Room and Board for a Board

This isn't Hawaii-related, but I figure it's as good a place to ask this question, especially since there seem to be many Mac geeks lurking in the woodwork here at HS. Perhaps someone might know the answer.

Is it possible to run a bulletin board/forum on Mac OS X, and how would that actually work?

The reason I ask:

The Boyfriend has had his free forum shut down by ForumCo. Another victim of the dot-com we've got money to burn hysteria, they've finally figured out that pop-ups weren't going to pay the bills forever.

I've told the Boyfriend about EZBoard's Gold Community, but he is a poor college student, and he is loath to pay for the privledge of having a no-ad board. There are few options for free forums besides EZBoard. So, the Boyfriend got the idea to run a forum off of his TiBook with our Road Runner connection.

After wondering about how this would violate so many provisions of the contract I signed with Oceanic, I began to wonder about the logistics of actually trying this out. I am somewhat experienced with installation of CGI-based software, and it can be a bugger to work out. I played around with Graymatter for awhile, and it was a nightmare trying to configure everything to my liking. I figure trying to run a web server off of a Mac would be equally daunting.

So, does anyone know of how this could be accomplished? What software to use, etc.? Or does anyone know of a secret free forum service that could support another community? I'm open to other ideas as well. Oh, and I've already done the pre-requisite search on Google, and haven't come up with anything useful.

Comments

Hmm. I would say it's technically possible.

Mac OS X comes with some PHP modules, and you can apparently compile the whole thing. "The BSD underpinnings of Mac OS X allow PHP to run as an Apache module in its native Unix environment," Apple says.

So, if you've already got your Mac running as a webserver, and compile PHP, you should be able to run any web forum/board software, including the incredible and free phpBB.

If Greymatter gave you a headache, messing with the guts of OS X and compiling UNIX modules and connecting it to a PHP script would qualify as spontaneous cranial combustion.

As a valued resident of HawaiiStories, however, it seems reasonable to think that if you want a service, why, by golly, we should provide it. I'd be happy to set up a phpBB forum for you (or anyone) here... though it depends on how secure you need your board to be, if you need several categories and subcategories, user-level access control, and the like.

Let's talk!

I second Ryan's motion, except that Marc Liyanage maintains precompiled PHP and MySQL modules for OS X. He's actually faster at updating these installers than anyone out there. His site is at http://www.entropy.ch (Switzerland--appears to be off line right now. Try later.).

Follow his directions carefully and in about 10 minutes, you'll be up and running. Marc also has other useful software compiled for OS X, all free.

If you'd rather run a Perl BBS, I'm running Ikonboard. http://www.ikonboard.com. It was probably harder to set up and run than the phpBBS, but it has been running for a year on my OS X Web server with nary a hitch. Ikonboard is also now offered in a PHP version.

And as I recall, EZBoard wants $30 or so for several months of ad-free use; the users might pony up a buck or so apiece.

I liked Ikonboard, too, but of all the CGI packages I've played with on various servers (and there have been many), I'd have to say theirs was the most convoluted. It's a decent board setup, but they really need someone to focus on the installation end. They could at least have tar/gz files that expand into the right directories.

The one thing Ikonboard does that I wish phpBB did is sub-sub-forums. On an old forum I ran with Ikonboard, I could have a category (Publications), and a sub-category (Honolulu Advertiser), and within/under that have several discussions. As far as I can tell, phpBB has only a two level hierarchy.

Thanks for the Marc Liyanage tip. Only gluttons for punishment should try to compile their own modules. (I've done PHP once on UNIX, and it damn near killed me.)

Those modules would get Vivi further along the process, but setting up a webserver, and - more importantly - running it live over RoadRunner (without a static IP, let alone the contract implications for service) is a bit of an undertaking as well.

I've set up HawaiiStories Forums as a test for Vivi, or anyone else here who wants a message board for their own site (and obviously, it would make sense for folks who are hosted here).

Speaking of PHP and bulletin board software.. anyone know of an integrated bulletin board/chat prog written in PHP?

I'm a big fan of phpBB, but I haven't found any chat progs that can be hacked into it yet, and I need the two to use the same DB.

Does PHP-Nuke do what you need? It's an all-over-the-place CMS-turned-portal package. One front end and many plug-ins supposedly gives you everything from chatrooms and boards to news articles to journals to polls to streaming music stations to classified ads to...

I've occasionally been in a chat room provided by PHPHeaven. It's unclear if it's Mac-friendly, but I didn't dig real deep, either.

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