Right now, I feel, the boards' scripts are lacking. Looking at things over the past while, we've got some things that need addressing. Many of our viewers don't see the pages how they should. Things are not very efficient, or constructed to work easily with each other. I'm now calling on the help of 4-ch'ers to help try to make a board script that meets our demands; both yours as you view and use them, and mine and the moderators so that we can efficiently moderate and operate the boards.

The list so far of things that need to be done:

• Smaller, more efficient HTML/CSS. So far this is the only thing I personally have worked on.
• Much better browser compatibility - WAHa built Kareha on firstly looks, and to work best with Firefox. I want the pages to be small and efficient whilst still remaining functionality, and looking 90% the same on every major browser. That includes Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari.
• Moving the moderation/admin tools away from public view - these just clutter up the boards, and by moving them elsewhere, moderators can have more "tools" at their disposal.
• imode/mobile phone browsing support - If we do support, people will use it, no doubt. We do get quite a lot of page views attempted by these users both from Japan and other countries.
• BBS reader support - designing the code to either work with existing bbs readers, or future-proofing it to work with tools of our own in the future.
• Faster processing. Faster, more efficient board scripts - Through using better coding, and other CGI options like FastCGI, SpeedyCGI or even mod_perl.
• Statistic collection - All but error logging is going to be turned off, so no longer will I have someway of getting a view on stats, and I would like to make a more publically viewable setup.
• Retain a lot of the things we already use - Secure trips, RSS, multiple board styles etc.

I've also come to the conclusion that taking some of Kareha's code and then building our own might be the best approach. I can't do this all myself : I'm a lousy programmer, and without your contribution I don't know what to add. Many hands also make light work. In terms of getting it all done, I personally would like a replacement for Kareha inplace before our 1st birthday (November 1st).

If you can help in anyway, Perl, HTML, CSS, ideas, criticism, thoughts, anything else I may have missed, then feel free to contribute to this thread. I am willing to provide whatever services are required to get the job done. Asking our resident technician to put inplace a CVS/SVN server is not a problem and if we need it, I'll have it in.

>>15

I can confirm that it's only a couple of IE workarounds that cause the validator to complain, due to usage of <nobr> tags.

As for >>1, changing the HTML template might be something you want to do (or might not, depending - the current one is designed to degrade fairly gracefully, and forcing it to look the same in major browsers might break the minor ones more instead). But I don't see what's wrong with the script itself - believe me, if there was a way to do things more efficiently, I would have done it already. You're going to have to point out some actual inefficiencies before you can do anything about them.

>> toss a caching proxy in front of kareha (black magic not included)
> In order to accomplish what?

It's faster to grab something from cache than it is to run a script, even one coded to take full advantage of mod_perl. Even with a C + FastCGI combination, you're quite unlikely to beat a decent cache.

>>18
I'm actually a bit curious why everything isn't just static HTML.

>>20

To implement functionality like >>1,18-21 and such. The "entire thread" link could still be a link to the static HTML pages in res/, I suppose, but it's more convenient this way.