# Help Me Post On a Broken Site

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-post-on-a-broken-site/49074>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [January 8, 2001, 11:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-post-on-a-broken-site/49074 "2001-01-08T23:46:04Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![King\_Rat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/7bcc69/32.png) [@King\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/King_Rat)\
**Post date:** [January 8, 2001, 11:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-post-on-a-broken-site/49074/1 "2001-01-08T23:46:04Z")

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There is a message board that’s on the fritz. You can reply to a post, but you can’t start a new thread (nothing happens when you push the “post a new topic” button). Someone named Sam created a new thread and then wrote:

change the ‘{’ to ‘less than’ signs  
the ‘}’ to ‘greater than’ signs  
: try copying the html below into a file on your local drive (the forum will not allow html in the posts). It will give you a form into which you can post a new topic.

: {!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”}  
: {HTML}{HEAD}{TITLE}Post a new topic{/TITLE}  
: {META http-equiv=Content-Type content=“text/html; charset=windows-1252”}  
: {META content=“MSHTML 5.50.4134.100” name=GENERATOR}{/HEAD}  
: {BODY bgColor=#00e000 background=followup\_files/kick4\_x.jpe}  
: {CENTER}  
: {H1}Post a new topic{/H1}{/CENTER}  
: {P}{A name=postfp}Post a New Topic{/A}  
: {P}  
: {FORM action=http://www.martial-arts-network.com/cgi-bin/forum.pl  
: method=post}{INPUT type=hidden value=new name=topic}  
: {INPUT type=hidden value="" name=name}  
: {INPUT  
: type=hidden value=“December 14, 19100 at 17:39:47” name=origdate} Name: {INPUT  
: size=50 name=name}  
: {BR}E-Mail: {INPUT size=50 name=email}  
: {P}Subject: {INPUT size=50 name=subject}  
: {P}Comments:{BR}{TEXTAREA name=body rows=10 cols=50}  
: {/TEXTAREA}  
: {P}Optional Link URL: {INPUT size=50 name=url}{BR}Link Title: {INPUT size=48  
: name=url\_title}{BR}{INPUT type=submit value=“Submit Follow Up”} {INPUT type=reset value=Reset}  
: {P}  
: {/CENTER}{/FORM}{/BODY}{/HTML}  
I don’t know what to do. I cut and pasted his post into notepad and changed the brackets, but what do I do now? I’m asking here because the site in question isn’t visited very often at the moment. Plus, I am now more curious about the solution to the problem than I am about posting on the site!

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**Author:** ![TheNerd](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/858c86/32.png) [@TheNerd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TheNerd)\
**Post date:** [January 9, 2001, 12:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-post-on-a-broken-site/49074/2 "2001-01-09T00:46:13Z")

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just save the file that you’ve just created as something with an html extension. Then open that file in your browser. You should be able to use it to post.

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**Author:** ![King\_Rat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/7bcc69/32.png) [@King\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/King_Rat)\
**Post date:** [January 9, 2001, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-post-on-a-broken-site/49074/3 "2001-01-09T01:58:40Z")

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Thank You!! It worked beautifully.