you looked at my code?     I don't know how to use comments.