You are already basically doing what I recommended. And that is largely to discuss possible modifications to the EarthWaves board.

By having those discussions here they can be commented on by present EarthWaves board posters.

For an example of that type of progress, I learned about the present board program I am with working from other people. I had previously been working on the making changes to the original board program.

For another example, you mentioned TalkShop in your note. I had never heard of it before I saw that name in your post and will now go looking out on the Internet for a copy to see if it might be even better for my new board than the version of WWWBoard I am presently modifying.

Next, after making a few adjustments for the differences between Internet Server Perl and ActiveState PC Perl (the version I myself use), they appear to be essentially the same. I am not having any trouble at all now with my code. The only problems that I do run into are related to the fact that I am not a Perl programming expert. So some of the code conventions are not familiar to me. I am learning what they mean as I make modifications to the program and see what works and doesn’t work.

Next, additions to the EarthWaves board don’t need to affect how the existing Web page looks and works. For example, so far I have created one additional data entry screen that I am presently using to test my board program code. It is just a data entry screen that does not itself display posts. And it doesn’t affect the regular board HTML Web page in any manner except that the regular Web page displays any new posts that are added through that alternate data entry screen. One reason for using that independent screen is because people can download it and use it to add posts without having to visit the actual EarthWaves board Web page and download and wade through all of the post that are stored there.

Security is not really a problem with that approach. Anyone could create an independent data entry screen like that one for use with the existing EarthWaves board and store it on their PC.

For another example, code can be easily added to the bulletin board program that will cause it to create two different versions of the existing board Web page and store them at different addresses such as “wwwboard.html” and “wwwboard_mod.html.”

wwwboard.html would be the same one that is presently being displayed. wwwboard_mod.html could be a largely identical Web page that would have modifications made to it so that it looked different and had different options. Board visitors could visit both and see what they liked about the modified Web page, didn’t like, and then post comments regarding their opinions.