Features
DoubleMessageBoard recognizes a carriage return (line feed) and a tab.
It automatically makes a daughter board if an article contributed by a guest is long. While the daughter board accommodates the entire article, a short article of just a few lines is made by cutting the tail and is put on the mother board. This makes the mother board reasonably short and skipping uninteresting articles easy. If the entire article is short, on the other hand, the mother board can accommodate the full text. Therefore you do not click a link only to find "Hi!"
"prof" DoubleMessageBoard comes with two CGIs, setup.cgi and bbs.cgi. One to setup the boards and other to run them. Once installed, you can make, modify and delete a board from setup.cgi and manage the board from bbs.cgi.
The number of the message boards you can create and run depends only on the server's capacity. Each board has its own title, background color, a link back to the homepage and a short description. They can be modified as you like. And each board-master has user ID and password. The CGI also adds a list page a link to the new board, and deletes it from the list when the board is removed.
bbs.cgi has a message-board accommodate a certain number of articles. Once the number is reached, the older articles, including the daughter boards, are automatically deleted. This is good to keep the site size small and almost maintenance free. But some articles might be deleted before the board-master moves them to the archive. You may get other version of DoubleMessageBoard if you do not like this feature.
With DoubleMessageBoard (prof) you can start your own rent-a-board business (almost) right now. But this is rather ideal for a group of just a few to tens of people or a man running several sites and wanting to have separate boards for each of them.
See the sample DoubleMessageBoard.
Setting up
You need to modify the cgi script. You make it fits your server and make it works. This is must. Or you want it works the way you like. And how much you can do depends on how much you already know. Therefore, I strongly recommend you identify your experience. If you;
Maintenance
Having your own message-board site is just a beginning. You must slave for never ending site management. Though "prof" DoubleMessageBoard automatically deletes what are old, and let each board-master deletes inappropriate articles using a web browser, you still need to know/educate-board-masters how to use the administrative page.
Security tips
Do not use DoubleMessageBoard (prof) with SSI (Server Side Include) if you start a rent-a-board. setup.cgi accepts HTML tags and one of them is notorious <!-- (notorious only if SSI enabled). Although you may disable SSI or rewrite "prof" script to reject the tag to kick off SSI, you rather want to take "SP" DMB, specialized for SSI server.
DMB "prof" has only minimum security measures. A simple password protection. This is because I believe that a security measure known is the security measure compromised. Even if you do not care about security, you do change the name of secret.dat storing password data (and corresponding changes to setup.cgi and bbs.cgi).
Some providers let you have "private_html" besides "public_html" in your directory. ("private.." can not be seen by an outsider whilst "public.." is open for public browsing the net.) You can enhance the security level by placing secret.dat in "private_html".
Unless you are going to start your own rent-a-board business, delete setup.cgi once you made a required number of message-boards. And unless the number of the board counts hundreds, you can have tighter security by importing the contents of secret.dat into bbs.cgi.
You can automatically clear a cgi page cache or modify the cgi to ban specific access.
Further, it is a good idea that you read a book about internet security, have one or two additional security measures and keep your security measures secret.
Yet if you learn something from a hacker, the most frequently used technique to trespass is "social engineering". Be careful with your wording. Do not offend people.
Warranty
No warranty. (Saying so however, the most of case a software does not work is you do not know or misunderstand how it works. You may reasonably expect you visit my homepage, ask question and get answered.)
DoubleMessageBoard (prof), Version 2.1
visitware (C) 1999-2000 B. Uchina, All rights reserved
about visitware
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