discussion group- advice please

[I Fisher]

Some advice please.



I set up a discussion group forum using the FrontPage wizard. It worked
fine but after a couple of years and a few thousand messages it has grown
and become less user friendly. For example I would like users to be able to
choose out of a number of high level discussions (for example
"introductions", "general", "detailed" etc) and also at a lower level to be
able to expand/contract threads. I haven't tried the latest version of
FrontPage (I'm on 2002) but I assume there are no major changes for this
situation.



Can you recommend a product that I can buy (not too expensive) which
provides good functionality. Ideally if I could also see sites using this
product.

I don't want to use a commercial message groups (such as Yahoo) because I
want to retain control.



I don't need to transfer the old messages over. I have Windows XP and
FrontPage version 2002 SP3. The provider has FP extensions enabled.



Thanks, any tips appreciated.



Iain

 

[Andrew Murray]

No there aren't any changes - the FP discussion board is a *very basic*
feature.

I'd suggest you try a discussion group/bulletin board script suitable to
your server such as

phpBB www.phpbb.com (free)
Yabb. http://www.yabbforum.com/ (free)

These have member signups/logons (so you can have control in that respect,
even block IP's of spammers I think)
Moderated lists, set up various categories of discussion etc etc.

They take a bit of setting up and the php one uses MySQL on a LInux server,
the YABB one uses flat-text databases (text files) - at the time I used it,
that was how it worked; it may have advanced from there since then.

etc

 

[I Fisher]

Thanks for the tip- I am trying phpbb.

Iain

No there aren't any changes - the FP discussion board is a *very basic*
feature.

I'd suggest you try a discussion group/bulletin board script suitable to
your server such as

phpBB www.phpbb.com (free)
Yabb. http://www.yabbforum.com/ (free)

These have member signups/logons (so you can have control in that respect,
even block IP's of spammers I think)
Moderated lists, set up various categories of discussion etc etc.

They take a bit of setting up and the php one uses MySQL on a LInux
server, the YABB one uses flat-text databases (text files) - at the time I
used it, that was how it worked; it may have advanced from there since
then.

etc