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Greenhorn
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i wrote everything but the gui for a bbs board. right now i have some jsp showing the data, but it is a bit ugly. what i need is someone to show me some bbs/messege boards which look nice. i need to be inspired. any links to good looking (regardless of content) bbs's would be appreciated.
thanks.
 
Thomas Harrington
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anyone, anyone???
 
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just do a quick search, you should find them..
There are many forums out there based on Perl CGI JAVA etc and have totally colors, but all seem to be the same layout. I personally have not liked any forums.
here are two links plus you have this site!
http://www.codingforums.com
http://www.jsworkshop.com/bb/
Another Link:
click on the info pop link on the bottom of the boards, they have sites listed that use their software.
I personally would just try to create your own and not follow anyone else. One thing I would offer that would make you unique is the ability to personalize the board in the user setings. I wish boards had that feature so I could set colors, fonts etc. People say that makes the site not the owners, but hey I like my colors!
That is just CSS stylesheets, not hard.
If you need help just say so, also this forum (JS and HTML) sees little traffic on weekends, that is why there was no major reponces.
Eric
 
Thomas Harrington
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That is a great idea about letting users decide their own color schemes. I am going to add that now. I think I will start with adding three color schemes, and run it through an if statement in the jsp. I wonder how I should save the setting for the user, so it is remembered every time the person visits. Maybe I will add a table to the DB with user and colorChoice fields, and save there. Thanks for the idea!
BTW, do you like threaded forums better than those like YaBB or vBulleten? Yabb seems to have one page with topics, then you click on the link and it takes you to the all the posts of that topic. A threaded bbs would have all the posts and repsonces on one page bulleted by subject. You would click on the subject for that one post. That way you could easily see all the posts, instead of just the subjects, although it would require a little more clicking.
 
Thomas Harrington
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One other question. If I do not want to allow users to add code to a post, what is the easiest way of doing that. Should I just go through all the text and remove any brackets?
Sorry if I am rambeling, but it helps me to think out loud before I start coding, because once I start to code my field of thought becomes narrow. So I ramble alot before I code.
 
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Hi Thomas,
Although I haven't written many scripts in JSP I have come across similar situations when it comes to using Perl scripts. Since security is everything these days you should check for everything that could cause a problem. Like I said my JSP experience is limited so I'm not sure what the optimum way of doing a string search and replace in JSP is but in Perl it's very very easy to do. Here is one line of code that basically does a check and replace of "sensitive" code that may be passed back from an HTML page to a Perl script :
$inputdata =~ s/<!--(.|\n)*-->//g;
$inputdata =~ s/([;\'\\|"*?~<>^\(\)\[\]\{\}\$\n\r])/\\$1/g;
If unfamilar, then the first line gets rid of everything between and including the comment lines. Second line escapes everything that occurs within the round brackets. You might want to try something like this. Depending on what your bulletin board prompts for, just removing the brackets may remove some clarity from what the user is trying to put across. You might want to have a more specific means of matching whats inside the brackets before simply removing them or maybe escaping values will do. I'm just throwing this out as (hopefully!) helpful advice. Just make sure that no where within your code are you using information returned by the user in such things as eval statements or the such. That could get messy.
Rob
 
Thomas Harrington
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Thanks for the input. Unfortunatly, I do not know Perl, and I would not know how to incorporate it with Java. The way I have my bbs structured is with a database housing all the posts, a JavaBean controlling access to the database, and servlets formatting the data for display in the JSP page. I am not that worried about security, and I have specific methods in the JavaBean for accessing the database. As long as those methods are unknown to the public, I think security will be high. Perhaps I should adjust Tomcat so it only allows IP's from outside localhost on just the introduction page. That way, every other page I am hosting would have to be reffered from another page on my server or they would get an error page.
 
Eric Pascarello
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I would just set up the different color shemes in a table like you said in a database. You can make sure they are viewing the right theme with cookies if you are allowing a user to stay logged in. If that is not the case and you are not using cookies, then I would look into a session cookie or have it written from the database. It depends on how you are acoomplishing writting the data from the server.
To get rid of the brackets for the code would just be reg expressions. For most code you would just have to change < to &lt;
You could do it client side before it is submitted where I could help out, but yoir best bet would be to do it with the jsp, which I lack the knowledge. You could prob. ask that in the jsp forum.
They layout all depends on how the info should be displayed. There are so many features you could have that it is endless. I have been on boards that have every post in one big list that gets added on top and shows a tree to the responces and then you have this type of board.
Did I sort of answer all your questions?
Eric
 
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