“Bulletin boards, once the backbone of the online
community (in the pre-Internet age — about 20 years ago), have
been making a strong comeback after a noted absence during the
1990s Web explosion and the rise of USENET. Web sites with their
own internal discussion forums, as well as corporate intranets with
special-purpose bulletin boards, have been popping up all over the
place. No matter how esoteric the topic, you can probably find a
Web BBS (or multiple BBSes) all about it — video games, DVD
collecting, food, wine, gardening, automobiles, sports teams, you
name it.The two undisputed Web BBS software leaders for the past two
years have been Infopop’s (http://www.infopop.com) UltimateBB and
Vbulletin (http://www.vbulletin.com). Both are commercial software
and cost $250 and $160 per licensed copy, respectively. Until
recently, there were no Open Source/Free Software alternatives that
could match the functionality of these two software packages, and
none that could scale to allow fast performance of particularly
large discussion communities (i.e., more than 10,000 members or
100,000 messages).Enter Jarvis Networks’ Ikonboard V3 (http://www.ikonboard.com),
the first Web-based and Open Source BBS package to challenge
UltimateBB and Vbulletin. The latest version of Ikonboard (“IB3”)
supports Perl DBI, MySQL, and postgresSQL databases, as well as the
mod_perl Apache extensions for improved Perl CGI performance. Like
its competitors, Ikonboard boasts a user-friendly Web-based
installation program, and an attractive and full-featured
administrative GUI. It is also completely “skinnable” to allow for
sophisticated aesthetic design elements.”