Message boards, or online discussion areas, are a great resource.
They make group forums easy to setup, administer, and use. These
online discussion areas, usually dedicated to a particular topic,
can add a great amount of interactivity to your site. Users simply
submit messages through their forms-based web browser and the conferencing
software "posts" them and sorts them by subject. Anyone can start
a discussion on a new subject or reply to something previously written.
And, as the board's administrator, you have the ability
to delete material quickly and easily if you so choose.
Message boards are great places for sharing information and
opinions, finding answers, and getting or giving customer support.
Be aware however, that unlike chat, these discussions are not real-time.
WWWBoard is
a Perl script that
has become quite popular as a plug-and-play CGI-based message board.
Many MindSpring Web Hosting customers use WWW Board as their message board
solution. This has been customized to allow you to configure easily how
your message board looks - such as background colors, images, etc.
To add a Message Board to your site:
Log in to the MindSpring Control Panel at
http://control.business.mindspring.com
Choose
Message Board from the
Toolbox drop-down menu.
Click the
Install button to put the WWWBoard script into your cgi-bin and
install the related message board files onto your web site in the /wwwboard
directory.
This will install the message board script, as well as the
administration tool for Matt's WWWBoard script - WWWAdmin.
This is a web based tool that lets you remove old or unwanted messages
easily.
There are really only two files, located in your "
www/wwwboard" directory, that you'll need to customize:
wwwbhead.shtml - this is attached at the beginning of each page, it initially
looks like:
<html><head><title>[Your
Message Board Title]</title></head><body
bgcolor=ffffaa>
wwwbfoot.shtml - is attached to the bottom of each page, and initially looks
like:
</body></html>
You can use your FTP program to download these two files,
make any changes you'd like, and re-upload them. Or you
can edit them through MindSpring's FileManger. Simply change
directory to "
www," then change to "
wwwboard" and edit the files as needed.
If you make changes to any of the other files, please be aware
of the following:
If you'd like to make customizations that aren't
covered here, you're on your own! The best source of information
is Matt's Script Archive where you can get the full documentation
as well as source code you can customize to your liking.
This script can be invoked at http://www.
yourdomain
.com/cgi-bin/wwwadmin.pl.
It requires (initially) a username of "
test" and a password of "
test." Please use
wwwadmin.pl to change your username and password as quickly as possible.
This program will also allow you to delete messages by individual message,
date, or author.
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