Back again?

[theblasp]

We haven't really been working on Web2Messenger for quite a while now, but it's been silently running in the background doing what it's supposed to do. The only real problem was that changing your passport or signing up wouldn't work, as the add-user routine in the bots were broken.
Initially I've just wanted to keep Web2Messenger running as both Andrew and I find it quite useful, but as people kept on bugging me about the aforementioned bug, I took some time yesterday to try and fix it.
For now it seems fixed, and in case it fails again I've added some event logging that should alert me to the exact place it's failing so I can pinpoint the problem easily.

Now, we aren't opening up Web2Messenger to the grand public yet, but I did drop off a few invites to a forum and a news site to generate some new buzz around it. Reason being both that I'd like to see my bugfix tested, and that I'd like to get some feedback on things.
Web2Messenger in it's current form has no real future. We're currently running into our maximum capacity, but making no real profit. We would like to add an extra server (think roughly 200$ per month), but we're simply unable to afford it.
We're hoping someone might have a good idea or opportunity to get some proper advertising income so we could put some more time into W2M.
So, if you have any ideas about how to generate some income, or have an idea for a sponsoring deal or something, please do not hesitate to reply to this forum thread or use the contact form.

Thanks,
TB

[Daniel15]

Nice work!
Any idea how long it'd take to fix the bots so they handle Unicode correctly? Or is this a major task that'd take a long time?

We would like to add an extra server (think roughly 200$ per month), but we're simply unable to afford it.

What about a relatively low-end server like an AMD Sempron 2400+ or something? I have one of them for hosting several sites as well as a few personal servers and pay US$50 per month for it

[FireStorm]

Glad you're still there
Nice work

[theblasp]

Nice work!
Any idea how long it'd take to fix the bots so they handle Unicode correctly? Or is this a major task that'd take a long time?

Actually, the bots should be able to handle unicode fine, they pass everything on as UTF-8. I believe the problem with Unicode is somewhere in the website. I'll see if I can look into it later

We would like to add an extra server (think roughly 200$ per month), but we're simply unable to afford it.

What about a relatively low-end server like an AMD Sempron 2400+ or something? I have one of them for hosting several sites as well as a few personal servers and pay US$50 per month for it

We're not making *any* profit at this moment, so we couldn't even spare 50$...

[Daniel15]

We're not making *any* profit at this moment, so we couldn't even spare 50$...

Ahh, alright.

Actually, the bots should be able to handle unicode fine, they pass everything on as UTF-8. I believe the problem with Unicode is somewhere in the website. I'll see if I can look into it later

Aha, I see
I have no clue about character encoding, I really know nothing about it. I wrote a MSN bot in Pascal and all the display names displayed fine, they "just worked". I never actually thought about it, it's something I just use without thinking of why it works or what I'm actually doing.

[Aziraphale]

I have no clue about character encoding, I really know nothing about it. I wrote a MSN bot in Pascal and all the display names displayed fine, they "just worked".

Unfortunately PHP is a bitch with Unicode.  It just assumes that every string you give it is encoded in ISO-8859-1, and that each byte corresponds with a single character and vice versa.  PHP 6 will be fixing that and properly handling Unicode, but PHP 5 requires trickery.

Our main problem, I believe, is the database, which, despite being set to use UTF-8 in all the tables, still expects clients to be talking to it in ISO-8859-1 unless told otherwise.  The bots don't tell it otherwise, so it gets given UTF-8-encoded data by the bots, but because it believes it to be ISO-8859-1 data that it wants to store in a UTF-8 database table it duly re-encodes it unnecessarily.  The result is that anything except basic ASCII (which gives you A-Z, a-z, 0-9 and some various punctuation, and that's about it - see here for an image showing the full extent of the ASCII character set) is corrupted horribly.  It would probably be possible to fix that in PHP, but it would be slow as hell, require a lot of effort on our part and altogether the "wrong way" to fix the problem.

[Aziraphale]

Right, Unicode seems to be finally fixed!  I put some random Japanese kanji in my PSM (yay charmap) and my status .txt file displayed it quite happily.  The Facebook app seems to have broken now, though, so I'll get to work fixing that...

[B4tm4n]

Great job on trying to get this back going! Since you mentioned about Facebook I'm having a problem with it. My name on MSN is a blank space. However on the Facebook app it shows a weird letter "A", but only when I'm online. When I'm offline it shows nothing which is correct. Another thing I notice is when I'm online it shows the weird letter "A", but it doesn't say what my status is on MSN. (Online, Busy, Away, etc. etc.). I know because I'm using a "blank space" might create more problems/work for you to do. If it isn't a quick fix forget about it

[Aziraphale]

The MsgPlus formatting code in the Facebook app is very broken currently.  I'm trying to fix it, but it's not easy all the time PHP doesn't natively support UTF-8.

When I've finished fixing this issue I'll check out what's broken with your profile.

Note that you will have to change your status/PSM/name before the Facebook app will update your profile, so make sure you change something before you expect the Unicode issues to go away

[Aziraphale]

Fixed the Facebook app now.  Does your name still not display correctly, B4tm4n?  It appears to be a non-breaking space, which should display correctly - it does from phpMyAdmin, at least.  Let me know if it's still broken and I'll take a look at it.

[elopez93]

Woops  The XML is broken...

http://www.web2messenger.com/status/elopez93.xml

PHP Errors inside? Hope it's an easy fix

Thanks for all!

[Aziraphale]

Fixed

Any other errors anyone's spotted?

[B4tm4n]

Fixed the Facebook app now.  Does your name still not display correctly, B4tm4n?  It appears to be a non-breaking space, which should display correctly - it does from phpMyAdmin, at least.  Let me know if it's still broken and I'll take a look at it.

Works great Aziraphale! Thanks.

[elopez93]

TXT format is also broken It may need the same fix as in XML.

See here for example: http://www.web2messenger.com/status/turl.txt

Other than that, working great I could change my passport address finally

[Aziraphale]

TXT format is also broken It may need the same fix as in XML.

Fixed Thanks