Shout-Maru !FAQ

These aren't frequently asked questions. In fact, they've never been asked. But I like to talk to myself.

Why should I use your service?

No reason — you don't have to. I had some fun working on it and I figure other people might like it. I tried to provide a lot of flexibility as far as formatting goes, using the magic of CSS, so if that's what you're looking for, check it out.

Hey, why are you storing my IP?!?

This is for shoutbox owners, so that they can track abusers and forgers, and ban them.

Why don't you set up user accounts so no one else can use my name?

Nah.

You can "protect" one username, but I don't wanna do the whole user account thing for everyone. It's just a shoutbox after all.

Why can't I make a template for the posting form?

The form is static, so if you'd rather format the form in some way other than the default, go nuts– craft your own <form> and put it on your page directly. Just make your shoutbox call with form=false. See details on the form syntax for guidance.

How do I get rid of the "Powered by Shout-Maru" line?

There are ways, but I'm not gonna tell you. Would it kill ya to give me a little credit and exposure?

The shoutbox is too wide! Why won't you make it narrower?

I intentionally left any kind of sizing out the default shoutbox generator and themes because I wanted to give you the flexibility to put it into your own site just how you wanted it. With this awesome power comes some responsibility: you have to type like 20 more characters:

<div id="shoutmaru" style="width:200px">

Enough with the "<div>" stuff. This is too hard!

You don't have to do any of that. Just the <script> line. It'll just look plain.

My post doesn't go through! It gives me a dumb "Oops" message, then it never appears! This is the suck!

The error message is intentionally generic since your visitors probably could not care less about some technical description. Some things to look into:

Was the anti-flood protection triggered? Making too many posts in a short period will cause posts to get rejected from that IP. If you're behind a proxy, this complicates things even further.

Did you enter something for the "check referrer" setting? Could be that the browser having problems doesn't send a proper referrer. Some don't, for various reasons. Or some proxy between the browser and this site is dropping it. Try turning off the "check referrer" setting and see if that helps.

I want my visitors to see message histories. You know, a pager

This is a bit of a challenge, the way things work. I think I can code one up myself to use the existing Shout-Maru, but that's me coding on my page. I can't think of a good way to do this in a purely remotely-hosted Javascript way so that you don't have to code anything up on your page, while still retaining the ability to use CSS-based themes (ie iframes won't work). If you have any ideas, let me know.

You know, you're kind of annoying.

Sorry, sometimes my attempts at humor fail miserably.

This is fabulous! Can I send you money?

Sure, I guess.

News

050326: Small tweak to make shoutmaru better behaved with non-English character sets. May break stuff. Email me if you have problems.

040322: Release