getting user input

[Kevin Tysen]

I have one of those free yahoo websites which shows an advertisement at the top of the page every time you look at it. Well, that's okay. After all, it's free and I can't complain.
Anyway, one of the rules of such a website is that you are not supposed to make your own CGI type programming. But they do provide a limited amount of CGI for me, such as access counters which count how often each page has been seen, and a bulletin board which users can use to type in their contents.
What I want to do is somehow get the information which my web page users are typing in the text areas and text fields on my web pages.
Maybe you are thinking, "If you really want to do that, buy server software or buy a domain."

Well, the easiest and most obvious way to do what I want to do is, have a link to the bulletin board, and instruct the users to input their info into the bulletin board instead of my page. That would work, but I really want to get the info from MY page directly somehow.
I had an idea of using javascript to get the text from a textfield in my page and put that text into the bulletin board text area. But that does not seem to work because the bulletin board is a different domain and I cannot refer to the document of a page from a different domain.
I also had another idea of making a copy of the bulletin board and making a page with the exact same HTML as the bulletin board and putting the page in my website, which would make it the same domain. However, I have a feeling it would work only temporary, and if yahoo ever found out, I would get in trouble.

Or perhaps there is some other free alternative to yahoo which has a little more CGI which I could use to do what I want to do. I don't need the CGI to do any heavy-duty programming. All I want is to get user input into a file automatically, or at least sent to me by e-mail automatically.

Any ideas?

[Eric Pascarello]

And what is this JavaScript code going to do?

It can not write files and to send the code to another page would require a serverside language on another domain somewhere.

If you want the data, why don't you just write a little app on your own that loads the html page and grabs the content and saves it locally?

Eric

[Kevin Tysen]

why don't you just write a little app on your own that loads the html page and grabs the content and saves it locally?

A few questions about that:
First of all, what language would I use to write such an application? Java? JavaScript? Ajax? An applet?
What do you mean by "locally"? On the user's computer (like a cookie)? Or on my web page domain space?

I think my knowledge of web-based applications is rather thin. I have written a lot of JavaScript code, but have never written an applet or used Ajax, or written any server side programs. If you could tell me the name of some kind of computer language or function, then I can research it myself.
Thank you for your help.