Daniel,
I noticed that with the new banner for the Pronto forum, you have added a "File Area," presumably for Pronto config files and icon/bitmap uploads and downloads (thanks for expanding the usefullness of this forum). I have two questions: (1) Do you have a forecast date for activating the file area, and (2) Is there any protection software that you or forum contributors could use to limit the posibility of virus attacks?

I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Pronto software and look forward to sharing Pronto files - there have been so many good ideas presented here.

Thanks,
Clay W.

1) I expect to activiate it once the software's available.

2) Virii via what source? Most are transferred via executable files, and since the forum will be dealing with config files & bitmaps I don't expect any problems.

Oh, just to clarify, it's not going to be another message forum, but rather a seperate file area. Uploads will done via email (to me) or FTP (if I can get it going), downloads will be off of a FTP server but index/sorted here.

Daniel,
Thanks for the update. It was the "most" part about computer viruses that concerned me.

Clay W.

Daniel --

Any chance a text search command will exist soon? it would cut down on new thread creation if you could search the bodies of old messages for a text string first.

Greate site BTW!

Sigh, this is one item I have really been wanting to implement: searching the message forum. The problem is the forum and it's messages are created/formatted each time you view it, with content formatted into HTML code from a text database. There's no way to implement a search function using traditional tools.

One method would be to use a "spider" indexer (which would index this site much like Alta Vista), but the cheapest one I've found is $800. Currently I use Excite For Web Servers, but it indexes from the inside - useless for this forum.

Next would be to program a search script that would itself go through the database files and compile a list of matches to queries, but I'm not up to that task - I didn't write this message board, I've just tweaked and tweaked and added more and more power - arrghhh, arrggh, arrggh! :-)

I know it's inefficient, but perhaps it's possible that when someone selects to do a search, you export all or part of the DB to a text file and then perform the search (rather than performing it on the DB itself)?

It would at least be able to give you the functionality till you improve it.

Daniel -
You might consider ht://dig for your indexing, which can spider your site.
Free at http://www.htdig.org/

Looks like good software, but even if it manages to index these thread.cgi pages the results won't contain the thread title, author, date, number of replies etc. My new search script will. :)