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Paid for and received this script and my initial reaction was that I was very impressed.
As a passable PHP coder I purchased this script because I didn't want to risk my bad coding bringing down quite an important page. The script functioned pretty much first time and I left it on my site for a couple of days. Then, as I added to it, I noticed that the index page automatically scrolled to the bottom of the page.
No problem. Visit my HTML, nose around. Nothing. Visit the tagboard code. My jaw dropped in horror. There's so much of it! The admin routines are stored externally so it can't be that. Nose around some more. Well, the scrolling problem is easy - there's an onload scroll statement in the body. Body? In an include script? Shouldn't that be dynamically added for iframes?
Nose around some more. What's this? The help file? It's getting sent to my main page when ever it loads? what's the point? Just how big is this file? Good god it's about 20k! My index page is only 7k and that includes database driven news postng and a sql display for hit counter / online users. So much for speedy loading!
So I start hacking. I tear out the help file and move it to an external file. Loads of rubbish comes out. A huge chunk is repeated to allow all posts to display in a new window - it basically includes the same script twice. So that comes out, replaced by a popup (javascript for that already included in the file) that refers to the same file. I managed to reduce that file to 7k. I was shocked. The file, which looked pretty much identical to the original was two thirds the size of the original, could still use the admin functions, and no longer messed with my page.
But I paid for it, right? I lost my rag and took it off my site. I asked for a refund but was met by a stony silence.
So I write it off and look for another script among the free offerings and find... The Webfroot shoutbox. Looks familiar. It's Tagboard! it's identical! And it works first time with cleaner code, though fair enough the file sizes are the same.
In short, this script is a copy of a freely available script with bugs built in. Avoid it. There is no support, it's pretty much illegal, and while there are some nice features, they slow your site down and are badly coded.
