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Case Study : ActiveForums

INTRODUCTION

ActiveForums is an Internet based discussion forum software product. Using only a browser, users can read from, and contribute to, online discussions. Any individual with Internet access to the hosting site can read messages posted on any of the public forums. Users who have registered with the service can post new messages to any of the public forums. ActiveForums is designed as a piece of heavy-duty forum software, to be used by an application software provider (ASP) for providing a forum service to its clients. Rather than current popular forum software, such as Ultimate Bulletin Board, ActiveForums is intended to be installed on a single server and supply forum services to many web sites.

CONTRIBUTION

This software was designed to support thousands of users, contributing to any number of completely disparate sets of forums. Within an individual discussion group forums can be grouped as either private or public. Contributors to private forums are allowed at the discretion of the Administration team, and access to one private forum does not automatically grant access to another.

All contributors to forums either private or public have to be registered users so that there can be no anonymous messages.

ADMINISTRATION / EDITORIAL

There are two levels of administrative control:
" Site level - Site administers can define forums groups, forums and subjects. Site administers are also responsible for allocating users to private forums as well as allocated forum moderators, the next level of administrators
" Forum Moderators - Moderators are responsible for the monitoring of individual forums, the control of long threads, long in terms of either number of messages or period of time.

All Administrative procedures be it at a Site or Forum level is carried out via a web enabled Administrative site. Access to the Admin site is either via a unique URL or, if an Administrator is logged into the Public site then they will have a link directly back to the Administrative site in the same context as they are in the public site.

PRESENTATION

Each web site using the forum software has a great deal of control over the look and feel of its forums, however centralised control of the forum software remains with the ASP.

The forums' settings, threads and messages are all held in a SQL Server database, for easier access to the underlying data.

TECHNOLOGIES

The ActiveForums web-server employs the following technologies:
" MS SQL Server 7 - Performance was one of the major considerations for the design of the ActiveForums database.
" Visual Basic WebClass Client - As a service designed to be used by a wide range of websites, the ability to completely alter the design for each site was a major consideration so the presentation site was developed using WebClasses with HTML templates and Cascading Style sheets.