Design of AnyBoard & how to do it right

AnyBoard separates message data indexing/storage and message presentation. Message data are stored in plain text files or a database. Message presentation (html file) is generated from the message index and data based on configurations of individual forums. This separation allows you to configure and reconfigure a forum with vastly different styles. When a forum is reconfigured, all html pages can be regenerated. For instance, if you want to add a banner to the message header and change the background, you can change the configuration, and all existing and new messages will carry the banner; if you have a board configured in wwwboard style, and you want to change to a different one (such as threaded topics but inlined message text), just reconfigure and regenerate the board.

AnyBoard is designed to be adaptable. Different people have different preferences on the look & feel, people get bored with one fixed look, AnyBoard lets you have the flexibility to choose the styles you like and switch between them. In fact, many of our customers are able to configure AnyBoard to look like their previous board, so the users don't feel a sudden change.

AnyBoard is designed to be robust, it catches almost every runtime error, such as "disk quota exceeded", it has builtin recovery function to recover the board even after a web server crash. It uses locks to protect critical data from concurrent access by different users and handles deadlock situation gracefully.

AnyBoard has a rich set of control functions. It can disallow misbehaving users by various means, such as automatic ban after configurable number of violations, ban by IP, ban by domain, by username (exact match in .kill file), by username pattern, by alias (using persistent cookies). It allows you to control number of posts/uploads a user can do per day, minimum time interval between two posts from the same IP, disallow duplicate subjects in most recent 20 posts, it can send alarm emails to admin if messages arrive too fast... It let't you set different levels of policies, such as whether user needs to login to read a message, whether they must have validated email address to register, whether posts must be aproved first before showing up... To see all these configurations, VIEW CONFIGURATION OF THE SUPPORT FORUM

AnyBoard's capabilities are unsurpassed, at least for now and in the near future, simply because of the level of its sophistication and the engineering skill needed to implement it. No other message board can match AnyBoard in terms of functionality and ease of use.

AnyBoard code is infinitely extensible, just look at how quick we can add new features to it. It is an excellent example of reusable and extensible software. With this extensibility, AnyBoard can quickly adopt new ideas and technologies and continues to be a viable product for the future.