Many of you will already be aware of a recent hack by criminals into EBay's member database. This has resulted in the leaking of usernames and passwords there and since this event, Ebay has been in contact with its members to ask them to change their password.

This event has reminded me of a pattern that seems to be developing here with some (not all) new members in recent times. Clause 12 in the acceptable use policy states the correct format for account passwords and there are a few here who have ignored it and this is putting their account security in jeopardy.

When people sign up to this website, and pretty much every website that allows user input, you are telling the site's owner about yourself. Some sites require more information than others. However, regardless of the amount of your information you hand over, it is yours and no-one else's and it is submitted to the website by you only for your use and at times for the use of the owner for the purpose of administration of the website. If you guard that information with a weak password then you are more or less asking someone else to steal it.

Site owners go to a lot of trouble to make their sites as secure as they can be. That said, no website is perfectly secure. There will always be people who have the knowledge or tools required to break into websites with numerous layers of complex security provisions. It's just a fact of life. However, weak passwords reduce what security there is to almost nought for at least a portion of the personal information stored.

Unless the integrity of the whole site becomes a problem, I have a policy of not meddling. That is, if individuals don't care if their accounts are stolen then so be it. I have no intention of wasting time enforcing Clause 12 however I would suggest that all members read it and give careful consideration to what is at stake.

On the whole, most members have good passwords but some are red rags being waved at the bull. If your account is compromised because of a password that is easy to guess or otherwise (in my opinion) contravenes Clause 12 then the leak of your information is your problem, not mine. I will say no more at this time. The warning is out there.

On a less important note, though one that has consumed some of my time of late, is the quality of the comments being posted on the forums. To the credit of most, the standard is high and remains consistently so. However there are occasions where correct formatting of comments is overlooked and things like a lack of capital letters and punctuation make comments difficult to read.

It would be restrictive and pointless of me to expect everyone to be perfect linguists, applying the correct use of the English language at every point, particularly as I don't do this myself. However, I think it is fair to ask that everyone makes an effort. Strings of words entered without correct capitalisation and punctuation doesn't allow the reader to comprehend what is being said and it looks dreadful. As I have mentioned, if someone misses a capital letter or full stop occasionally then there is no problem. When a whole series of comments are typed as a string of unformatted text then that is a big problem and it makes my life harder because I have been running through such postings over the last couple of weeks and correcting them for clarity. Another problem is a few members pressing the return key to line-break sentences, causing the text to shift to the left of the forum template which interferes with the site's text alignment and makes the posting hard to read.

Above the commenting field in each forum thread there are a few reminders of how comments should be posted though I generally look for the following:-

1. All sentences should begin with a capital letter and end with a full stop - no matter what.
2. Please use capital letters when typing acronyms such as AWA, HMV, STC, etc. When a trademark begins with a lower case letter it is still proper to use a capital letter when typing the trademark for the purpose of visual clarity, for example; eftpos would be typed as Eftpos when pronounced as a word.
3. Press the return or enter key twice to begin a new paragraph. Paragraph spacing is an important part of text formatting.
4. There is no need to press the return or enter key in the middle of a sentence - the forum software automatically formats all text to neatly align with the left and right margins. Inserting needless line-breaks and carriage-returns just makes your comments hard to read.
5. Try not to leave blank space below your comments. I removed a chunk of blank space from below a comment today that was larger than the text portion of what was submitted. This wastes space in the database and makes the affected part of the site look awkward.

There is another reason why good commenting practice is important. Search engines (not just Bing, Google and Yahoo) index web pages with quality content with a higher rank than pages that are lacking. A combined effort with what I have mentioned here not only helps this website but helps other people who have never been here find it and the content also appears more trustworthy.

In closing, I once again make known that I am not targeting honest mistakes - we all make them. Rather I am merely paying attention to the few times when there is a consistent lack of regard to formatting.

I think I see one of mine in there. Very hard to overcome going back to BBS days when manual line breaks were the polite thing to do for line by line chat, and continued on all this time.
As you can see I've made an effort for you this time!

I count three or four people doing this, although probably for differing reasons. It's not a national emergency in this case though it just looks better.

Think of it like selling the old three-on-the-tree manual clunker with crash cogs on first gear and replacing it with a V8 with silky smooth six speed automatic.

I can widen the text field if you think it will help.

It might be more intuitive for commenters if the Comment box defaults to the same width as the parent element - eg in CSS "width=98%", label above rather than floating. The little handle at bottom right for changing the size of the box is easy to overlook.

Maven

The little handle at bottom right for changing the size of the box is easy to overlook.

It sure is! I had never noticed it until you mentioned it.

It's never going away for me, I'll just have to try!
I still think I've spent more time on a modem to modem line than ever on the internet, and Telecom started cutting my calls after an hour so I didn't get several hours for a single local call cost.
Someone notices about every second forum:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1675252&page=3.

...The little handle at bottom right for changing the size of the box is easy to overlook.

I am not sure what you mean there. Changing the width of the box isn't a problem though a change of width won't stop line breaks inside a paragraph overriding the justify property for plain text in the CSS file.

It's never going away for me, I'll just have to try!

