Review: Ultimate Bulletin Board 5.38
Web Marketing Today, Issue 58, July 1, 1999
While mailing lists can build community, they lack an easy way to view various threads or discussion topics as a more permanent reference. The tool for this is a bulletin board.
I've had the HyperNews bulletin board (http://www.hypernews.org/) system installed on my site since 1996, and it has served well thousands of users, but was beginning to show its age. A simple free-ware option is Matt Wright's WWW Board (http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/wwwboard.shtml), but I needed something that offered full features and the ability to easily coordinate many different discussion sections. I settled on the Ultimate Bulletin Board
ver. 5.38 from InfoPop (formerly Madrona Park, Inc. For URL see http://www.wilsonweb.com/reviews/ultimate.htm). I had admired UBB for many months at Jim Wilson's Search Engine Forums (http://www.searchengineforums.com/), and he had been quite pleased with it. There it is handling tens of thousands of posts, and hundreds of members. Overall, its developers claim it is installed at about 60,000 sites.
I purchased a full license for $152, though it is available for a one year lease at $67. A freeware version allows up to nine forum sections, it but lacks key administrative tools, such as the ability to remove offensive posts. UBB is written in Perl 5, so can be installed on a great number of webserver platforms.
I bought it for its intuitive user interface, extensive administrative features, ability to involve multiple moderators who have little technical skill, and easy customization. Some of the features of the full UBB program are:
- Unlimited number of forums (including private forums)
- Integrated search engine
- E-mail notification of replies to topics
- Ability for non-members to view posts easily
- Ability to close threads and turn off forums easily
- Support for HTML within messages
- Multiple forum moderators (who can edit/delete any post in a forum they moderate)
- A simple registration system
- Full-featured administration and customization through a browser interface
- Word censor capability to screen out some of the crudeness of participants.
You can add your own HTML header and footer to the site which allows you a great deal of customization, as well as the ability to create and use all your own graphics. While I can't run SSI banner ads, there is a proprietary UBB code for a random number (UBBrandomX) which can be inserted into the HTML banner code that forces banners to rotate instead of being cached. Of course, since it is written in Perl, the UBB can be hacked to do just about anything, if you have the programming skill at your disposal.
If you're looking for multi-featured bulletin board for your own site, UBB will probably fill the bill. It does require some knowledge of Unix to install, but for a nominal amount InfoPop can arrange for an installer to put it on your site for you.
I'm pretty impressed with the power of the Ultimate Bulletin Board, and invite Web Marketing Today readers to join in the discussion at the Web Marketing & E-Commerce Forum (http://www.wilsonweb.com/forum/) and try it out.
You may download a freeware verion of the Ultimate Bulletin Board at on the Web.
