Posted by Troy Rudolph (Webmaster) on August 11, 2004 at 15:49:10 from 4.231.53.209
In Reply to: Question About Bulletin Board posted by Bill Gulf Coast on August 11, 2004 at 07:15:21:
Thanks, Bill.
Our BB software is pretty old. It dates back to '98 or '99 or so. I've fixed some bugs and made some improvements here and there, but basically it is WWWBoard by Matt Wright.
It doesn't store things in newgroup form, so you wouldn't be able to use a news reader to access it. I know that when there is a lot of activity, it can be somewhat tedious to keep up. Sorry.
The main reason we keep it is that it maintains all the messages in html format. That makes it very, very easy to transport from place to place and fairly easy to archive. And, because the messages are plain old html, Google, AltaVista, and other search engines work just fine with them.
All of the more sophisticated boards that people have recommended to us require mySQL databases to manage the content. And, they don't have good archive capabilities. If I could find one that would allow me to export a "date range" of posts to a navigable set of html files, I'd use it.
Also, I do like that WWWBoard has one big "index page" for the messages. Quite a few boards require that you create subject or topic groups and then threads are posted inside those. With the current structure you can comment on whatever strikes you w/o having to poke around.
Everyone has an opinion on this subject, but so far, I haven't found anything that really satisfies our needs like our version of WWWBoard.
Sorry for rambling. Thanks for your interest and participation in FirstFives.org