• The closing ceremony for TBT's Farewell to New Leaf event has been posted! View the winning entries and other closing announcements here. Thanks for joining in on the fun and nostalgia. We'll see you this Friday night for the start of our annual Easter Egg Hunt!

Signature Height Checker Tool

Bumping this again because I had to dig to find it. It's SO helpful. Currently editing my sig as it's too big.
 
dunno if im the only one getting this, but i've tried this on two different devices now and i keep getting same problem. whenever i go to a thread to check my signature, it kicks me back to the TBT homepage and gives me the "This tool is not intended for viewing other websites" message. :(
 
dunno if im the only one getting this, but i've tried this on two different devices now and i keep getting same problem. whenever i go to a thread to check my signature, it kicks me back to the TBT homepage and gives me the "This tool is not intended for viewing other websites" message. :(

yeah i get that :/
 
dunno if im the only one getting this, but i've tried this on two different devices now and i keep getting same problem. whenever i go to a thread to check my signature, it kicks me back to the TBT homepage and gives me the "This tool is not intended for viewing other websites" message. :(

Yeah, The Bell Tree now uses HTTPS which caused the "traitor check" as I call it to falsely fire. This has now been fixed. Also fixed a missing closing iframe tag and specified the character encoding while I was at it.

However, the whole signature checker is a bunch of hacks slapped on top of each other and I'm amazed it still works at all. Now that TBT is HTTPS-ready, it is now possible for the checker tool to directly embed the TBT website without using a proxy and still be able to access the required information to return signature heights. So I'll probably do that at some point and release it as a "version 2" of sorts. I've also been considering releasing a browser extension that does the same thing but could also work on the Edit Signature page. We'll see.

Maybe I'll make everything under the hood a little more reliable too, but maybe not since it could do with a complete rewrite looking at it. There may only be about 100 lines of JavaScript in there, but it's an ugly 100 lines. Regardless, I'm too busy to do any of that just now so this will have to do for the moment.

Oh, and if you're getting it stuck on "please wait whilst the next page loads", try a thread that has fewer posts. I think some of the image hosts people are using in their signatures are running slow today.
 
Last edited:
28 September 2018

I'm doing major server changes so it may be down for a few days and show an SSL certificate error/warning. In the mean time you can use your browser's developer tools or ask here or in the "The Signature Guide" thread.

- - - Post Merge - - -

28 September 2018

I'm doing major server changes so it may be down for a few days and show an SSL certificate error/warning. In the mean time you can use your browser's developer tools or ask here or in the "The Signature Guide" thread.
 
09 October 2018

Alright, I finally got around to moving stuff I care about to a different server. Now the signature checker is hosted in Germany rather than the UK, so you may notice a slight change in latency, but nothing too drastic. The Bell Tree is hosted in America, and its pages are still proxied through my server, so due to the distance involved it's still kind of slow.

But why do we need a proxy at all? Because web browsers trust stuff that gets returned from the website you are currently on more than another one. So from tools.tenhourguy.com, data about a page from tools.tenhourguy.com can be parsed with JavaScript, but for security reasons, data about a page from belltreeforums.com cannot. Now, a few months back, The Bell Tree started using HTTPS when serving up pages, which might change things a bit (since this fact bumps up the trust levels), but from my very brief testing it didn't seem to help. Currently I believe we can only do away with the proxy if the signature checker can be hosted here on belltreeforums.com, or if I do something clever. I want rid of the proxy setup more than anyone else - it's a potential security hole for myself and could be open to abuse.

Since the checker has simply been copied over with no work done, some things might break. I quickly slapped it together in a day or two over a year ago now. It's now on a different version of PHP and Ubuntu with a slightly different configuration, and things change with The Bell Tree too. For myself it appears to work fine, but maybe not for everyone. I did have a bit of a hiccup though. If going to tools.tenhourguy.com results in Big Man Tyrone appearing (or nothing, or other oddities), press Ctrl+F5 to do a no-cache refresh and he should disappear.

Anyway, this is sticking around as it is with no further changes for a fair while longer. Have fun checking those signatures.
 
Back
Top