Does anyone know....

[Daniel_Christie]

Does anyone know of some really great chat and Message board forums that are very alterable? I am having a hard time finding any, especially any good ones that provides the Admin a lot of control of how the board looks and reacts.

And...

Does anyone know of a JAVA version of a message board or chat room? This way everything would be neatly contained on my site and my job's firewall would not block it.

I appreciate any help you may have to offer,
Daniel Christie

Ultimate Bulletin Board is what this BB is based on... go to http://www.ultimatebb.com

As for a java BB...it doesn't really matter what language the BB is written in...there really needs to be some kind of server running code that stores the previous entries for the bb and if your work's firewall blocks all access from outside then you're screwed.

There's no way around it...you need a web server that is visible to the outside world that can run scripts...even a javascript bases bb would need some kind of server to store then entries on (incidentally the client side javascript wouldn't actually save the entries...it would just send it to a script on the server which would do the business).

You can either...

1. Run your own server with a permanent 'net connection and do what you like with it. :)

or

2. Use a bulletin board setup on someone else's site like deja news or egroups (not sure of the addresses of these)

or

3. Get an account with someone like Websamba (http://www.websamba.com)...they give you 30 megs of webspace and let you run asp scripts that can access databases (similar to option 1). I have my own custom guestbook that I wrote and run from websamba... no reason it couldn't be expanded into a full bb (PLUG: http://www.websamba.com/mralston/guestbook/view.asp)

[Edited by matthewralston on 05-26-2000 at 10:17 AM]

Actually, this used to use Ultimate Bulletin, but now it uses vBulletin. (www.vbulletin.com)

ubb is based on perl, vbulletin is based on php.
you need a server like http://www.virtualave.net to run ubb off of, i have my own UBB on there..
it isnt ready yet. so I will not tell the URL, and unless you know the ubb path, you will never guess where it is on my website ;)

but this site still uses ubb for the feedback on karl moores tutorials.

i must say Vbulletin is better, and they are the same price.
so I recoment Vbulletin.. :)

I am not sure how vbulletin works, but UBB works like this

the member profiles are stored in a .pl file,
they look a little like this


username|password|email|status(admin, etc)|etc.


the directory where they are stored is /cgi-bin/members the directory is locked from others prying eyes.


this should actually be in the perl section...

but you can customize the forums, I can make mine with a white, purple, black, or any other color background, I can have title images, customized "post" and "reply" images.
they are not fully customizable, but you can filter out words(john you should do this :D ), etc.
although Vbulten is better because there are more status(member, guru, etc.) in UBB, there are only 4,
junior member
member
moderator
administrator
but you can set the names to anything you want... :)

[Zaphod64831]

If you're looking for quick and easy ones you could try http://www.bravenet.com, that's where I got mine. They're pretty powerful too, you can edit, ban, etc.