I personally use the forum to write about the interesting services, links, images, videos, media and everything else that I come upon on my daily research for interesting Ghacks topics. Not everything I find is suitable for an article at the blog but you can be sure that I post about it in the forum if the service or website looks interesting.

Here is a listing of the latest discussions and threads on the forum:

• Browser game reviews: Sushi Cat and Clue Sweeper
• Password Manager discussion
• Pale Moon, a custom build of the Firefox web browser optimized for Windows.
• Firefox 3.6 in Ubuntu
• Firefox and Microsoft DRM plugins
• Visualizing the Internet

There is more to discover and we would love to see you join the Ghacks forum to contribute with your knowledge or questions.

We just recently crossed the 1000 posts mark and are aiming to cross the 10K posts mark in the middle of this year. Here are some articles and discussions that have been going on at the forum.

• Is Internet Explorer Inherently Insecure?
• Game reviews: Balloon In A Wasteland, Cover Orange 2 and Infectonator
• Ebook: Windows 7 Shortcuts and default program
• Check Your Youtube Video Speed
• How Unique and trackable is your browser?

It is a small forum by today’s standards and we hope it grows organically so that it stays friendly even if the user count goes up a lot.

We are inviting everyone to join the forum. You can post PC problems there for instance and we try our best to help you.

We are also offering a small incentive in the form of $50, $25 and $10 cash prices via PayPal for the three forum users who refer the most new users to the forum and forum users that post the most.

So, what are you waiting for? The Ghacks Forum is waiting for you.

We already got some nice threads going and would like to invite each and everyone of you to take a look at the forum and join it if you feel like contributing to the growth of it.

We have decided to offer incentives to further the growth. To be precise: Users can earn money by either being one of the top posters in a month or by referring the most active users in a month.

The three top posters and the three top referrers earn $50, $25 and $10 respectively each month in the forum.

Here is a short compilation of interesting threads that have been created in the past seven days:

Ipad Introduction in 180 seconds
Big Brothers Satellites Orbiting Earth
Website Analysis Tool WooRank
I’m getting a Windows refund

There is more to explore and everyone is invited to post interesting findings or questions related to technology in the Ghacks forum.

See you there.

I have created the forum yesterday and it is now live at ghacks forum or by following the forum link in the top nav of the blog. The next days, and probably weeks, will be used to test the forum, make modifications, add new plugins and optimize the forums and practically anything that has to do with it.

I invite you to join the forum and start posting if you like. I can guarantee that the usernames and posts will remain on the forum regardless of the optimization and changes.

The forum comes with a full CMS as well and my initial idea is to offer blogs to members that I trust (e.g. moderators or supermoderators but also regular users) and who “have something interesting to say”. Thinking about revenue sharing options for the forums and blogs as well.

If you have the time look at the forum and let me know, either here or in the forum, what you would change, what you would like to see and what should remain as is. Vbulletin veterans are especially invited to share their must have plugins and modifications.

Hope to see you soon in the forum.

That’s probably the main reason why Chris Motch created the 4Chan Grabber, a graphical user interface that mimics the functionality of the command line program. 4chan Grabber is a software program for the Windows operating system that requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 to work.

The program comes with a list of all 4chan boards. All that needs to be done to download all pictures from one of the boards is to select the board from the list and to click on the Grab Images button. The program will respond by starting to parse the available pages containing the images. This can take quite some time and the downloads start right after the parsing has been finished.

The 4chan images will be downloaded to a directory specified by the user after clicking on the Grab Images button in the application. 4Chan Grabber can be downloaded directly from the developer’s homepage.

Update: 4Chan Grabber appears to have been discontinued. You can try alternatives such as the 4chan Downloader, which is also a freeware downloader for images posted on 4Chan.

A click on any board will load a huge page that contains hundreds of images and comments about those images from users from all over the world. 4Chan has sparked lots of controversy in the past due to its anything goes attitude. The site rules state that only adults are allowed to view the site’s contents and that it is illegal to post post content that is illegal in the United States.

4Chan Cleaner is a userscript that removes some of the elements on the 4Chan website. This includes advertisement but also a better layout of all the posts and images on each 4chan forum.

4Chan Inline Image Expander is a second userscript that makes it easier to expand images on the main forum page. A simple click on the image will load its full size directly in the forum without loading a new page. A second click on the same image will display the image thumbnail again.

Both userscripts require the Firefox web browser and the Firefox add-on Greasemonkey or a compatible web browser that can load userscripts as well.

Users who do not stop here and turn their back on the forum in frustration can actually access the answers quite easily without having to use third party services or changing their web browser’s configuration. What many users fail to realize that the answers are right in front of them, or more precisely right at the end of the scrollbar.

The Experts Exchange forum uses a very clever forum disguise to make visitors think that they can only access the answers if they signup as the banners and information directly below the question suggest. If they happen to scroll down further however they will realize that all the answers are located below that block.

There is one requirement though. Only visitors who are coming from search engines will be able to see the answers this way. There is however a quick and easy way of achieving this. Copying and pasting the title of the thread into a search engine form will do the trick. The posts at the Experts Exchange forum are usually well indexed and one of the first entries should be a direct link to that forum post.

A click on that link will open the Experts Exchange page with the question and its answers which are located below the middle block.

It is more of a fun tool than a serious tool that the user would use on a daily basis. It is however well thought out and creates multi-colored texts speedily and perfectly. The tool is fully portable and can be executed from any location on the computer or external media.

The interface might look confusing at first glance because of the options and their placement but as I said earlier it is well thought out. The text can be entered or pasted in the top pane of the program. It does appear in the preview area as well immediately. The preview area reflects any changes made to the text in real time.

Colors are added in the lower half of the program interface. The interesting aspect is that a gradient is added to the text which can be altered by changing the colors of existing pegs or creating new pegs to add even more diversity.

Each color can be picked from a set of default colors or by using the whole color wheel which is just one click away. Each addition or change will have a direct impact on the text in the preview area. The user has a few choices like changing interpolation from the default cosine to flat or linear and to enable quantization. A color scheme can be saved to the computer so that the user can reuse it at a later time.

The two buttons Copy HTML and Copy BBCode copy the code to the clipboard from where it can be pasted into websites. The numbers behind both buttons are the chars that are used to create the effect.