Paying the Gnome
Or How to stop censorship of message boards!

Disclaimer: I don't advocate using curse words on boards that block them, but hey I'm an anti-censorship kindof guy.

What the heck is paying the gnome about?

How do message board censors work? Well for our purposes a little gnome lives in message boards with censors on and replaces your damn with ****. Paying the Gnome let's you post without being censored.

So, how can I pay the gnome?

Well ya gotta understand how the gnome works. First of all he doesn't deal with what's on your monitor. That stuff is generated by html code, which is interpreted by your browser (Internet Explorer, Netscape etc.) and displayed on screen. To view the html for any webpage, simply right click anywhere on the screen and select view source.

If you did that for this page you can see how simple it is. I wrote this in Notepad for crying out loud.

I know I know get on with it. Okay. When you post a message whatever you post gets stored. So if you post damn it gets stored as damn. The gnome sees this damn, get pissy and replaces it with ****. How do you get damn up on the screen then? Simply store something besides damn, but something that is interpreted by the browser as damn. Sounds complicated? Not really

If you viewed the source code on this page, you may have seen the code <br> Well you don't see any other <br>'s on the page do you? This code is interpreted as a line break. In fact I had to write a code to get <br> to appear as <br> instead of as a line break.

So, to pay the gnome ya gotta type in code. Ya can't type damn. All the characters on your keyboard can be represented in what we call ascii code. The numbers 1-256 all represent a different character. For example to type the letter a is represented by a 97, A is represented by a 65, etc. So, you can store code that is interpreted by the browser as a letter, and thus avoid the gnome.

To post damn, instead of typing damn substitute the ascii code for d and type amn afterwards. For example &#100;amn with result in damn. Go ahead, try it out I'll wait. And yes I had to code that statement to prevent it from appearing as damn.

Where can I get a list of ascii codes?

Use a search engine. Type in ascii chart. Follow the links grasshopper.