Build a vibrant online community
More info and resources
By Mike Slocombe for Internet Magazine, May 2004

Four of the best!
There's a huge choice of very capable free/commercial bulletin board software avaiable.

Here's four of our favourites:

phpBB2
Totally free and fully featured PHP/SQL bulletin board.
Snitz
Excellent free ASP-powered board.
YaBB
Popular, open source Perl/CGI-based board. Free!
vBulletin
Extremely powerful commercial PHP board recommended for busy sites. Our favourite!



Jargon watch:

Bulletin Board/discussion forum: Set of interactive pages where visitors can start discussion threads and read and respond to messages Thread - a group of posts around a certain subject.

User / member: someone who has registered or posted a message on your bulletin board.

Administrator: the Big Cheese of the boards, able to create forums, edit posts, delete posts, ban users, delete threads etc.

Moderator: Board 'policeman' with limited admin powers to delete posts and ban errant users

Control panel / admin area - admin-only area full of levers and buttons for configuring and editing the board.

IP address: a unique number identifying every computer connected to the Internet.



Bluffers guide: PHP

PHP is a popular, open source, scripting language used to power popular bulletin board software like vBulletin and phpBB.

PHP-enabled web pages are treated just like regular HTML pages and you can create and edit them just like regular HTML pages.

Best of all, PHP is completely free and can be used on all major operating systems, giving authors the freedom of choosing their preferred operating system and web server

More: http://www.php.net

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