Portal:Forums
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An Internet forum is a facility on the World Wide Web for holding discussions, or the web application software used to provide the facility. Web-based forums, which date from around 1995, perform a similar function as the dial-up bulletin boards and Internet newsgroups that were numerous in the 1980s and 1990s. A sense of virtual community often develops around forums that have regular users. Technology, computer games, and politics are popular areas for forum themes, but there are forums for a huge number of different topics.
GameFAQs is a gaming website that hosts FAQs and walkthroughs for gamers. It was created in November 1995 by Jeff "CJayC" Veasey and is owned by CNET Networks. The site has a large database of video game information and has been called a site where readers "can get almost any information" regarding game strategies. The systems covered range from the 8-bit Atari platform to the systems of today. The FAQs, cheat codes, reviews, game saves, and credits are submitted by volunteers, and contributions are reviewed by the site's two editors, Jeff "CJayC" Veasey and Allen "Sailor Bacon" Tyner.
The site hosts one of the most active message board communities on the Web. Every game listed on the site has a board to discuss the game or answer questions about the game. Every day, approximately 20,000 topics and 200,000 messages are posted on GameFAQs' 50,000+ individual boards. The site also features a daily opinion poll and related contests.
GameFAQs is consistently cited by The Guardian as one of the top gaming sites on the Web, and the site has been positively reviewed by Entertainment Weekly. Additionally, GameFAQs.com is one of the 300 highest-trafficked websites according to Alexa. (more...)
phpBB was started by James Atkinson as a simple UBB-like forum for his own website on 17 June 2000. Nathan Codding and John Abela (both now former team members) joined the development team after phpBB went into SourceForge CVS, and work on 1.0.0 began. A fully-functional, pre-release version of phpBB was ready by 1 July 2000. Multiple database systems are supported via an abstraction layer. These are: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, Microsoft Access and, with modification, Oracle. The phpBB database abstraction layer primarily handles API differences; peculiarities in SQL syntax are dealt with by the application on a per-query basis.
Abstraction is also applied to the way phpBB presents data to users. Layout is separated from the application code, and defined with templates. Templates, which contain markup as well as variables and blocks, are compiled by phpBB into PHP code and executed. This can be an intensive process; phpBB is distributed with an optional system to cache the compiled templates. Templates typically do not contain text from a specific language. Localised text is contained in language "packs", which contain lists of strings to be substituted into templates as variables. These strings often contain format specifiers, enabling the order of application-supplied variables within each piece of text to be customised.
Portal:Forums/Noticeboard
- Make suggestions for the portal
- Expand some of the stub articles on forum software.
