Websites are great for presenting information to wide geographically dispersed audiences. Frequently, however, site visitors like to contribute their thoughts regarding not only the design or general content of a site, but specific perspectives on the information a nonprofit site shares with them. For this reason, a number of websites feature an online bulletin or message board (also called a comment area, discussion, forum, or conference). This is different from a chat room in that it is not a space for real-time interactive discussions, but is simply a central spot for electronic messages to be posted, such that messages can be posted, and related postings can be threaded together. More advanced systems and tools provide additional features, like

• searchable archives of past postings,
• filters that allow users to view messages by date, poster, or subject,
• the ability to automatically expire or reject postings based on duplications, inappropriateness, or registration criteria
• notification via e-mail when new content, or content of specific interest to a user, is posted to the message area Online Services A number of online list hosting services also offer the ability for users to set up their own private and public online Web-based forums or conferences. For the most part, these services allow users to access threaded discussions via the Web, and to post their own messages or responses. The advantage of threaded discussions is the ability to track responses and feedback to certain topics, in essence giving you both a record of a discussion and a sense of what topics generated the most interest and activity. In most cases, free online services entail some form of company advertisement on your website, or will link to a URL distinct from your website that will link back to your site. There may be also be limitations on the amount of postings, size of individual messages, limitations on whether attachments (especially graphics) can be included in postings, or duration of certain forums left inactive. For a fee, most services will remove the advertising from your message board, or will allow groups to add their logo or name prominently on the screen, so that it can be more integrated into an existing nonprofit site. By utilizing a free web-based service, however, groups who either lack access to the service hosting their website or organizations that do not want to administer a service on their own server can host their own boards. Software Options One key resource for any nonprofit looking to provide this feature on their site is David R. Woolley's "Conferencing Software for the Web". It is a good first place to start if you want to know what software is available to run threaded message discussions on your website. Do It Yourself For groups with access to a web developer, site designer, or programmer expertise, there is another way to incorporate a message board into a site, namely using scripting courtesy of Perl/CGI or JavaScript. There are also some good freeware tools to accomplish the same thing. The first involves CGI script. Some of you might have heard your tech folks mentioning this word, but what is it? It stands for Common Gateway Interface, and it refers to a type of information exchange between a Web server (those machines hosting web pages) and a program, which can be written in any number of programming languages (most usually C, Perl, Java or Visual Basic). The program itself basically processes the data between a person accessing a Web page and the Web server. For this reason, CGI is referred to as a "server-side" process. When you fill out an online form, perform a search, or make a selection from a menu, you are most likely performing a transaction involving a CGI process. CGI, however, can be slow and inefficient, especially on servers with a lot of traffic, because each time the CGI program or script is invoked, a new process is generated. A faster server-side approach is PHP, which creates faster Web pages by including instructions similar to other scripting languages in special tags within an HTML document. PHP is effective with Web databases and for processes that operate across different network platforms. Another approach used for similar processes is the "client side" process, which involves programs like ActiveX controls, Javascript, or Java applets. These programs are executed on an individual's machine through the browser, and take some of the processing burden off of the web server. Another approach is to use Java servlets and APIs. Servlets are tiny programs that run on a Web server, and, once started, stay in memory to handle multiple simultaneous information processing requests. API's (application program interface) are programming environments that allow applications to be developed that are consistent with the specific operating system within which they run. Both of the latter options tend to run faster than programs requiring processing by a server. With that said, there are some scripts and source code that have been recommended to us that were developed to allow folks to run a message board on their Web servers, and we've listed a few below. Before implementing any of these approaches, please consult the person who handles your website (unless its you) to see if your server can run the script or program, and what it will require in terms of maintenance, and any other issues that might affect the performance of your server.
  • A-Forum: This program can host up to 36 message boards on the same Web server simultaneously. It runs on hosts operating either the Microsoft Internet Information Server (MS IIS) for Windows NT or Microsoft Personal Web Server (MS PWS) for Windows 95/98. It was written in an API called IAPI (Internet Server API). This version of A-Forum script allows you to start up to 36 different forums (or "message boards") on the same server at the same time.
  • ARS Digita Community System: For those of you who are programmers and are looking for something to keep you busy, or if you are interested in the design principles of online message systems, and are interested in open source tinkering, you might want to take a look at MIT professor Philip Greenspun's "Scalable Systems for Online Communities" and his related materials on the ArsDigita concept, which features a good background on creating and implementing software tools to facilitate discussions, as well as links to source code to get you started.
  • ASP-DEV Discussion Forum: This is a VisualBasic script, currently in public beta testing, but featuring advanced message board capabilities.
  • Phorum: This is a PHP program that is developed as an open-source effort. Significantly faster than CGI.
  • Remarks: If you happen to have an older server running Windows 3.x, you too can have your own web-based bulletin board with this script (note, this will not work on Windows 95 or NT servers)
  • Web Forums: This is a free Web-based discussion program written in Perl, which presents threaded messages across multiple discussion forums.
  • WWWBoard: Popular Perl CGI message board script used on a number of websites. As with most of these scripts, unless expressly given permission to do so, you cannot sell or claim the script as your own, so utilizing it should not be treated as "stealing code." You are, however, allowed to modify and adapt scripts to fit your particular needs. Be sure to examine the README and installation files, as well as any license or information on terms of use to see what you can and can't do. Resources Cited "Conferencing Software for the Web" David R. Woolley A-Forum < aref="http://www.arsdigita.com">ARS Digita Community System Scalable Systems for Online Communities" Philip Greenspun ASP-DEV Discussion Forum Phorum Remarks Web Forums WWWBoard