Ideal Science: Bulletin Board Software

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A powerful bulletin board
The Ideal Bulletin Board is our premier product. It is a powerful but elegant bulletin board program for the Microsoft Windows platform.

The Ideal BB has many features that set it apart from other bulletin board solutions.

Multi-lingual
Scalable
Microsoft SQL Server
Active Directory Support

Revision History
File Attachment to messages
ASP/COM
User polls

Unlimited topics
The Ideal BB will continue to grow as your web site grows. It's only bounding factor is the space on your database server. This allows the Ideal BB to serve as a massive information base. As your users post more information, there is more information online and available to your other users either through browsing the board, or through the included search feature. Many companies deploy the Ideal BB in a technical support or customer services area of their web site so that they can benefit from the knowledge base features of the Ideal BB.

Unlimited members
Unlimited categories
Run the board on a web farm

Unlimited forums
Unlimited topics and replies
Scalable solution

Security
Security is paramount when deploying information on your corporate network. The Ideal BB has several powerful security features that safeguard access to information on your bulletin board.

COM object used to for increase security at the middle tier.
Support for Active Directory (domain) authentication through LDAP.
Private forum support.
Database session management system using 128 bit GUID for the session identifier.
Report problems to administrator feature.
Administrators can lock board so only members can view it.
Administrators can receive email when a failed login occurs.
Registration features can be disabled.
Registrations can require administrator approval.
Group based permissions model.

Powerful Moderation tools
One of the more important features of the Ideal BB is the moderated forums feature. The moderated forum is a forum where messages must be approved before they appear in the forum. This is especially helpful for forums that contain sensitive information.

Moderated forum support.
In a moderated forum, moderators must approve posts before they will appear on the board.
Excellent moderation tools make the job of moderating busy forums easy.
Supports moderation of topics and replies, or topics only.
Report bad content feature.
Moderated registrations. Administrators can approve or reject. registrations before they become active.

Revision History
One of the newer features is the revision history module. This feature tracks all changes to both topics and replies and allows you to view the changes as well as the user who made those changes. This makes it very easy to track the changing content on the Ideal BB.

Revision history support
When a user edits a topics, a revision is created
Revision support begins 30 minutes after a topic is created
Revisions can be viewed from the topic and reply view pages
Tracks all changes to a topic or reply

Announcements and Mailing lists
The Ideal BB can act as a mailing list by allowing you to email any of the three categories of users. (Administrators, Moderators, and Members.) This allows you to keep in touch with your user base through email. The announcement feature allows you to post announcements to the board which can appear in any of the three sections of the board. Announcements can have a set date in which they are valid. During the period in which an announcement is valid, it will be displayed on the board.

Announcement support
Announcements can be posted in forums, or on the main page of your board
Announcements can be scheduled to appear and disappear
Mailing list support
Can email administrators, moderators, and or members through the admin control panel

File attachments and Polling
With the Ideal BB, your users can attach files to their messages. This makes it very easy to distribute applications, files, images, music and much more using the Ideal BB. The administration section of the board has a special area where you can view all of the files on the system. You can selectively delete files from the system from this interface making it very easy to manage file content on the board. The Ideal BB also has a powerful polling mechanism that allows you to schedule polls, view results, and even expire polls when you no longer want users to be able to vote. Permissions for polling and file attachments are on a per forum per user type basis making it easy to configure security for the board.

File attachment support
Administrators can limit file types and sizes
Administrators can specify file and avatar upload directories
Full support in the admin control panel for deleting and or downloading files
Attach polls to topics
Polls can be set to expire and close voting

Performance and Scalability
The Ideal BB was designed with performance in mind. The current version of the Ideal BB uses database stored sessions, cursors, and stored procedures to increase performance and scalability. There are Ideal BB users that have forums with over 500,000 topics and 1500+ simultaneous users. The Ideal BB performs well in both the small and large bulletin board scenarios.

Supports high performance environments
Supports web farm configurations
Utilizes SQL stored procedures temporary tables and buffering for optimal performance
COM object executes often run code for faster performance and better security
Administrators can specify filters per forum to display only the most recent posts

Foreign Language Support
The Ideal BB supports all foreign languages by putting all language strings into a single file. There is currently a language file for Chinese, English, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. To add support for more languages, you simply translate the language file into your language of choice.

Language string stored in a single file
Graphic source code included to allow for easy graphics translations
MS SQL server utilized to provide support for foreign character sets

User Management
The Ideal BB allows you to customize the information captured during the registration process and the information that appears in a user's profile. The software also allows you to manage your users from the web administrators interface. You can edit, delete, create and ban users from the system. Banning users is a very useful feature as it allows you to remove trouble makers and or unauthorized users from your bulletin board.

Custom registration fields
Registration fields can be public or private
Registration fields can be required or optional
Ban users by username or IP address
Lock users' profiles so that they can't modify them
IP address banning supported by individual IP or IP range
Edit or delete users
User's can upload their own avatars
Administrators can approve registrations before they become active.
Custom user images and labels can be applied through the use of templates.

Rich Text (WYSIWYG editor.)
The Rich Text editor allows you to use a WYSIWYG editor to create your topics on the board. This type of editor shows you the final look of your content as you create it. (Similar to using Microsoft Word.) This is a one of a kind feature not present in most bulletin board applications. The Ideal BB will allow you to choose font colors, sizes, types faces, underline, bold, and much more. The Ideal BB also allows the use of HTML tags in posts. Administrators can specify which tags are allowed in the administration section of the board.

WYSIWYG editor for posts.
Preview your post as you create it.
Supports HTML tags.
Administrator can limit the use of HTML tags.
Allows images to be inserted directly into the editor by uploading to the server.

Powerful search engine
The search engine is a very useful tool. It allows you to search through all of the topics and replies by topic subject, body content, date posted, and the member who posted it. The search engine turns your bulletin board into a powerful knowledge base allowing your users to search through your content to find the information they need.

Search through commonly used fields
Empowers your users to find the information they need
Turns your bulletin board into a knowledge base
Uses MS SQL Full Text Search Engine
Supports Boolean searches

Easy upgrades
Upgrading your Ideal BB copy to the latest version is very easy given our powerful upgrade scripts. No need to install a fresh database, just use our SQL schema upgrade scripts which make it very easy to upgrade your existing database to the latest version.