Blah Readme

» Blah Readme

Introduction
Thank you for downloading Blah. I hope you enjoy Blah, and keep coming back for later releases. Blah is still in development, it is one of the largest boards currently available – open source just adds to it.
Message boards (or bulletin boards) have been around for years, however, all open source projects have lacked features such as calendars, polling features, logging features, and so on. With Blah, I wanted something I could use. I started out just making this project a fun little thing. Then in January of 2002, I found that it was bigger than just a fun little project. I decided I wanted to sell it – however, people from the open source side was begging me not too, so I decided against it. I hope you enjoy this board and continue to download future beta releases and, in the end, a final :).

How to Install
The installer that was put together for this board did not work correctly on UNIX servers, this package should fix that problem. There is no installer. However, this way is almost as easy as the installer itself.
Windows and Unix:

First and foremost, change the location to perl inside your script (Blah.pl). It's set to the default (which is correct on most servers) -- "#!/usr/bin/perl". If you get an internal server error after you upload your perl location is probably incorrect.
Secondly, before you upload you should check to make sure the directories in Settings.pl are correct. You must change them to reflect your server (which on the majority of servers the values already given will work). To change them look at the top of Settings.pl where you see the comments (under "########### Directories ###########"), after you change those values, save Settings.pl and continue to the last, and final step.
Upload the files in the /cgi-bin/blah/ directory of this package in ASCII mode (ALL files must be uploaded in ASCII, on most servers you must place scripts inside the /cgi-bin/ directory of your server), also upload the files inside of /htdocs/. If you are on a Windows server you can go ahead and execute the script (Blah.pl).
Unix Only:

File or Directory	Chmod
cgi-bin/blah (dir)	777
cgi-bin/blah/Blah.pl (file)	755 (if error 777)
cgi-bin/blah/. (file) NOT including Blah.pl	777 (if error 755)
cgi-bin/blah/Boards (dir)	777
*cgi-bin/blah/Boards/.* (files)**	777
cgi-bin/blah/Code (dir)	777
*cgi-bin/blah/Code/.* (files)**	IF error: 777 or 755
cgi-bin/blah/Members (dir)	777
*cgi-bin/blah/Members/.* (files)**	666
cgi-bin/blah/Messages (dir)	777
cgi-bin/blah/Prefs (dir)	777
*cgi-bin/blah/Prefs/.* (files)**	666
cgi-bin/blah/Prefs/BHits (dir)	777
cgi-bin/blah/Prefs/Hits (dir)	777
htdocs/uploads (dir)	666

Features That Will Be Added or Fixed In Future Beta Releases
More Conversion Utilities
Extra Smilie Code (Clickable) -- in a new window -- Version 2 or higher (currently not avalible for download)

Note: The Help files are not finished (I hate help files, anyone wanna put those together for me??).

After You Install
Logging in: To login to the boards, use the following information.

Username: admin
Password: admin

After installing, it is recommended that you go to the Administrator section and change the Board settings.

If you have a board you are switching from (say YaBB), go to the Administrator Center (of e-blah) and remove all the categories that may be there, then go to convert at the very bottom of the Administrator Center index. If the board you were currently using is not listed there, please visit our forums and tell us @ the e-blah! Community … we may need some of your boards files (to understand it’s structure so we can convert from it).
We are also looking for people that would like to help us in bug reporting and those that would like to tell us about features that you would like to see in this board.