There are many uses for a bulletin board system on the Web. A "BBS" can be used to make information continually available that would normally be shared only during infrequent meetings. Within a BBS, users can discuss topics, reading the responses to their ideas at their leisure. On the Internet, vendors can use a BBS to discuss their products or offer technical support. Additionally, users on the Internet can set up a BBS spontaneously to discuss things that interest them or just for fun. The main feature of WebBBS is that it allows a user to post messages as well as post replies to existing messages. WebBBS keeps track of which messages are posts and which ones are replies and displays them in a hierarchical tree-like fashion. Posts that start new topics are at the top of each tree, and the replies are shown indented beneath the original posts. WebBBS is also fully integrated with the user authentication library discussed above. Additionally, it allows a user to restrict the number of messages through a variety of query mechanisms. The user can conduct a keyword search and display only those messages that satisfy the search. The user can also select a range of dates within which the viewed messages were posted. For example, a user could choose to see only messages posted between 6/1/96 and 6/10/96. In addition, the user can select a range of posts based on age in days, and choose to see, for example, only those messages posted between two days ago and four days ago.

Application in Action