The FAQs of Web Forums

Last week, I noticed I was getting a lot of email from readers with questions about the Windows NT Magazine online forums (www.winntmag.com/forums/index.dbm). The questions ranged from, "How do you do your forums?" to, "Is the code for your forums available for download?"

In all cases, I don't get to take much credit. For our forums, I use Allaire Forums 1.0 from Allaire, the same company that makes Cold Fusion. Most of what you see on our site is what you get with Allaire Forums out of the box. With all the attention our forums are getting, both in use and emailed questions, now is a good time to look at Web forums. Cold Fusion 2.0 will be out by the time you read this, so now is also a good time to talk about it.

Web Conferencing
You might want to set up a Web conferencing system on your Internet or intranet site for many reasons. Although email is great for providing customer support or feedback, so is a conferencing system, and it lets you answer frequently asked questions (FAQs) once for all your users to see. I use the Windows NT Magazine Web site forums to provide a feedback area where readers can post questions or comments about the magazine. The person with the appropriate expertise answers the question. The Web site also includes an Ask Dr. Bob forum based on Bob Chronister's Tricks & Traps. Here readers can ask technical questions. The neat thing about posting to this forum is that other users can offer solutions to a person's problem.

The main reason we use a conference feature on our Web site is to provide an efficient way for users to ask questions and for us to answer them. In preparing for conferencing, I looked at several options. Email works for individual questions but doesn't offer an elegant way to handle FAQs. I also looked at implementing a news server, but at that time, the ones available for Windows NT weren't any good, and I wanted a Web-based solution. So I began looking at Web conferencing.

WebBoard
The first conferencing software I came across was WebBoard by O'Reilly & Associates. WebBoard accesses Microsoft Access's jet engine through a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) to interact with a database to store and retrieve data. The software tracks user messages and user information such as how many messages a user has posted, how many times a user has been in a conference, and the last time a user was in a conference.

WebBoard is a nice setup, but it requires a Web server that fully supports the Windows CGI. Because I wasn't running such a setup at the time, I looked for something else.

Allaire Forums
About this time, Allaire began packaging the software it was using for its Cold Fusion support forum as an add-on product to Cold Fusion. I had seen how powerful and efficient the Web conferencing software was, and I already owned Cold Fusion, so the decision to go with Allaire Forums was pretty easy.

The flexible access controls of Allaire Forums made the software an excellent fit for the Windows NT Magazine forums. I can give users read/write or read-only access in each forum, and I can set up members-only forums. I can give each forum its own graphics, background colors, headers and footers, and announcements. Another nice feature is the searching ability of Allaire Forums. Users can search messages for postings by author, date, keyword, or discussion area.

I administer and configure Allaire Forums with my Web browser, as you see in Screen 1. This ability makes remote administration a breeze. I can change the configurations individually, or use the product's nice template system.

Allaire Forums consists of several layers. The first layer is the conference, the general topic of conversation (e.g., our Windows NT 4.0 conference). Within the conference are the forums, more specific areas within the main topic (e.g., the subject of compatibility in the Windows NT 4.0 conference). Within the forums are the threads, specific topics that a user creates in the forum (e.g., within the compatibility forum, a user can create a thread to ask whether a specific software package is compatible with NT 4.0). Screen 2 shows how the Windows NT Magazine conferences and threads look. Finally, within the threads are the messages.

Allaire Forums is also great for users. When they enter a conference for the first time, they get the default settings. They can choose Options to set up personal preferences, such as which forums to follow in a conference and how many days of messages they want to see when they enter the forum. This option is especially useful if you visit the forums several times a day and don't want to see 365 days' worth of messages.

Allaire Forums maintains each user's preferences with cookies, which let Web servers store and retrieve client-side information in the form of a file. At least, that's how I use cookies on our Web site. I don't force people to register for the forums, so the cookies option lets me identify individual users. If they use the same Web browser every time they enter the forums, the software remembers their settings and configures the forums to their settings. Another advantage for users who always use the same Web browser to access the forums is that once they post a message, they don't need to fill in the Author and Email address fields again for any other message they send; Allaire Forums fills in these fields automatically when it knows the user. However, users who don't always use the same Web browser to join a forum can have a hard time telling what messages they have read.