HTML in posts?

[Ashkhar Ben]

Hey guys.

Long time lurker, just made a new account. I've seen plenty of people make effects and various tables, etc in their posts, but is this done with HTML or the built in vbulletin software?

Is HTML even allowed? The main reason I ask is that I currently am working on a game system that I have posted to my blog: ashkhar.wordpress.com. I own all of the rights and plan on publishing it through my own publishing company, so no copyright infringement there.

Thing is that I have some 13,000+ words that I'd like to put up here for creative criticism, and transferring over all of the layout and what not from the HTML of the site sure would make it simple for me. I just didn't see anything specifically in the forum rules say against it, but then again, I'm not all that familiar with forum software.

Thanks in advance.

[Zherog]

HTML is not allowed, as it's a potential security risk. The bottom of every page, on the left-hand side, is a box titled "Posting Rules." That box will tell you what options - html, bb-code, images, whether you can post at all, etc - are available in any given forum.

As for tables, and any other form of bbcode really... the best way to see how somebody did something is to press the quote button. That'll show you almost everything - if they did something interesting with the quote tag, you won't see that, and there are a few other small ones that won't show as well. Tables, for sure, will show.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Yeah, the HTML will just not parse.

<b>As so.</b>

[Ashkhar Ben]

Oh, I see that now. Thanks for the quick reply! I guess I'll be having to do a lot of reformatting then if I want it to look pretty. Not a problem, thanks again.

[Mando Knight]

You can use [URL] tags for links (the hyperlink button in the box will automatically craft them for you), and {table] tags are fairly easy to use once you get the hang of them (though I would recommend keeping a spreadsheet version on your own computer as backup since you have to do all the formatting by hand here).

[Zherog]

In a fair number of cases, search-replace might get you most of the way there. For example, you could search for <b> and replace it with and then search for </b> and replace that with if you had any bold in your text. Same is true for underline and italics. It probably won't cover all the code conversion for you, but there are a good number of them that should be easily handled by search-replace.

[Rawhide]

HTML is not allowed, as has been mentioned, and never will be allowed for security reasons. Sorry.

For the rest, you can quote to see what others have done (as has been mentioned), read the bbcode guide by clicking the link where it tells you that bbcode is enabled, or check one of the unofficial table guides that someone else will need to find and link.

[KillianHawkeye]

Why don't you just link people to your blog? Why even repost 13000+ words here when you've already done the work elsewhere? :smallconfused:

[Roland St. Jude]

Why don't you just link people to your blog? Why even repost 13000+ words here when you've already done the work elsewhere? :smallconfused:I would imagine:

The click-through rate is lower than the rate of people who will read it if posted here.
The poster wants to become an active member of the forum and this is a way to add content and become known and involved.
It's a little spammy to show up and do nothing more than direct posters off-site. Not that it's a Forum Rules violation, but when people show up and do that, we do get post reports and many people are reluctant to click the link.

[Alias]

Rule of thumb with any forum - if you see a post that has formatting you don't know how to do, quote it. That usually reveals how it was done. You don't have to actually post your quoting of course, just study what you see in the editor.

[Zahhak]

Just curious, why is HTML considered a security risk?

[Douglas]

Just curious, why is HTML considered a security risk?
HTML is the code web pages are written in. Anything a web page can do, HTML can do. Think of the worst virus-ridden popup explosion site you've ever heard of. Allowing people to post working HTML opens the door for the possibility of people turning forum threads on this site into something like that. It is difficult or impossible to be certain that all such dangerous HTML is blocked without simply blocking all HTML.

[KillianHawkeye]

HTML is the code web pages are written in. Anything a web page can do, HTML can do. Think of the worst virus-ridden popup explosion site you've ever heard of. Allowing people to post working HTML opens the door for the possibility of people turning forum threads on this site into something like that. It is difficult or impossible to be certain that all such dangerous HTML is blocked without simply blocking all HTML.

HTML is not code. It is a markup language only. What that means is that it was designed to make text look different (with fonts, sizes, bold, italics, etc.), and it has other formatting features like alignment and tables and spacing and a few other things.

Any actual coding done on a web page is in addition to the HTML elements. Most likely it is Javascript, but there are also other languages.

Probably the worst thing you could do with only HTML would be like a meta redirect tag that sends people to a different web site that is actually harmful, but the other 99.9% of HTML uses can't do anything to harm your computer. But in my opinion, that one thing is a good enough reason to prohibit HTML on the boards considering that we have BB code to replicate the majority of text formatting uses.

[Rawhide]

HTML is not code. It is a markup language only. What that means is that it was designed to make text look different (with fonts, sizes, bold, italics, etc.), and it has other formatting features like alignment and tables and spacing and a few other things.

Any actual coding done on a web page is in addition to the HTML elements. Most likely it is Javascript, but there are also other languages.

Probably the worst thing you could do with only HTML would be like a meta redirect tag that sends people to a different web site that is actually harmful, but the other 99.9% of HTML uses can't do anything to harm your computer. But in my opinion, that one thing is a good enough reason to prohibit HTML on the boards considering that we have BB code to replicate the majority of text formatting uses.

With HTML you can insert JavaScript, you can insert Active X, you can insert Java, you can tell browsers to automatically download files, you can insert inline frames with entire HTML pages on different servers, you can generate unauthorised cookies, you can forward information to different servers, you can trick people into entering personal information such as usernames and passwords, and you can use any of the tools available to attack the server itself, amongst other things.

It's much more potentially harmful than you're making out.