Rich - A Question about Software

[Mark Hofman]

Rich:



What software does this site use to drive the discussion board? Thanks!

 

[Rich Stern]

MO, it's my own creation. It's written in Microsoft ASP, and the messages are stored in a SQL Server database. At the time I started this site, many of the available bulletin board packages forced you to see their advertising or pay a license fee. I decided to write my own to avoid the hassle of somebody else's rules.

 

[gone bye bye]

And we all thank you for that Rich....I am also not opposed to seeing litmited advertisement here for your benefit.



Mini

 

[Mark Hofman]

This is without reservation the very best discussion board setup I've EVER seen. If it was a commercial package, I'd consider buying it for my employer's web site.



If you aren't already, you should seriously think about marketing it!

 

[Rich Stern]

MO, if you check out the Bass Zone (www.basszone.com), you'll see that I do have one customer for the software.



I don't spend time marketing it because there are plenty of commercial message forums available, and they offer many more features. People often suggest to me that I switch to one of them. What those people don't appreciate about this software versus the ones that have a ton of bells and whistles, is that this software is far easier/more accessible to a newcomer, which I think contributes greatly to encouraging people to post (and isn't that the point?). I can also keep things moving faster by keeping it lean and mean, which people with dial up connections appreciate.



So, thanks for the positive comments. You already percieve this software exactly the way I would ask you to. Less is more.

 

[Rich Stern]

MO, one follow up comment:



You might think that "easy" and "fast" would give me good marketing advantage competing with other message forum products. Unfortunately, in much of the tech world, product evaluation is about depth and breadth of features. It's one of those cases where the forest gets lost through the trees.



Word processing software is a great example. All of the major word processing software packages have gotten so sophisticated that they do pretty much everything that desktop publishing software can do. And you know what? It's harder to write simple documents with them because of all of those features. The people that evaluate and recommend software products want the bells and whistles. The vast majority of people that use the software don't have the same level of training or technical sophistaction as the evaluators, and struggle with the product in basic use.



Sorry, pet peeve of mine: Software should be easy.



Stepping down from soap box now.

 

[Jeff Duggan]

Hey Rich, I am a programmer too. Is the site written in straight ASP or do you use any COM objects? Also, do you run your own web sever and SQL server or do you pay a monthly fee for an offsite server?