Help me build a forum using html and cgi

I'm trying to build a forum myself for my website as I'm sick of seeing those free ones that offer nothing except ads which look crap. However I've ran into a couple of problems and can't seem to recieve any help from the authour of the tutorial I was following.

I've got the guestbook.pl file and was instructed to put this into the cgi-bin of my server. Thing is I don't have a cgi-bin on my server, so I decided to create one. However I'm starting to think that it's not as simple as creating a new folder and calling it cgi-bin. Am I right in suspecting this?

Anyhow, the addguest.html submits it's data to the guestbook.pl file and updates guestbooklog.html which in turn updates the guestbook.html. However, when I press the submit button on the addguest.html I get the anoying 404 file not found when quite clearly it can be if it were to look hard enough.

Perhaps i'm doing something completely wrong. I've changed the read/write permissions on the appropriate html pages but still no joy. Any advice will be greatly appriciated.

Well, if you didn't have a cgi-bin to start with, you might want to check with your host and see if Perl is supported. If it's your own server you need to install Perl before you can get any Perl scripts to work.

I will do this. Thanks.

Just out of chance, do you know of any forum tutorials that can be used as a reference?

No, but it looks as though you are trying to reinvent the wheel. Keep in mind that a guestbook is not a forum and provides minimal interactivity. You might want to check this out if you want something that works with Perl:

http://poeticpollution.net/design/

Huh? Which free forums look crap with ads. This forum doesn't have to have adds on it - BWM chooses to put ads on here. phpBB does not <b>force</b> you to put adds on your site. If this is the reason you want to build one I say don't bother. Building a complete forum is a big job, and as atno said, you are reinventing the wheel.

i think he's talkin about free remotely hosted forums such as the pubs and ezboard ones. they are crap.

Deepain is building its own forum, :p ( http://bounce.deepain.com )
And yes, it is a very big job, i would go with what ATNO suggested.

Greetings. Been asking the programmers for advice on building a forum but it quickly became clear that I didn't actually want to build one. What I'm looking for is a free forum that goes easy on the advertising yet offers customized buttons/fonts/colours etc so I can suit it to my site. I don't mind doing some programming in the html source coding, however my web server doesn't support Perl.

Tried Bravenet but.... no.

http://www.phpbb.com/

Thanks. Be checking this out now.

np

I merged this with the original topic because it's still a continuation of the original question.

Dan -- exactly what does your host support. Giving you thoughts and opinions for forum board scripts is pointless until you can tell us what is supported by your host.

Right then, my server host does not support Perl however i can use programs such as mySQL for databases although my knowledgge of this is very limited, hence my question of fully customized hosted forums.

MySQL is the database. What you need to look at is learning SQL and PHP (reason I say this is that if the server runs mysql odd are it is running php)

If you don't want to write it yourself (would be great exercise to do it) do a search for Forums written in PHP, sure there are some out there