Once we had a bulletin board running for our student class. The software is actually well-known, but it sometimes showed unexpected and strange behaviour, had an unattractive design model, did not always do what the user wanted and finally, the source code was nothing but a mess – I couldn’t believe this programme actually can be compiled. Exams just passed and I thought, writing my own newsboard shouldn’t be a too big challenge to take (for me as a computer science student). So I started to make plans and to code PHP classes. Not much more than one month later, we chose to convert to the new software. Of course it couldn’t yet keep up with phpBB or even vBulletin, but it improved rapidly with the help of some friends who had some great new ideas and always found the latest bugs... This was in April 2003.

I wanted to create a bulletin board unlike those that already existed (at least to my limited knowledge). I wanted to build it from the ground up with a very clear arrangement and structure. It should be easy to modify or integrate into your own web pages. Configuration of forums, threads, posts and users would ideally be done ‘in-place’, so you wouldn’t have to open a separate Admin menu first but could do things like renaming forums directly where they’re listed, on the overview page.

I believe I made these ideas reality with the Unclassified NewsBoard. User guidance is thereby kept as simple as possible. Only those buttons which make sense in the particular context are shown at any time. I.e. you can only mark all threads as read if there are any unread at all. Another new concept is ‘confirming’ forum announcements: Having read one, you can just ‘click it away’ and only look at it again when you want to. Moreover, any administrative functions will only be offered to those users with sufficient access rights, which can be controlled in details with an access control list.

More of the most interesting features include the Jabber IM notification, avatars and user photos, marking threads as ‘important’ or closing them, polls with or without a timeout, configurable extra user profile fields, statistic graphs, several security enhancing things and many more...

This board is free to the public and I’m not going to change this. More precisely: This program is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). For details, see the file docs/license.txt inside the archive or the GNU website.

This software uses code of other authors, see the Credits for details.

There’s a Support Forum for this, and I’m quite well reachable via e-mail (link at page bottom)... and thankful for any bug report or other notes, like i.e. that you’re using the board on your site!

I can additionally offer commercial level support or custom code modifications, but not for free then.

Forum Software Reviews has published an extensive review on the Unclassified NewsBoard. They also run a live demo of the forum including Administrator login.

The Unclassified NewsBoard is also listed on several script index sites, among others Hotscripts, phpwelt.de, dynamic-webpages.de, php.resourceindex.com, phpfinder.de, webscriptsdirectory.com, scriptsearch.com, fatscripts.com, scriptindex.de and php-resource.de. The sites phpforum.de, php-center.de, phpfreaks.com and freescripts.com unfortunately don’t seem to be interested in new applications.

An incomplete list of sites currently running the Unclassified NewsBoard is available in the Support Forum.