Need help creating a forum

[mmingfeilam]

Hi,

I am writing a forum in c#, .net 2.0 framework. I have all the basic functionalities done, but I

am trying to create a professional looking forum, so I have the following questions:

1) I see that some nicely done forums allow you to reply to not just the original message but any

message, and then display all the related messages together, and use indentation to separate the

1st level replies from the second level replies, etc. Can someone show me the algorithm? I am

sure the implementation is pretty straight forward once the algorithm is figured out.

Right now, I have two tables:

FORUM_MESSAGES:

ID PARENT_MSG_ID FORUM_ID CREATED_DT ACTIVE_FL REPLY_CNT NICKNAME

EMAIL SUBJECT MESSAGE

FORUM:

ID FORUM_NAME ACTIVE_FL CREATED_DT

Right now I only have message that don't have a PARENT_MSG_ID as parent messages, but in a good

forum, you should be able to allow messages that are both parent to a set of messages as well as

being a child to another message.

2) I have always wondered how people can make their forums look so nice visually, can someone

give me some pointers as well? This is what I have so far:

http://www.jiazhouren.com/forum1lam/...e=Forum+Sinaca

Thanks,

Mike Lam

[Lithic]

Have you checked out the freely available bulletins....such as vbulletin? they are customisable, so they don't look generic or plain...and they seem to do a great job (such as this bulletin...)