PETS

PETS (which stands for phpBB Enhanced Tagging System) is a widget that lets you apply tags to any post on a phpBB forum. It’s useful because, unlike normal hashtags, the tags it creates are searchable. This is a game-changer if you want categorized information that you can come back to later.

How did you come up with it?

I came up with the idea of altered tag names on the Discord server for Conway’s Game of Life. (Some parts of this conversation have been formatted by me, but the actual text is the same.)

dronebetter: how do you go about searching for patterns on the forums? i keep encountering the frustrating problem where searching xp[number]_[wechsler code] splits it along the underscore into two words and gives me matches for the first, but removing the first tells me the second is 'too common' so shows zero results even if it's a long and obscure apgcode

which significantly limits the extent of the forums' usefulness for me

[8 irrelevant messages skipped]

squareroot12621: It won't help for raw apgcodes, but I found out (through like 5 minutes of searching) that you can make tags by using ˍ (U+02CD) in place of underscores, and they won't be filtered out by the Annoying phpBB Search System™.

I'm trying to find some hashtag replacement character so the tags can be uniquely identified, but neither ⌗ (U+2317) nor 𐄥 (U+10125) work.

dronebetter: okay but how do we know that these resulting tags won't just be labelled 'too common' for no reason?

squareroot12621: Which apgcodes did you have problems with originally? Because I tried both "153" and "4r4z4r4" and they worked just fine.

dronebetter: anything too long, it seems, like y1g9b8889b9888b9gz640u1w8408o0o8048w1u046ze40vy0ray1ary0v04ezc40fgw24023032042wgf04czy11iq222iqi222qi1

[6 irrelevant messages skipped]

squareroot12621: I think it's pretty clear it won't accept that:

You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 2 characters and must not contain more than 20 characters excluding wildcards.

[3 irrelevant messages skipped]

dronebetter: oh right i was blind sorry

anyway that limitation is needless and bad and stupid

did the phpbb developers not know about hashing...

squareroot12621: Actually, I found a hash symbol that works: ⵌ (U+2D4C). So we can make tagging systems now.

First draft of a tagging system:

• All tags should match the regex /^\u2D4C[a-z0-9\u02CD]{1,19}$/.
• Tag names should follow snake case (but using ˍ instead of _).
• Posts should use all tags that identify the object. For example, if we had been using the tagging system when we found 34P7, we could use ⵌoscillator, ⵌperiodˍ7, ⵌsparker, ⵌcornerˍdotˍsparker, ⵌsoupˍsearch, and ⵌc2ˍ2.
• Example tag names: ⵌspaceship, ⵌoscillator, ⵌstillˍlife, ⵌperiodˍ41, ⵌ28ˍ3c84. I'm not too sure about that last one but ⵌ28ˍ3ˍcˍ84 just looks weird.

speedydelete: you could just like

modify phpbb

somehow

does anyone here know php

wirehead: nathaniel [the administrator of the Conway’s Game of Life forums]

squareroot12621: I'm pretty sure it won't be fixed any time soon, though. Might as well make use of what we have, since the tagging system won't break if the Annoying phpBB Search System™ somehow does get fixed.

How does PETS work?

Through Unicode Magic™, of course.

Okay, you probably wanted a better explanantion than that. Here’s how it actually works:

• Instead of using the # and _ characters that you can find on your keyboard, PETS uses ⵌ (U+2D4C) and ˍ (U+02CD). The trick is that these are both considered “letters” rather than “symbols” according to phpBB, and so they won’t be removed from the search query.
• phpBB also filters out words that aren’t between 2 and 20 letters long. The solution is pretty simple—PETS just enforces a maximum tag length of 20 characters (or 19, if we aren’t counting the hashtag at the start).
• To make the tags invisible in posts, PETS puts them in 5 [size=1] tags nested inside each other. This effectively reduces their font size to 0.

How do I use PETS?

PETS is available as a bookmarklet. Here’s the easiest way to install it:

1. Bookmark this page by pressing Ctrl + D or ⌘ + D.
2. Copy the code for the bookmarklet version you want below.
3. Edit the bookmark you just created, and paste the bookmarklet code into the URL field.
4. (Optional) Rename the bookmark to just “PETS” instead of the default name.

Bookmarklet versions

Frequently asked questions

My forum isn’t on here!

I can’t add variations of PETS for every forum that uses phpBB—I simply don’t have the time for that. Instead, start out by using the General version, which doesn’t come with a standardized tag set. If you want to, you can copy one of the tag JSON files (for example, cgol.json), change it to use the tags relevant to your forum, and then request me to add it.