Building a Web Site For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 10. Letting ’Em Have Their Say

In This Chapter

Providing guestbooks Constructing message boards Creating chat rooms with ParaChat

In Chapter 19, I give you the lowdown on polls and forms and how they can add value to your Web site by attracting more users and making your site stickier, meaning people tend to come back more often. The add-ins in this chapter (guestbooks, message boards, and the like) are similar to the polls and forms in Chapter 19 but have one important difference. With polls and forms, you have total control over the topics and possible responses. But with guestbooks, message boards, and chat rooms, you give up some control over your Web site’s content. You turn that control over to your visitors by providing them with a forum where they can express themselves.

Censorship and your Web site Censorship is an ugly word to most people, especially in connection with the Internet. Unfortunately, in running your own Web site, you sometimes find that you need to limit in some way what others can post to your site. In extreme cases, you may even need to bar a particularly disruptive person from posting in your chat room, for example. Is this act — and that of setting up filters — a form of censorship? The answer to this question depends on why you’re doing it. If your intention is simply to keep someone from voicing an opinion, you’re engaging in censorship, plain and simple. If your intention is to defend the free speech rights of the rest of the members against ...