Bulletin Board Forums

History

In the early days of The Major BBS, both message boards and file libraries were combined in a single somewhat-awkward module called "SIGs" (Special Interest Groups). The module was the same as the current Worldgroup message forums, more or less, with an older interface that was improved over time.

However, the "traditional BBSes" of the time had fairly advanced message forum functionality, as a result of that being their primary feature. To that end, Don Arnel of Logicom created Bulletin Board Forums to provide a message forum option more closely aligned with what users expected.

Information

The popularity or success of any BBS can easily be measured by the amount of activity in its message bases. The Bulletin Board Forums are designed to give your system a powerful, yet simple to use database for writing and receiving public message.

Features:

• Appoint "Directors" to manage individual sub-boards.
• Sysops and Directors can delete or modify any message, even while reading or scanning.
• Individual users can be restricted to NO ACCESS, READ-ONLY, or READ/WRITE.
• Lock-out "non-live" users from Quickscan features.
• Lock-out "non-live" users from specific sub-boards.
• Sub-board names can be changed at any time.
• Make entire sub-boards READ-ONLY to all, or temporarily locked-out for maintenance.
• Message numbering is handled individually by each sub-board.
• Four different methods of defining optional surcharges for writing messages.
• Move or copy message between sub-boards.
• Message headers display message number, time and date stamp, reply count, Sub-board number, sub-board name, "Who to", "Who from", and subject fields.
• Customizable default "who to" text string.
• Option to reply to current subject, or begin a new one.
• Definable maximum limit for the number of messages to retain in the database at any given time.
• Quickscan feature scans for new messages only.
• Users can customize their own quickscan to include any number of sub-boards.
• (S)kip command ignores any remaining new messages for whatever sub-board you are scanning and jumps immediately to the next one.
• Read options include: New, Forward, Reverse, or Search.
• Search for specific message by TO,FROM,SUBJECT, and MESSAGE-TEXT fields.

Module Usage

Usage was text based; similar to any other "traditional BBS" message base format. The only drawback was that Bulletin Board Forums, being an add-on, was never hooked into any network standard such as FidoNet, or the later MailLink-driven MajorNet, or the later WorldLink, or Internet newsgroups.