I know the feeling in a way. I am an old time computer user too going back to the days when screen resolution wasn't discussed as much as width expressed in the number of columns - 40 for a C64, 80 for an Amiga, etc; and 300b modems for Telecom Viatel, one of the many precursors to the Internet as we know it today. Also, I used to be criticised on IRC networks by Gen Y brats for typing complete sentences in chatrooms rather than using all the acronyms that made typing easier for those who couldn't be bothered teaching themselves to do it quickly. The older users didn't seem to notice as much.

I am not sure what you mean there

I believe he is referring to those six small light grey dots at the bottom right of the posting message box. Until he mentioned them I had never noticed them.

I don't see them, just the vertical scrollbar. Perhaps it is a browser-specific feature. Though if I widen the box it'll negate the need for it I suppose. I should be able to sort this out today.

I've emailed you a screenshot of what I see using Firefox.

Yes, I've just booted up the other laptop and checked all commonly used browsers. IE doesn't have that. Firefox, Safari and Opera do.

Also, I am testing a new commenting box. It should be live shortly.

On passwords, I hope mines strong enough, but with computers doing the cracking these day how safe is anybodies password

The big problem is of cause password are "inversely proportional" the better they are the harder it is to remember so if not using a password helper as in software or even copy paste people will use short easy to remember ones

The problem is so many sites want your info to use them, which makes life very hard...I will thought lie to sites that really as far as my use is concerned they dont need to know

That is not cause of the law or anything like that but purely cause they are usually high profile targets for hackers and its not a matter of "IF" they get hacked... it usually just a matter of "when!"

Sadly with shopping sites there not much you can do but hand over your info if you want to shop and hope they have half decent security measures

On grammar etc

Well I am really lousy at that I know...sorry...I do try to give lots of white space and block subject points in each comment, thought for GTC to make his live easier I try to let it flow inline so its not a chore to read

Yes Browsers are a real pain and like GTC I use Firefox (or nightly at times)

The scroll area is anywhere on the screen (no bars) and I do have those little dots... right angle triangle, bottom right

Why if you have standards is it browsers like to all do things their own way, is a real pain and makes life for Admins a nightmare I guess too Brad.. but you do need to check your site with as many as you can find I suppose to be sure of how they operate...even worse I guess there are some that either dont update them or can't update then due to hardware...like old power mac's

I suppose you could add some kinda script to aid you in finding out who's using what browser
so you can get an idea of what tends to be the most popular browser used here, thought dont ask me how but I am sure there is a not to difficult way of doing that since a few sites will dump that info
(thought, probably better to warn people you are collecting and using that info for site consistency & security)

Anyway.... A very timely comment Brad, much appreciated

Why if you have standards is it browsers like to all do things their own way

There's the challenge the world faces - in reality there is no such thing as web standards. A standard, in the true sense of the word, pretty much amounts to an agreed set of conditions. Back when Netscape was pretty much the only web browser with any degree of popularity there wasn't much progress in the development of the various protocols that are required to make a basic website work. This wasn't really anyone's fault, it was just a technology that was still evolving.

Then along came Windows 95 (version C, I think?) and Microsoft's latest version of Internet Explorer, that being Version 4. It swept the world and became a defacto standard because it wiped Netscape off the map. IE was based on a browser that existed before any other, Mosaic. Because Netscape and IE rendered pages very differently, developers just coded for IE because it was the most popular and unless the site was owned by a large corporation who felt the need to cater for all users, there was a time when no-one cared much for those loyal to Netscape.

Anyway, as time went on and Microsoft released V5 and then V6 of IE, Netscape clones started to appear. New browsers with ports available for Windows, Unix/Linux and Apple. Mozilla (now called Firefox) was released for Windows and Chimera (now called Camino) was available for Unix systems. Up to a dozen other browsers were launched too, mostly with no success. Even though most of these used Netscape's Gecko rendering engine they all still had their quirks and the most important thing to remember is that all browsers, IE included, still do have their little annoyances and peculiarities.

With the advent of HTML5, all of the commonly used web browsers will now display a given (and correctly coded) web page the same way. IE, Opera, Firefox and Safari all support HTML5 and CSS3 and with each update are supporting it in a uniform way. Such web pages load quite quickly and even more so when the pages are 'wrapped' in a compiled application environment such as ASP.NET, a technology that has already been rolled out here for certain functions such as lost password retrieval.

The main problem that exists for part-time web developers like me is finding the time to deal with the added complexity forced on us by the newer technologies. There was a period in my life when I had the time to learn how to build websites and update/upgrade as necessary. Unfortunately this is not the case at the moment though there may be opportunities down the track. At one time I set out to build the replacement for this website in ASP.NET and was amazed at how quickly my early effort loaded into each browser it was tested in. Of course it was just a new template with only one forum function - being able to view any thread - but the speed at which it worked was outstanding. One day it may be completed but for now I will just commit to supporting the current site, despite its advancing years it still works well.

The new text box is very narrow on my tablet. It's only 19 characters wide with no obvious means of making it wider.

Edit Okay, clear cache and try it again. It's much wider now.

Edit Okay, clear cache and try it again. It's much wider now.

Haha, that happened to me too. I went to view the site later on using the laptop I have in my loungeroom and sure enough, this skinny CSS-less text box. I thought to myself, what the hell have I done!