Getcomments Home Page

What was Getcomments?

Getcomments.pl was a perl cgi-script that takes the output of an HTML form and performs various actions with that output. These actions can include:

displaying the fields or sending an arbitrary URL back to the submitter
appending the contents to a log
e-mailing someone the contents

Announcements

Getcomments is no longer available and is unsupported. It was deprecated for a long time (since 1996) and now I have removed it from this site. However, I have kept the documentation here, in case there are any existing users remaining.

A copy of the documentation part of the Getcomments home page is now available. This enables you to keep a copy of the Getcomments documentation locally in your web pages, so that you do not need to depend on the network and the reliability of my server. Just download this 98kb tar file or this 21kb gzipped tar file and put it somewhere in your web directories, run "tar xvf Getcomments-doc.tar", and look at the documentation locally.

Getcomments History

Getcomments.pl was originally written in October 1994 by Jim Hoagland.

Version 1.0 became available around November 1994.

Version 2.0 was made available in April 1995 and was a significant improvement over the previous version. In a word, it matured. The format of the output to either of the three places is now completely controllable by the user.

Version 2.1 is now available. Version 2.1, also made available in April 1995, fixed a security problem in Version 2.0.

Version 2.2 is now available as of June 28, 1995. The main additions were format specification in files, better error handling, and the different varieties of forms distributed.

HFPM version 1.0 was released on February 3, 1996 to replace Getcomments.

You might also want to take a look at the "What's new" page.

Things to add.

What do I Need To Run It?

All you need to run getcomments is a UNIX system with perl installed (find out how to get it at Metronet) and a http server that supports cgi-scripts (I think all do).

How do I Use Getcomments?

You need 3 components to use getcomments:

getcomments.pl (one per site is enough): This is what performs the various actions when the user is done filling out the form and chooses "submit".
a directory in which to store a log of the forms contents (this must be writable by your server): this only needed if you wish to use this output method
a HTML form with special "hidden" control fields: The hidden fields tell getcomments what to do with the form once submitted. Four varieties of these forms come with Getcomments.

So, what do I do now?

Getting Help

You might find it helpful to look at the FAQ. If you have any questions not answered in the FAQ, feel free to e-mail webmaster@hoagland.org for more information or with questions.

Legal Stuff

Here is some important legal notices and information about modifying and redistributing Getcomments.

Thats it.

1 February 1996