untitled

Discus

Important comments by me are in red.
Quotes from the authors are in blue.

Price Free for educational institutions

Platform UNIX: set of Perl (4 or 5) scripts

Web-based? yes

Special browser requirements? It seems to make some use of JavaScript, though I'm not sure what for.

Interface simple to use - all responses are displayed on a single page (full text), which means that the user has to scroll through a whole "conversation", rather than navigating a tree of threaded responses. This is simpler to do, in practice.
You can include images and formatting in posts, using some (non-HTML) proprietary codes.

Access control
No read-access control: Anyone with WWW access can read any message in any area of Discus. This is one big drawback from our point of view?

Quote: "Closed forums are something that we will probably never want to include within Discus, as requiring a login screen would detract from the simplicity of the user interface and it will also require generating the messages via a CGI script instead of having the server simply spit back static files as it does now. This would slow down the program. However, some people have already implemented closed forums using their server's password protection features by putting a .htaccess and a .htpasswd file in the Discus structure."

"Each Discus topic is placed into its own subdirectory. You can use .htaccess and .htpasswd within these subdirectories to effectively create "Read Only" topics by password-protecting subdirectories of the "messages" tree. You can therefore accomplish what you need without sacrificing speed. "

As far as I can tell, this also affects posting to groups -
groups are either:
-"open-access" to the world, or:
- accessible to posting by all valid users
(i.e. members of one topic could post to all other topics), or else :
- closed to all but moderators.

This means that the only way to maintain a number of protected discussions, with individual sets of users, would be either:
(i) control access to each topic with a complex set of .htpasswd files, as described above, or:
(ii) make multiple installations on the server, one for each different user group.

This implies a lot of maintenance work for the administrator. Exactly what we were keen to avoid?

Administration All administrative tools are accessed using a web browser.
Once Discus is installed, unix shell access is never again required -- the board is maintained entirely using WWW-based interfaces.
The administrative tools have been verified to work properly with Netscape 2.0 and higher and Internet Explorer 3.0

Adding users:
"You can paste a tab-delimited username/password list into the admin tool pages (in the format username[TAB]password). This works for pasting adjacent columns from Microsoft Excel."
(this is a positive feature).

Working demo? Yes - http://mulliken.chem.hope.edu/discus/board.html

General Comments This is a nice enough simple discussion tool - probably would be OK for individual users who wanted to take charge of their own forums.

But it's unsuited to a general campus-wide system, containing multiple forums.

Accept / Reject Reject ?

Price	Free for educational institutions
Platform	UNIX: set of Perl (4 or 5) scripts
Web-based?	yes
Special browser requirements?	It seems to make some use of JavaScript, though I'm not sure what for.
Interface	simple to use - all responses are displayed on a single page (full text), which means that the user has to scroll through a whole "conversation", rather than navigating a tree of threaded responses. This is simpler to do, in practice. You can include images and formatting in posts, using some (non-HTML) proprietary codes.
Access control	No read-access control: Anyone with WWW access can read any message in any area of Discus. This is one big drawback from our point of view? Quote: "Closed forums are something that we will probably never want to include within Discus, as requiring a login screen would detract from the simplicity of the user interface and it will also require generating the messages via a CGI script instead of having the server simply spit back static files as it does now. This would slow down the program. However, some people have already implemented closed forums using their server's password protection features by putting a .htaccess and a .htpasswd file in the Discus structure." "Each Discus topic is placed into its own subdirectory. You can use .htaccess and .htpasswd within these subdirectories to effectively create "Read Only" topics by password-protecting subdirectories of the "messages" tree. You can therefore accomplish what you need without sacrificing speed. " As far as I can tell, this also affects posting to groups - groups are either: -"open-access" to the world, or: - accessible to posting by all valid users (i.e. members of one topic could post to all other topics), or else : - closed to all but moderators. This means that the only way to maintain a number of protected discussions, with individual sets of users, would be either: (i) control access to each topic with a complex set of .htpasswd files, as described above, or: (ii) make multiple installations on the server, one for each different user group. This implies a lot of maintenance work for the administrator. Exactly what we were keen to avoid?
Administration	All administrative tools are accessed using a web browser. Once Discus is installed, unix shell access is never again required -- the board is maintained entirely using WWW-based interfaces. The administrative tools have been verified to work properly with Netscape 2.0 and higher and Internet Explorer 3.0 Adding users: "You can paste a tab-delimited username/password list into the admin tool pages (in the format username[TAB]password). This works for pasting adjacent columns from Microsoft Excel." (this is a positive feature).
Working demo?	Yes - http://mulliken.chem.hope.edu/discus/board.html
General Comments	This is a nice enough simple discussion tool - probably would be OK for individual users who wanted to take charge of their own forums. But it's unsuited to a general campus-wide system, containing multiple forums.
Accept / Reject	Reject ?