Crazy Tripod hosting

General Forums Off-topic Chat
1

Who here has tripod hosting? In April I registered and put up a page. Having no time to edit it, I left it be. Suddenly, today I returned, and a frame of ads had been stuck on the side of my site! Even worse, when I tried to access the ‘WebFTP’ section, I noticed that all my (3) files had disappeared, despite being shown on my site!

How rare…

Has anyone else encountered these problems?

2

Whe WebFTP client is shite.
Don’t use it.
Occasionally (read: often) you click “edit” and it comes up with an empty window, and you have to close it and try again.
Occasionally (not so often) it loads with a completely empty file list.
Occasionally (too often to cope with) it doesn’t save when you click “save”, but closes the window anyway, and you have to type it all again.

get a proper FTP client, and do your work locally.

I discovered a great way to get rid of the ads on tripod, too.
It puts the ad code at the end of the file, so here’s the trick:
Rename all your pages to .php, whether they use it or not.
add:

<? die(""); ?>

to the end of every page.
Then the php processor will stop processing your file before reaching the ad code.

/me goes searching

Lycos’s terms of service don’t mention the banner ads, specifically they don’t disallow their removal by tricks like these - this is completely legal.

3

I tried your trick of ad removal, but they’re still there. :x

http://members.tripod.co.uk/inquus

I might just restart it all over again…

How does one work an FTP client?

:slight_smile:

4

It looks like lycos have changed their ad system, and now my page is broken :x

It just loads with the ad bar on the right and a blank panel in the middle, i then click refresh and i get the page, and no ad bar.

I think it’s the

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=JavaScript>
if (top != self)
  top.location = self.location;
</SCRIPT>

bit, standard “bust out of frames” code which helps with the layout of the site, but seems to mess around with the ads.

The new ad bar is bad from a marketing point of view too, who wants to have an ad on a site that you have to scroll the ad bar to see? really…

Does anyone know of a free PHP-enabled web host apart from Lycos?

5

Try:

http://www.free-php-hosting.com - has stuff

http://www.clickherefree.com - has 500 searchable entries

Must go and kill tripod admins… :<

6

[bump]

figured it out:

&lt;SCRIPT LANGUAGE=JavaScript&gt;
if (top != self)
{
  top.document.body.cols = "*,0";
  setTimeout('top.document.body.cols = "*,0";', 5500);
}
&lt;/SCRIPT&gt;

put that in the header of your main page (and any other pages people might visit first), and the ads disappear.

They tried to stop you from doing that with a setTimeout to put the ad back after 5 seconds - hence the re-removal after 5.5

It should disappear when loading, then 5sec later appear for 0.5s and go away again and never return - but for me it just goes and stays gone.

BTW: I just discovered: Lycos supports hotlinking! yay!

7

Short of parsing your files (which wastes server resources) they can’t do much to hijack a page.