andy

All files starting with a . are hidden files by default on Linux/Unix hosts. Also for .htaccess to work it needs to be permitted in Apache's configuration file. I don't really know why you would want to do what your doing though. All that site does is tell the webserver anything ending in .html or .htm is a PHP file and should be treated as a PHP file. You may aswell have used a .php file What is normally more useful is to do that with a JPEG extension then you can have PHP generate an image file and put it in web forums which add there restrictions via the filename. If your really clever you can use Apache's url rewriting module to do things like turning http://www.example.com/banner/12/img.jpg into http://www.example.com/banner/img.php?id=12 but it can do it for any number without coding them seperately. Very use for allowing users to create banners and have then able to specify things like colour and size at whim. There is of course a performance overhead from making Apache parse all HTML files as PHP, it needs to invoke the parse on each of them just for it to find they have no code in them, This can be avoided by putting all the HTML files that have PHP in them in a sub directory and moving the .htaccess file into that sub directory. Remember that a .htaccess file overides any .htaccess files closer to the root of the directory tree so repeat any other settings you had in .htaccess files.

Instead of altering the software you could trick it into thinking there are more people connected than there are This is more complex but it doesn't need you to alter the forum software (which would require access to the host). Simply requesting a page should make it think there is a guest. The problem lies in making it think there are multiple guests. It's likely that guests are judged to be the same guest if they share an IP or a similar IP address. So you need to connect from multiple IPs, thats a tad more tricky (unless you are going to bereak the law and I ain't helping you with that). Most forums will detect the IP of a proxy instead of you IP if you go via a proxy, especially if the proxy is stripping the details of who passed it traffic (anonymising proxies do this). All you need is a big list of proxies and then do the following (in Bash on a Unix like system): export http_proxy=http://myproxy.test wget -O - http://www.myforum.com/ > /dev/null repeat as desired, or you could build a list of proxies and then have a shell script loop through them. Might want to use a random delay. Technically the forum would still only display the number of guests you have, but you would have generated s lot of extra guests. Remember guest sessions probably expire so you need to repeat the entire process. But this could be written in a script with a time delay or invoked by a scheduler such as cron. This kind of requires you to have a Unix style machine, it can probably be replicated on windows somehow. Possibly write an program. Do you know enough about HTTP to know how to send a query? If you need to find some proxies you could try tor,. Not sure how you can force tor to switch to a new set of proxies though. You could try setting NewCircuitPeriod and sleeping for that amount of seconds between connections. I'm wrting this on the fly so it may not be correct #! /bin/bash http_proxy=http://127.0.0.1:8118 export http_proxy minpause=31 maxpause=60 site=http://www.example.com/myforum/ while true ; do # grab a copy of the page wget -O - "$site" > /dev/null & # now wait a bit range=$(( $maxpause - $minpause + 1 )) # get a number in that range rn=$(( $RANDOM % range )) delay=$(( $minpause + $rn )) sleep "$delay" done Script will run for ever, Ctrl-C will kill it. Assumes you have privoxy running on local host 8118. Assumes tor's timeout is 30 seconds (the defualt) and waits at least that amount of time so the chain changes causing the output IP to change. Will probably only add about 10 or 20 guests bofre the counter resets itself. If you can make tor use new routes quick lower the pause counts. If you find a way to make tor always use a new route you can make the delays much lower. Script will need altering for less than a second due to ho the random number generator works. Can't guarantee it will actually work.