From simon at technocool.net Mon Jun 19 13:40:21 2006 From: simon at technocool.net (Simon Waters) Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 21:40:21 +0100 Subject: [DCPM] Perl Bulletin Boards - Recommendations? Message-ID: <44970BB5.6070804@technocool.net> Looking for a forum tool for a chess website. There are a lot of general purpose BBs out there, and I'm familiar with some of the PHP ones (PunBB, phpBB2, and relatives), and one Perl board (YaBB). YaBB is pretty good, but it has some weird licence (not a serious problem - insists on a copyright notice), but if anyone knows a better Perl discussion forum, or as good as with a DFSG compatible licence. I figure Perl is probably better, as if I ever get to code anything CPAN already has most things a chess programmer could ever want (short of Perl chess engines, although someone has written one now). Mostly we want just a simple discussion forum. We don't need any massive features, just user sign-up with email confirmation, some sort of anti-bot features to prevent abuse (although obscurity may do that well enough). Good generated mark-up (the site validates or we fix it!) and no major accessibility issues. Ideally the ability to chuck arbitrary Javascript and extra handling into the message to do some "chess magic" for moves and diagrams, this can be done with pretty much any tool, but one that doesn't make it any harder than it already is would be good ;) So basically, beyond not being open to abuse, and good mark-up and accessibility, the less features the better probably. Will run on Debian Sarge, Postgres DB already available, I'd prefer not to add MySQL to the already heady mixture but if needs must. From aaron.trevena at gmail.com Thu Jun 22 02:41:56 2006 From: aaron.trevena at gmail.com (Aaron Trevena) Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2006 10:41:56 +0100 Subject: [DCPM] Perl Bulletin Boards - Recommendations? In-Reply-To: <44970BB5.6070804@technocool.net> References: <44970BB5.6070804@technocool.net> Message-ID: On 19/06/06, Simon Waters wrote: > Looking for a forum tool for a chess website. > > There are a lot of general purpose BBs out there, and I'm familiar with > some of the PHP ones (PunBB, phpBB2, and relatives), and one Perl board > (YaBB). > > YaBB is pretty good, but it has some weird licence (not a serious > problem - insists on a copyright notice), but if anyone knows a better > Perl discussion forum, or as good as with a DFSG compatible licence. > > I figure Perl is probably better, as if I ever get to code anything CPAN > already has most things a chess programmer could ever want (short of > Perl chess engines, although someone has written one now). Annoyingly - this is an area in which perl lacks some good solutions - mind you I wouldn't call phpBB, etc "good". * NMS (not MSA) wwwboard is very simple, decent code, but ugly as hell * psunami hasn't been updated since 2003 and I don't see any demo's or screenshots for it * mwforum seems to look nice, and works ok, but the code wasn't very nice (but then it can't be worse than the php BBS code) when I looked at it 5 years ago. I attempted to port it to TT to make it more useful, but never finished. Hopefully the code has improved since then and it might be easier to customise or move to TT. Cheers, A.