Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

As I check the Behold discussion forum page-by-page to set it up the way I want, I come to a few places where I have a decision to make about the wording or the setup of the user interface. For that I check to see what other forums use. Snitz is a good free forum written in ASP, and it has a nice list of its “competition”. The ASP Index also has a nice list of ASP forums, both free and non-free.

When you look at all the various forums (and there must be over 100 of them), they are all remarkably the same. Each has slightly different features but they are based on the same overall model. I would have picked one long ago, but found I hate using those sorts of forums, whereas I love using e-mail and newsgroups. Somewhere, this concept of showing only topic indexes at the top level has taken over and that’s the way it is. It is so similar to the plight of genealogy software, which are also all basically the same - with forms-based input and ancestor/descendant/list-based output.

Looking around to see which forum software now includes RSS: I see that phpBB has a “MOD” add-on for it, and InstantForum.net includes it, and at Snitz there is talk about it in one of their threads. The latter talks about it backwards: generating it as an ASP script upon request. I think it should be the opposite - generated when a new message is added so that the RSS file itself is static and that will reduce load on the server (which is agreed to by one reply in the thread). So only a handful of them so far have it. It hasn’t really caught on yet.

For forums, RSS seems like such a natural thing. It will give any forum newsgroup-like functionality. And with a link back to the message, replies are made easy. No more need to go online to the forum everyday to see if there are any new posts: your RSS reader can do that for you.

At any rate, it shouldn’t be too difficult to add an RSS feed capability to my Behold Forum before I’m done with it in the next week or so.

So my hosting service posted: “Due to the overwhelming level of SPAM email messages received by our system we have had to temporarily disable the Nobody/Catch All Alias … NOTE: This change is only a temporary measure. Once our new email system is in place you will be able to enable this feature and benefit from enhanced SPAM filtering and Virus protection.” It very much appears I wasn’t the only one with that problem.

Meanwhile … I’ve started overhauling the Behold Discussion Forum. Moved the login info into the header of each page to make it painfully obvious as to who is logged in and where to login if you haven’t already. Got rid of the white on dark-blue background of some parts of the forum and changed it to black on grey. None of this will be made live until I’ve finished it and tested it.