Prime-Web introduced version 4.0 of its Ultimate Bulletin Board (UBB), the full-featured discussion board that many Web sites are using to develop a sense of community.
The new release has many added features, including unlimited forums, the ability to “lock” or close a thread, and the ability to close a forum to visitors unless they have the required password. The new UBB can also pre-set the number of days worth of messages that will appear on the forum as a default.
UBB creator Ted O’Neill has been avidly working on the project, making updates available on an almost weekly basis. O’Neill is Director of Digital Media for Prospect Associates, a communications firm in Rockville, Maryland, but the UBB simply started out as a personal project.
O’Neill developed the UBB in 1996 as a free BBS in response to what he felt was a need for a less-cluttered and easy-to-navigate system. The response from the Web community was such that O’Neill eventually found himself putting much of his free time into the project, and felt the need to charge a small fee for the software.
Many popular sites, including Internet.com’s WebReference.com and BrowserWatch, have been using the UBB with great success.
Some of the features of Ultimate Bulletin Board 4.0 include:
- Unlimited forums
- Support for users with strict cgi-bin policies
- Forum on/off switches
- Support for HTML within messages and/or UBB Code
- Forum moderators
- Registration system
- Full-featured administration/customization through the browser
- User profiles that can be updated by users
- Extensive administrative features using the Web browser interface
- Ability to edit/delete/prune messages
- Word censor capability
- Classic design
- Online FAQ
There are now three versions of the UBB available: the free version, which
does not have many of the features of the commercial version; the full UBB 4.0, which is $30 for non-commercial sites or $130 w/two licenses for commercial sites; and a version that has been translated into French.
To see the Ultimate Bulletin Board 4.0 in action, visit Prime-Web’s Own Board.