There are several discussion boards that I read regularly, each powered by a different engine. Unlike UseNet, where you can get a newsreader that will fit your tastes and habits, each engine only has one web interface, with varying degrees of custimization. In terms of speed and ease of use they all pale in comparison to UseNet, but that's more a limitation of the web rather than the programming. As I've heard it said, the web is nice for some applications, but it's a far cry from a be-all-end-all replacement for e-mail, news, irc, and several other Internet services.

I'll start with a bad one: the Ultimate Bulletin Board (UBB), used by the TrekRPGNet web site. You have a user name and login, which all the boards have so they can keep track of your preferences and articles read. On the plus side you can include HTML code and UBB code for graphics and text formatting. Not that I care for those features.

But the negatives are many. It's supposed to keep track of your last login, and then mark the topics that have new messages. It does use cookies so you don't have to physically login, but often you're logged in as guest or it loses your readership records. But even if that feature was reliable, when it's time to view a topic with new messages for you, it shows all the messages starting at the first message. So there's no way to tell where to start unless you do what I do and note the day of the last time you logged in so that way you can scroll to the new messages manually. All in all little better than what a guestbook could do.

The second discussion board engine I've seen is Discus, which powers the boards at Star Fleet Games. You do have to log in every time, but once you log in it displays the message headers of any new messages since the last time you logged in. Note that it doesn't keep track of what you've read or not, just your login times, which is a simple and mostly effective way of doing it.

There are two interfaces, table based and text based. I suggest changing your prefs to use text based display, because table based can take a while to draw on Netscape. Opening a topic shows up to the last 20 messages or so, plus more folders for periodic archives for that topic. Not too bad as then you can see a range of messages without downloading all of them at once. Once again you can include HTML code, even pictures. The user info is also more extensive, as you can specify hobbies and include a personal picture.

Being able to see the message topics is nice, although once you choose a message it downloads the whole group and scrolls to the message you selected. But it's more than what UBB and Web Crossing do, you at least can scan the messages to see if there's anything worth to read.

Speaking of Web Crossing, this engine is used in two sites that I frequent: ConSimWorld and The Digital Camera Resource Page. I think Web Crossing also allows HTML code in messages. It keeps track of the last message read in each topic, so you don't have to worry about hitting all the topics as in the previous two engines.

There's a Check Messages button that you can keep clicking and it'll just display the unread messages in each topic. This wouldn't be so useful if you didn't have a subscribe to topic option, so that only those topics are shown for Check Messages. You can mark messages, which are kept in a favorites page (along with your comments for the message) for later perusal. You can set the maximum amount of text or messages to show on each page.

The limitations are that there is no view by header option, you just scroll through all the messages. I don't think subscribers can just add new topics, which means that this engine is more useful for preset topics like product support. But this is my favorite engine.

The last discussion board engine that I want to write about is the home-made open source engine at SlashDot. Not only can you have topics, but the messages in a topic can be threaded, like UseNet. Moderators can also rate the messages, on a scale of -1 to 5, for information content. Subscribers can set their preferences to filter based on that rating, quite useful if you have good moderators.

This is a high scale engine, as SlashDot gets a heck of a lot of traffic. I really haven't used it in depth so I don't know if there are more filtering options, but that would be useful because of the high traffic. You can't create new topics, at least not on SlashDot, but the engine can probably be configured to do whatever the admins want, as befitting a good open source effort.

Each topic can have a symbol, which if you click will show you other topics for that grouping. So for a topic about Apple, click on the stylized Apple logo to see the other Apple topics. You can post anonymously, although your ratings are automatically lower.

This is probably the best engine. But it also shows what happens when you have too much traffic, which will make any web-based engine lag like crazy. So it colors my perceptions of it. On SlashDot the topics are set up as news stories that the readers can comment on, so there are constantly new topics and I suppose other topics are being archived and deleted.