Certain web sites wish to take advantage of the functionality of Server Side Includes (SSIs) to include dynamic content (such as a hit counter or randomly rotating advertising banners) on a site. It is easy to insert the necessary code for SSIs into the Discus skins, but these SSIs will be parsed and interpreted only if your server is set up to do this.

Perhaps you have established an HTML page on your web site (or you have edited the Discus newpage.conf file or appropriate skin file, and regenerated your board). However, you notice that where you put the SSI that is suppposed to be a hit counter, you don't see anything. You look at the source of the page, and you see that the SSI is returned as plain text:

<!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/counter.cgi"-->

If you see this, then your server is not parsing the page in question for server side includes. THIS IS A CONFIGURATION ISSUE WITH YOUR SERVER and is not a problem with Discus. One or more of the following may be wrong:

• Your web host does not allow SSIs at all. Some poorly written discussion board products allow the end-user to type in SSIs in their messages. Then, when the page is next served up, whatever command this hacker wrote in his or her message is executed, giving unauthorized access to the server, deleting all files, or doing something else nasty. Discus does not have this problem, of course, since Discus strips out all SSIs entered by hackers. Some web hosts are paranoid of SSIs being exploited on their systems, however, and simply won't allow them. If you have such a web host, you will need to find another web host.

• You used the "wrong" extension. Since parsing a file for SSIs requires a web server to work harder than just serving up the file as-is, some servers are set up to parse files with certain extensions (like .shtml) for SSIs, but not to do this for other extensions (such as .html). Servers can generally be configured to parse all files for SSIs; whether this is wise, and whether your web host will allow it, is for you to decide. If you must rename all Discus message files, consult our instructions for changing extensions.

• The directory you're in doesn't allow SSIs. Most servers allow SSIs to be turned on and off by directory. Perhaps your server is configured not to parse SSIs in the particular directory in which the file resides.

• The page is the output of a CGI script. Web servers DO NOT parse the output of CGI scripts for SSIs (e.g., a new messages search result, the tree view, and any other screen generated from a *.cgi script).

For specific information on your server, we recommend that you contact your web host. If you are hosting your own pages, consult the server's documentation or contact the developers of the web server product you are using.

Questions about configuring or troubleshooting your server to parse pages for SSIs are not related to the Discus software, and as such are outside of the support we offer. To clarify our policy: we do not support the configuration or troubleshooting of your web server, and requests for such support will be silently ignored.