README.EN $Id: saturas $Ver: 1.1.0

What is it?

"Larus Board" ("LB" in short) is a lightweight flat-style discussion board. Its name is derived from "larus argentatus" which is a herring gull, you can see as logo. We photographed some during a vacation and decided to use its name for this piece of software.

LB is a light-weight discussion board written in PHP and a flexible database backend. The Interface uses Unicode, AJAX, XHTML/CSS and is rendered by Smarty (PHP Template Engine). Instead of being bloated it has a minimal featureset and uses tags set by users on any posting instead of fixed categories. Any topic can be fetched by RSS. Edited postings have a history to view the differences. It is designed to have a public part accessible from the web and a private part which can be anywhere.

What can it do?

It is the most, best advanced discussion board in the world. Amazingly fast, very secure and easier to use. You feel no barriers or will ever experience any problem. We *use* sophisticated "technologies" to blahblahblah, rule the world, bring peace to everybody, let the sun always shine and so on. Well, we run out of colorful marketing phrases here and we do not want to bore you anymore. So, let us stick to the facts instead

User accounts with minimal required set of personal data
Every user is attached to a usergroup each having specific permissions
Some users can moderate the board (edit, delete, close or approve postings)
Guests (user without account) can register themselves
Unlike other boards LB has no categories, but uses tags provided by users instead
If a posting is edited, his history is kept and can be seen on next edit
All postings can be fetched by RSS into popular newsfeeder
Any posting can be rated. Good one become green, others red.
Some little things you may find useful and do not bloat the software

Well, to be honest and use buzzwords either, two common baselines do exist: privacy and security. LB stores very little amount of personal data by default. And in fact it does not allow or implement some features others do in order to enhance security. The downside, of course, is a lower (conservative) featureset.

What does it need to run?

A http server. Well tested are apache and lighttpd, others should work, too.
PHP (yes, blame us :D). It requires at least version 5.2 and the modules pcre, filter, session, date and pdo. These should be available on common installations.
A database. You can select between MySQL or PostgreSQL. MySQL must be at least version 4.1 as character encoding for unicode is required. We do not know the exact minimum version for PostgreSQL; development is done on 8.2. We think anything about 7.x or above should be fine. Maybe an experienced postgres-user knows more?
A browser understanding recent web standards like XHTML/CSS and Unicode (UTF-8). Do not bug us with "ancient" software.
At the moment we support no IPv6 configurations!