I'm looking for ways to alleviate the problems of Malls not being able to update petpages. Since it's been well over a week now, with no real word form TNT on the issue, we can assume it will take them another month at least, and look for alternatives.

The 3 main problems I see so far are:

1) Not being able to communicate with a large number of members at once through postings.
2) Not being able to post updated banner codes, shop codes, etc.
3) Not being able to show people OUTSIDE the mall that the mall is actually active.

Unfortunately, so long as many in the general populace don't know about Petpages being broken, #3 is not really fixable, other than just going about your business and running the mall as best you can. So, focusing on #1 and #2, what are possible solutions?

Thus far, we have taken to NMing everyone in the mall. This is time intensive, discouraged by TNT as spamming, and doesn't take care of #2.

PMing through Neomallers at least allows us to send banner code (though we need to send instructions on how to get the code, i.e. 'Reply to this message, the code will appear for you '). This still requires PMing each individual person (or adding each person as a contact, and then checking each of their names each time, though this DOES make it so you only have to actually SEND the message once).

Forums, the easiest way to post a bunch of stuff for all to see, have just that problem, who wants to have to see all the news and banner updates and everything from someone elses mall. Well, I'm sure some people might like to, but not everyone Also, posting code in the forums intentionally does not work well/easily.

Who would be interested in having some available methods of made more readily available for communicating within your own mall, and what methods would people find easiest/most useful?

edit: I make this the second post so I can edit and fix typos later, and I have a typo in the topic title FAIL!

Hmm... Is there any way we could post our mall code on here or something? If I post HTML here, it will actually DO the code... right? ^^

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Books, School & Water Faerie Items:
http://www.neopets.com/browseshop.phtml?owner=_always_lonely_

Yes, it would be nice if something like the CODE tag allowed you to actually post CODE, instead of just formatting it with a fixed width font so it looks different... silly CODE tags

For the hardcore, you could take your code, use notepad or something to replace all < with &lt;, all > with &gt;, and all quotes with &quot;
Not fun, but it could work.

Sort of, most is filtered out though. There is also a BB Code tag which specifically stops the HTML tags from being parsed, but that still doesn't DISPLAY them, just doesn't do anything with them, so not really helpful at all, except they should display when you reply (it's the notag BB tag, [ notag ] )

edit: According to the documentation, the notag tag is EXACTLY what we need, are the custom filters here killing that workaround?

the documentation went to the dogs haha. i rewrote the forum filters abit but obv didnt do a really good job lmao. but suppose safer is better
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Contrary to popular belief, the Irish and I are not married

Safer is better so long as it still gets used. And obviously the forms do, so yup
If the [ notag ] tag is modified to allow posting of code without parsing any of it, that would be one giant step I think. Then we would just need an appropriate place to post the code (I would put it in the recruitment page for the branches/malls I think).

It would be safer to make use of an already existing security(i.e this forum) rather than creating one from scratch again on a page like for example /xmart_code since if security is breached for any reason it would mean PHP code would run and that is gonna cause a magnitude of problems haha

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Contrary to popular belief, the Irish and I are not married

Not only does that makes sense, it's a lot less effort than creating something entirely new.
Therefore it's really a matter of 'How do we make what already exists the most usable to solve the current problems while not compromising security?'
I'll also add 'and not reducing current functionality or adding more maintenance overhead'

that would be pretty simple. Maybe have a script that inserts the data as a "thread" into the forum table of the database. Pass it through the usual series of sql injection checks and the forums should take care of the rest from there

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Contrary to popular belief, the Irish and I are not married

This one finally went over my head, but when I start reading sentences that say 'script that inserts data into the database', all I can think is SQL Injection Attack! Not that I really know anything about 'em though, maybe I should?

the forum topics are stored in a table called "nodes" (check your drupal datbase) so create a script that adds the user input into this table and then drupal will treat it like a forum thread lol

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Contrary to popular belief, the Irish and I are not married