YaBB

[Bogotter]

I use a message board for my D&D group. We use ikonboard. It was really simple to set up and all of the information is stored on their site rather than on a server of mine. This is both good and bad.

There are a few things about the board I use that I don't like. For instance if a thread has more than 1 page...you need to go to the first page before you can click on page 2 or 3. Also it seems a bit slow at times and has been known to erase long posts when trying to submit them to the forum.

These forums seems to work out well and I was wondering how you're running them? I mean does YaBB need to be run on your own server? Are there other message board software products you'd recommend?

[RawBearNYC]

I have an issue on my machine with my implementation of PHP. For some reason, despite the complile switches, it refuses to communicate with mySQL. So, the host of php/mySQL message boards are unavailable to me.

I used YaBB because it was well rated and used a perl/flat file system. As long as a host supports perl scripts, you can run it on any web server, and there are many low cost web hosts out there. Some as cheap as $5 a month.

The bulk of the EverQuest community uses EZBoard (www.ezboard.com) for hosted message board solutions. The boards at EZBoard are free, if you don't mind adds (and possibly popups, it's been a while since I've been to a free board). If you pay a fee, you can have the ads removed.

The fees are assessed based on board traffic, so a small community might pay a marginal fee. The permissions system at EZBoard is rich, and they have many of the features you'd expect out of a commercial bulletin board solution. (Image hosting is separate, and there are no attachments to posts).

They try to balance out bandwidth to as many of their communities as possible, but occasionally do suffer slow downs. I've rarely ever seen outages.

We played an online game on those boards once. It was ok. No die roller, but otherwise seemed doable.

[The Giant]

That might as well all be in Babylonian as far as my understanding, but there is one thing I don't like about the boards: As an Admin, I can't seem to split a thread into two threads or move individual posts to another thread. I mention this because Bogotter and my discussion of old PCs is really off-topic of Jan's thread about his character and I want to move it, but can't.

Other than that, I like this much better than EZBoard.

[RawBearNYC]

I should note: I haven't tried YaBB on a Microsoft Internet Information Server, but I see a potential security flaw using YaBB there, so I don't recommend it in that environment.

[Bogotter]

I consider myself fairly computer savvy. I've got my MCSE, I've worked supporting unix/linux computers for almost 7 years and I've even dabbled in web design with frontpage and dreamweaver.....but is it me.....or is setting up a YaBB message board (like this one) a lot of work?

So I guess I should ask a question huh? That would be helpful wouldn't it? As long as your web host supports PERL you can upload YaBB to it and use it as a forum correct?

Let's say you have a web site hosted and it does meet the requirements. Then you go to modify the YaBB.pl with your settings. The very first entry in that file is the path to your sever's Perl location. I'm not sure where to get this information. What do you do with that setting?

Help! RawBEAR......anyone!?

Thanks.

[RawBearNYC]

The answer to that question depends on several things. What operating system is your web host. If it's a Microsoft server then that line is all but useless. If it's a Linux/Unix, then the sys admin for your server would have to give you the location to the perl binary or, if you have shell access, try "which perl". Generally, in most linux distributions, however, the default location is fine. In the rare occasion that the perl binary isn't specificaly there, it's common practice to create a symlink to it so that packages downloaded can operate without issue.

If I were you, i'd try the script without modifying that line. If that doesn't work, then contact the system administrator for your server.

If you're having trouble with installing YaBB, I have this one piece of advice, follow the instructions to the letter. I ignored the bit about uploading the files in ASCII (assuming that my ftp client would make that determination automagically) and got spanked for it. I ended up using DOS' ftp utility and reuploading it that way. Once I followed the instructions, the upload went just fine.

The other problem you might have (if on a Linux/Unix box), if this isn't a computer you have shell access to are the permissions. You're gonna need the sysadmin to give write permissions to the necessary files and directories, otherwise you won't be able to save anything :P

If you're running into a specific problem otherwise, post it here. Be aware, tho, that I'm leaving for Albuquerque, NM this afternoon, so I may not be back to post until Monday.