Thank you so much for your suggestions. Update on the message board...the 'psycho' designer has removed the message board completely from my site. I did however make a backup of the message board prior but I'm unsure if I could even use this for anything? However, I have some questions. How can I find out if my host supports sql? (my site is hosted by
www.doteasy.com if that helps) Also, what is sql, mysql, PHP and PHPbb? Could somebody please explain these to me so I can try to get a better grasp at what I'm dealing with. One more thing, I believe the 'psycho' designer was hosting it off of something called 'servebeer.com' which I totally don't understand either. I've typed in servebeer.com in to google.com and noticed that many people host their sites off of this servebeer.com. I'm curious if anybody knows anything about that and how it works?
One more thing? I know that I have a lot of questions but I am really untrained in this but I believe intelligent enough to handle creating a PHP message board on my own. Regardless, after I DL'd the simplemachines installation I unzipped it & it says to run the install.php file. However, the only option to open this file is with wordpad which opens up into something like this:
"$GLOBALS['current_smf_version'] = 'smf_1-0';
$GLOBALS['required_php_version'] = '4.1.0';
$GLOBALS['required_mysql_version'] = '3.23.4';
// Initialize everything and load the language files.
initialize_inputs();
load_lang_file();
echo '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>', $txt['smf_installer'], '</title>
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="Themes/default/script.js"></script>
<style type="text/css"><!--body
font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;
background-color: #D4D4D4;
margin: 0;
}body, td{font-size: 10pt;
div#header background-color: white;
padding: 22px 4% 12px 4%;
font-family: Georgia, serif;font-size: xx-large; border-bottom: 1px solid black;height: 40px;}div#content{padding: 20px 30px;
}div.error_message{border: 2px dashed red;
background-color: #E1E1E1;margin: 1ex 4ex;padding: 1.5ex;
}div.panel{border: 1px solid gray;background-color: #F0F0F0;
margin: 1ex 0;padding: 1.2ex;"
etc. etc. However, I don't understand what this is or what I would do with this? Can somebody also attempt to explain this to me as well. Thank you so much once again for your help. I really hope I can get a message board on my site soon with no adverts on it. I mean, after dealing with ezboards abrasive ad techniques and then switching to Vbulletin for a short period of time, I really want an equivalent message board to something of vbulletin. Thanks again for any help or advice you may offer!
-Derek
