How do I setup a Chatroom?

[nightsky]

Hi, I am fed up with degenerate, mindless, and lonelyhearts chatrooms. I would like to setup topic chatroom on my website. How do you setup chatrooms and/or bulletin boards? Are there other websites I should checkout, on how to do this? Thank you all

[DrZaius]

Hi nightsky,

If you have a PHP enabled server you can use any of the free PHP bulletin board software listed here. I like phpBB and Phorum.

If you want to use CGI/Perl, the check out the boards here. As for a chat room, you're pretty much limited to using Java applets, do a search and I'm sure you'll find a bunch. Hope that helps.

[nightsky]

Dr.Zaius, like everything else to do w/computers I learn as I go along that is to say I know little to nothing about programing, so what is PHP?

[DrZaius]

nightsky,

PHP is a scripting language used on web sites. It is somewhat like HTML only dynamically generated, so that means the pages can be created with user input.

For example, you can write a form that asks a person to enter their name, and then dynamically generate a page using PHP that would look like "Hello $name" where $name is the persons name.

You can find a good basic intro here. The PHP message boards are just some scripts and files that you upload and configure on your server, and depnding on how well documented they are, require simple PHP knowledge. CGI/Perl is basically the same, a scripting language, only with different features and syntax.

[nightsky]

Thanks Dr Zaius!