WWW Board

The WWW board script enables you to add a discussion forum to your site, where visitors can post messages, and reply to messages posted by other users.

The message board system is easy to set up, and includes advanced features, such as filtering and IP blocking.

A www board sample is not currently available:

How to Add a WWW Board

Follow these simple steps to add a WWW board to your web site:

1. Create your new WWW board.
2. Configure WWW board options.

Create Your New WWW Board

From the "Hosting" area of your account control panel, select "FreeCGI" and click "Manage WWW Boards". Enter a directory to use for your board (this will be automatically created) and click "Create Board".

It is good practice to follow file/directory naming conventions when configuring your board. This means your board directory name should not contain spaces, and should be in lower-case alphanumeric characters.

Configure WWW Board Options

The next page includes all configuration options for your new WWW board.

Basic Options

These options must be configured for your forum to be created.

• Title of the board is the HTML title for your forum pages.
   
• Main board file is the file name for the main forum entry page. As mentioned in the previous step, the page name should not contain spaces, and should be in lower-case alphanumeric characters.
  
  Tip: If you enter the main forum entry page name as "index.html", you can point your users to "http://www.yourname.com/yourboard/", instead of the entire URL to the file.
   
• Color options allow you to to specify colors for your background, text and links. You may also enter the Hex value directly.
   
• Background image allows you to specify the URL of an image file to display on the background of your forum pages.
   
• Administrative username and Password must be specified in order to create your WWW board, and are required to access the forum administration interface.

Advanced Options

These options are not required, but can be used to enhance your discussion forum. It is recommended that you leave these settings at their default values until you have visited your WWW board. You can then return to the management interface and make any required changes once you are familiar with the way the board functions.

• File extensions allows you to toggle between ".html" and ".htm" extensions for your message forum files.
   
• Message directory allows you to change the name of the subdirectory where messages are stored.
   
• Show FAQs allows you to specify whether a link to the user help file is included in your forum.
   
• FAQ File enables you to provide an alternate help file for the above link.
   
• Allow HTML tags in messages enables/disables HTML in forum messages. If you disable this option, users will not be able to post links and other HTML to the forum pages.
   
• Quote text in replies includes/excludes the original message text when a user posts a reply to a message.
   
• Subject line determines whether the message subject is included when a user posts a reply to a message, and whether the subject text can be edited.
   
• Time stamp messages places a time/date stamp on all posts to your forum.

When you have finished configuring your WWW board options, click "Save Customization".

Viewing Your WWW Board

If you named your main forum entry page "index.html", as recommended above, simply point your browser to the following URL (where "yourname" is your actual domain name, and "yourboard" is the directory containing your WWW board):

http://www.yourname.com/yourboard/

If you provided a different file name, you will need to include this as follows (where "yourname" is your actual domain name, "yourboard" is the directory containing your WWW board, and "filename" is the name you provided for your main forum entry page):

http://www.yourname.com/yourboard/filename.html

Modifying Configuration Options

You can modify basic WWW board settings, or configure advanced options at any time. Simply visit the "Hosting" area of your account control panel, select "FreeCGI" click "Manage WWW Boards", and click the "Modify" button next to the board you wish to edit.

WWW Board Administration

The administration interface enables you to remove posts from your discussion forum. You can remove individual posts, or entire message threads. You can also remove posts by date, author, or message number.

To access the WWW board administration interface, visit the "Hosting" area of your account control panel, select "FreeCGI", click "Manage WWW Boards", and click the "Administer" button next to the board you wish to edit.

You can also access the administration interface directly via the following URL (where "yourname" is your actual domain name, and "yourboard" is the directory containing your WWW board):

http://www.yourname.com/cgi-t/wwwadmin.pl?boardname=yourboard

Note: If you access the administration interface via its URL directly, you will be prompted for the administrative username and password you specified when you created the WWW board. This does not apply when accessing the administration interface from your account control panel.

Tracking IP Addresses of Users

Each WWW board message and related thread is stored in its own HTML file. Message files are named sequentially (i.e. "1.html", "2.html", "3.html" etc.) and are stored in the message directory you specified when you created your board ("messages" by default).

Every message posted to your WWW board includes the IP address of the user. This is written as an HTML comment tag in the message file. To determine the IP address of a user, simply examine the message file that contains their post. Their IP address will be included in the HTML as follows (where "000.000.000.000" is their IP address):

<!--IP ADDRESS: 000.000.000.000-->

If you find that a particular user is frequently making inappropriate posts to your forum, you can use their IP address to block them from your forum pages (or your site as a whole). Detailed information about blocking IP addresses is available in the Webby Guide.