Hello!

If you are familiar with MessageBase, you will notice that everything looks considerably different! You will notice that the site is MUCH MUCH faster than it was before. I have switched everything over to my latest incarnation of my MessageBase software. Have tried to give it more of a community field, in an attempt to 'lure' more repeat visitors to the site. Would love to see tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people logged into this site.

From a technical perspective: Have moved from an old-school Active Server Page (ASP.old) codebase storing its data on an Access database using ODBC, to a completely re-written version in ASP.NET storing it's data on Microsoft SQL Server using ADO.NET.

The layout has been completely reworked, and is dynamic, unlike they old psuedo-static version that rewrote the static menuing HTML every time a new message was posted. (When I first started creating MessageBase, it was 1997 with a Pentium 133 machine with 64  MB RAM, so dynamically generating the layout with every request was completely out of the question, unless you wanted to wait 10 to 30 seconds between requests, waiting for the Access database to grind out it's result. No, didn't think so, I didn't want to either. :) )

Other cool things are:

        You can finally indent your text, things won't flatten out.

            Like
               they
                  used
                      to...
                          :)

MessageBase 2.0 also now features a cookie-based login system, so you won't have to log in each time you visit. I'm pretty happy about that!

You can now preview your messages before posting them, a long overdue feature.

Also, you can set basic HTML tagged text effects like:

BOLD
Italics
Underline

and can set a horizontal

---

line across the screen like:

---

However, note that instead of using < and > characters to indicate your HTML tags, you use the '[' and ']' characters in place of the '<' and '>'.

Currently only the following tags are available, although I am planning on adding support for more soon (Remember to use square brackets, and lower case only, for your tags, or they'll just be interpreted as normal text.):

---

Play around with them by using the new Preview Message support to get the hang of how they work.

That's it for this quick introduction as I cut us over to MessageBase 2.0. I will be creating some documentation and help text in the near future.

Suggestions, comments, and ideas are very much welcomed!

Welcome to MessageBase 2.0!