h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I wish I had a blue fish.
>() is that it?
)<> is that it?
}<> is that it?
>(> is that it?

Well, I have them all written down so if one works, I'll know. damnit, I want the blue fish.

I have tried:
)<> ><<>> >o >O
>0 :<> ;<> |<>
><:> <:>< >
-<> ~<> >-<> >~<>
><*> ><-> > >

Some put breaks in

No success vegiman

Awww why?

Why can't we have the blue fish, Veggie???
This is just horrible.
Maybe it's is name...

shim
shimon
Shim
shiM

ARG

I thought of that. MadMunk TRIED to get it out of shim and got a cryptic answer. (Only if your researchers number is 23). so I tried various combinations using 23 & U23 and many others. I don't think coding has been allocated yet. Well not any that makes sense. All the smileys are based on emoticons - I am stumped

bluefish - needs some serious hacking - beyond me. vegiman

I see subtlety is beyond you.

Let me spell it out.

Only I can make the blue fish. Don't bother trying. It won't work. I know. I wrote the forum code to put it there.

Clear?

OK It is going to be your own personal trade mark. I bet someone will eventually find your cryptic key controls. It's cool, we'll just have to make do with it on user pages. all the best vegiman

Spoil sport. :-Þ

*sniffle*

OK folks - when you post to a thread, the cgi script looks through the posting text for and replaces it with . If the user happens to have userID 23 (i.e. only Shim), it replaces it with [bluefish] instead.

We can't do it. Only Shim. There's no fancy key combination or anything, so don't bother looking for it!

That's what it sounds like anyway.

Hmmm how annoying; the Preview button turns &gt&lt&gt back into text before you get to post, which then appears as when you wanted it to appear as &gt&lt&gt. Should have spotted that!

How can the rest of us set up things like the blue fish? If we have a small image on a public-access site somewhere, can we have the opportunity to set up a personal 3-character code thing to reference it? I can understand that IMG SRC would be a bad idea for the forums - someone might feel the need to put in a vast and slow-to-load picture to irritate people who are already irritated by forums taking ages to load up fully.
Copying the blue fish and pasting the clipboard into a text editor reveals nothing. Viewing the page source does nothing as all the forum stuff is framed. We'll have to wait for one of Shim's colleagues to leak the details of the blue fish or (more fun) to remove the blue fish from the h2g2 servers. Then we'd see nothin but the code used to reference it. Ha. Please, someone?

Even if we knew the code Shim uses to filter all his > < > into blue fish, we wouldn't be able to upload it to the main servers anyway, and I doubt it would run of a user page, so the chances are, knowing the code wouldn't make a blind bit of difference. That's what I think anyway....

Hmmm. Some of SHium's older postings feature the fish, implying that the code is as that for f_fish.gif - one's Shim-ness must be the decisive factor in turning the fish blue. One day, though, I shall have a fish of my own. It will be brown.

I'm going for a distinctly green fish.

Oh yes. But the coolest color fish would other be magenta, or blue-green.

Hey, my two favourite colours. I want my own fish!!!! It's not fair!!!

Yeah!! Hey, maybe on the first anniversary of H2G2's opening, they'll have a contest and give a few people fish. I like dreaming.

I sure hope so, but i don't know if i can wait that long.....

We're on busiest forums. Woohoo!!!

And I wasn't even here to see my own user journal on the busiest forums?!?!

I want a purple fish. Pretty.

And hi to everyone I haven't spoken to yet, I'm Fenchurch, nice to meet you.