Pierce's Menace

[zangetsu]

I decided to reread an old favorite, but got distracted by all the [color] and zeroes that show up. Can some one explain why that happens to some of the older stories? Anyways, Pierce's Menace is one of the first stories I read on this forum, and has remained a top favorite, right along with the story Leonard's school buddy. I unfortunately learned that it isn't a safe story to read in a room with other people. The description of the characters, especially of Pierce, is just unbelievable. Every thing was just so well written and flowed so smoothly, I envy the writer's ability. Did albron111 write the story, if so, did he write anything else? I've been watching his blog for a while now and am completely and utterly blown away by the quality of his art, but have never seen any stories or links to stories. If there are stories written by the author of Piece's Menace, could somebody post a link in the comments?

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by zangetsu

I decided to reread an old favorite, but got distracted by all the [color] and zeroes that show up. Can some one explain why that happens to some of the older stories?

Okay, vBulletin uses BBCode, which is the system which uses stuff inside [ and ] to control formatting. For example, [URL="http://www.musclegrowth.org/forum/"]Click here to go to the main page of the forum[/URL] will, if you put it into your post without anything to stop it from happening, put in a link to the main page of the forum.

Now, the "color" BBCode tag, which is what you're talking about, changes the color of text (duh!). The problem is that a substantial number of people on this forum (including me) change the theme from the default dark background/light text to the alternate one provided in the user control panel, which has a light background and dark text. (If you have any sort of eye trouble at all, it's a zillion times easier to read than the usual.) Most people who were using the "color" tag were using it to set the text color to white or yellow, because that showed up well, but it makes stuff unreadable on the alternate theme. (To add insult to injury, many of the people doing it weren't even aware they were doing it — they just were editing the story in a word processor and trying to make the word processor look like a page in the forum. Don't do that. In fact, don't use a word processor to compose posts for this forum — use a text editor, such as Notepad++ or TextWrangler.)

Our helpful forum host, after receiving complaints from various people, turned off the part of vBulletin which changes the "color" tag into color formatting. This makes things look a lot better — but it means that old posts which contain the "color" tag are littered with them.

You may or may not be able to use the following bookmarklet to erase all the "color" tags from posts on this forum. To make it work:

1. Copy the following block of text:

javascript:( function(){ %20var%20O= new%20RegExp( "\\[COLOR= [^\\]]+\\]","gi"), C=new%20RegExp( "\\[\\/COLOR\\]", "gi"),t,i,n; %20function%20R( t){t=( t.replace(O,'') ).replace(C,'' );return%20t; }%20function%20F( n,i){t=n.tagName; if(i=n.data )n.data=R(i);if( t!="SCRIPT"&&t!="STYLE" )for(i=0;x=n.childNodes[ i];++i)F(x) }%20F(document )%20})()

2. Open a word processor or text editor and paste it in.
3. Use the program's find and replace function to delete every space. (Unfortunately, vBulletin adds spaces to long chunks of text, so I put some in preemptively.) If there are also line breaks, delete those, too.
4. Copy the result.
5. Open your web browser and make a new bookmark.
6. Edit the bookmark so that it points to the chunk of text you copied.
7. Save the changes.

Now, every time you view a page which has "color" tags visible, you ought to be able to get rid of them by choosing that bookmark. (This may not work on all browsers.)

[tekuno]

Oh, one more thing: I don't know if there are any more stories by Albron111, but he usually just goes by the name of Albron, and he has done some Superman-being-defeated pics in the past. He used to draw (and was astonishingly good) but in later years he moved to CGI, and hasn't posted anything (to my knowledge) for about a year. You can see his blog (with some image galleries) at http://albron.wordpress.com.

(It's definitely the same guy ? he lists the e-mail address from the story on his contact page.)

[miniace2009]

My suspicion that you're an engineer or a computer scientist grows by the day Tekuno.

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by miniace2009

My suspicion that you're an engineer or a computer scientist grows by the day Tekuno.

Me? I'm the fellow who talks too much. Fancy meeting you here after all these drinks.