Bulletin Board Related Note To Skywise – May 11, 2013

This is something that I proposed when the archives transfer from Canie was first made a while ago.

The EarthWaves bulletin board can be easily expanded to include a variety of new features. And that could be done without even changing anything in a manner of speaking.

Multiple board Web pages can be created. And uses could use the one they liked the most. This present Web page might stay the same all the time.

It took me a while to learn how the WWWBoard program I myself am working on works. But once that was done it was easy to make modifications. And the latest board that I developed even has some advanced security features. For example, if there were a Denial Of Service attack the board would count how many request that it got during a specific period of time such as a day. And if that number went above a certain value it would indicate that there could be a Denial Of Service attack in progress. And the program would delete a small link in the program chain and stop running until it was reset. When the board was accessed by the attacking computers the requests would just go off to cyberspace.

Mine doesn’t do the following, but it could also be set so that it would only respond to READ and POST requests from approved board visitors while a Denial of Service attack were in progress.

It took me a while to lean how to structure the different server files to make those types of things possible.

TWO SUGGESTED ADDITIONS

Submitted Picture Files

The first and most important would be the ability to have people submit a picture file with their post. Many bulletin board allow that but not the WWWBoard program. The picture file has to be stored on some other server and then called by HTML code in the post.

I don’t know how to add such a feature. However, I have developed an indirect routine for doing that on my personal Web sites. There is probably some CGI Perl program that could be merged with WWWBoard that would allow this.

Drawn Maps

Some CGI graphics program could be run with WWWBoard that would let the program generate picture files such as drawings that display forecasting data.

Gnuplot is supposed to work for that. But I don’t presently know how to use it as a CGI program myself. And responses to requests for information posted to the Gnuplot Newsgroup just said that it is possible without explaining how to do that.

I have several dozen projects not related to earthquakes that are in various states of development. And I don’t have time to develop those computer codes myself. But I could help with suggestions and some minor code development. One of my Web sites is also available for experimentation with CGI program code development

Roger doesn’t want to work with Web site development or Perl or Gnuplot work from what I understand. There are volunteers within the Perl community etc. who would be willing to help. But, someone has to be in charge of keeping the effort moving along.

These are personal opinions.