Setting Up Your Own Message Board

I want to go over the process of setting up your own message board. This is something which a number of people have requested since I've been doing TNB, and it's a good script to master. Here's the main points with running a chat forum on your sites:

You can have adverts for your sponsors and even spam your own board.
You can make a niche board for each group of surfers.
You can research into what porn surfers are really looking for.
Search engines LOVE the keyword-rich text pages.
It's a free-to-setup, low-maintenance piece of content.

The final product looks something not unlike TNB does today. Visitors can go to a special page and add their comments. Here's an example of the script we're going to set up already running:

Working Example

Have a try at posting a message if you like.

Downloading the script

The script we're going to use is an old guestbook script which I've modified over the years. It can be a bit tricky to get working, so we'll go over it one bit at a time. The first step is to download the script to your hard disk. You can do that by clicking on this link:

Download the script

Then unzip that script with something like Winzip. You should now have the following 4 files on your hard disk:

- chat.html
- guestbook.pl
- index.html
- post.html

Setting the script up

Now we need to alter some settings to get this thing working on your webspace. This has to be done before anything is uploaded. This is the hard part so stick the coffee on and let's get down to it.

1) Start a text editor (like NoteTab or notepad). Anything will do so long as you can edit plain .txt type files.

2) Open up the guestbook.pl file in your text editor.

3) The very first line will be:

#!/usr/bin/perl

This is the first thing that the script needs to know. It needs to know what's called "the path to perl" on your webspace. It's likely that this is already the correct path but shoot your host an email and ask them "what is the path to perl?" just to be sure. Once you've got that info - and altered this line if needs be - then move on.

4) The next line you come to will be this one:

$chatpath = "http://www.tomsnewbiebooster.com/resources/chat/";

You should recognize the bits between the quotation marks as a familiar web URL. This will be the url on your webspace where the chat will live. If your domain name is "www.sexypicshere.com" then you should create a folder called 'chat' and then your path for this line would look like this:

$chatpath = "http://www.sexypicshere.com/chat/";

5) Next up we come to this line:

$guestbookreal = "/home/htdocs/users/tarmstro/tarmstro/tomsnewbiebooster.com/resources/chat/chat.html";

Again - it's the part between the quotation marks that needs to be changed. This time, it's the SERVER PATH (which is a bit different to the web path). You need to put the server path to the chat folder on your webspace. If you are confused at this point - DON'T BE! There's help on finding your server path easily here:

What's my server path?

6) The final setting we need to alter is as follows:

$cgiurl = "http://www.tomsnewbiebooster.com/cgi-bin/guestbook.pl";

And again, look between the quotation marks. It's the exact same procedure as the first URL we entered - this is the web path. You need to alter the path to your cgi-bin. Every domain name has a cgi-bin and this is what you need to put in here. So, if your domain name is "sexynudewomen.com" - then this path should be changed to:

$cgiurl = "http://www.sexynudewomen.com/cgi-bin/guestbook.pl";

7) There's one more thing to do. Open up post.html and look for this line:

<FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="http://www.tomsnewbiebooster.com/cgi-bin/guestbook.pl">

Then change the path that's between the quotation marks to the exact same path as in step 6). This tells the posting page WHERE it should send the information to be processed. the guestbook.pl file then adds the post to our chat board.

That's it! Well done. You've altered what is actually tricky settings file.

Uploading the script to your webspace...

This is kind of backwards because we've just told the script about a path that doesn't actually exist yet. The next thing you need to do is to create a folder on your domain name, on the server, called /chat/ - the same domain obviously that we've just been talking about in the section above. Once you've done that, upload the following files to that folder:

- index.html
- chat.html
- post.html

CHMOD chat.html to 777.

If you're stumped by the "chmod" part above - take a read of this tutorial:

CHMOD tutorial

Then, in your FTP program, go into the cgi-bin that we specified in the section on setting paths. Upload guestbook.pl to the cgi-bin on your domain name. Upload it in ASCII mode, and then CHMOD that to 755.

Almost done!

You should now be able to do to index.html in your browser. So if your domain name is "kinkyfreesex.com" - then you should be able to go to the following address in your browser:

www.kinkyfreesex.com/chat/

And test things out. If there's an error - email me or post on the board and I'll help you nail it.

Additional notes that might help

You can open the index.html file and the post.html file as you would any other html file and customize those.

The script requires that SSI can be run on html pages. If the script doesn't work, this could be one cause. The simplest way around this is to rename index.html to index.shtml. The script will preform exactly the same with the .shtml suffix.

Posts are added to chat.html. So if you want to remove a post, download chat.html and then remove the HTML that you want to (it will be easy to spot - the code is very clean!) Then upload chat.html again. TAKE CARE OF CHAT.HTML!!! If you wipe this file or lose it, all posts to date will be lost. Maybe back it up just in case.

Good luck and hope you find running a chat board for your surfers educational and profitable!

TOM ^"^

ICQ 12616560
Email tom@tomsnewbiebooster.com

Enter TOM'S NEWBIE BOOSTER

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