As a curiosity, why are CGI powered boards so heavily frowned upon? What are the downsides of having a CGI powered board? As people would bring up yabb, and ikonboard and start to say "yuck" due to them being CGI driven. I'm currently looking at this other forum software to serve as an alternative forum for another community I have. (MyBB is still top choice though, but it'd be nice to have some sort of variety).
YaBB and Ikonboard are written in Perl. For whatever reason people seem to think Perl and CGI are the same thing. When I first started programming I thought the same. Perl and CGI are NOT the same, though.
CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is one way that common programming languages are ran on a web server. In fact, both Perl and PHP can be ran as CGI. However, both can also be ran as an Apache module.
Anyways, to answer your question: CGI is looked down upon because it opens a new process for every call. This means if you have 200 users on your board at once you are going to have 200 processes open up. This can cause the server to slow down and so the board can be considered inefficient.
You are probably wondering how it can be done without opening so many processes. Running it as an Apache module means that all calls to the program, or in this case bulletin board, are opened under the Apache process. This means that there is always only the one process for your site. Of course, it still uses up memory but because it is not an individual process it can more efficiently use up the memory and CPU.
As for YaBB and Ikonboard being consider "yuck," this is partially because people do not realize the difference between Perl and CGI, and the fact that it is run in Perl. There are also some other reasons for PHP being superior to Perl but I will not go in depth with them because I would be lying if I told you I knew all of the reasons
ahhh...to make a long story short, CGI isn't server friendly? Make sense.
I think YaBB, e-Blah and Ikonboard are great BBS. But, more times than not, PHP/MySQL is more powerful, more efficient and faster. Plus, this may or may not be true, but many frowned-upon BBS services, such as ProBoards, are coded in PERL, which gives the language sort of a negative stigma.
Ugh. Don't even get me started on ProBoards!
Den-Den Wrote:Ugh. Don't even get me started on ProBoards!
Before I knew anything about self-hosted BBS, I used ProBoards. While PBv4 looks promising (it's coming out April 30th), the service still sucks, unfortunately. My forum was deleted because a member I had to ban reported it for "having porn." This wasn't the case, but the owner of ProBoards has no time to check, so he uses the honor system. Thus, the forum got deleted!
I think the only "good" Perl-written forums are YaBB and e-Blah.
eXaulz Wrote:I think the only "good" Perl-written forums are YaBB and e-Blah.
Yeah, I agree. I have an e-Blah on my server, and it's awesome. I think it's the best free PERL BBS available, in my opinion. And the Platinum 9 Beta is going to be a killer release.