Message boards can engage customers if they are easy to find and use. But managing boards to keep them from becoming unruly requires administrative tools and manual labor.

Giving people the ability to communicate directly with one another is one of the great benefits of online communication. People can carry on conversations with communities around the clock and around the world. If customers can find their favorite boards time and again, and use them with ease, the communities that form around these message boards can grow.

If your target visitors want anonymity, you can choose to let them use your message board without revealing their complete names and personal information. Even without complete anonymity, however, some people might act irresponsibly. To prepare, you must build in systems to ensure that your boards do not become overrun with off-topic, off-color, and perhaps even illegal conversations.

CSS, however, enables us to create attractive user interfaces for HTML forms, to integrate them fully with our sites, and, hopefully, to make them easier for our visitors
to use and understand. Their application can boost the accessibility and usability of forms, as well as providing additional elements to which we can apply CSS.

Some communities have no anonymity because administrators know that if a name is attached to a message, the person is likely to act more responsibly when posting. Other communities have rules that visitors cannot have complete anonymity. These kinds of rules are important because in cases of criminal activity such as fraud, libel or corruption, law enforcement officials must be able to investigate.

You should start with one or two message boards, but eventually you will add more as your community grows. It's best to start simple, but keep the potential for expansion in mind when you're designing message boards.

On moderated message boards, a site administrator filters messages before they are posted to make sure that everyone is conforming to the rules of the community. On unmoderated message boards, if one person posts a message and another visitor complains, the administrator can choose to remove the message, but otherwise it's a no-holds-barred, free-for-all forum where anything goes.

Despite the necessity of forms on the Web, HTML makes virtually no styling options available to allow us to make forms more attractive. HTML attributes that are now deprecated, such as borders and background colors, did not give us an alternative to the gray boxes and buttons displayed by browser defaults.

Moderated boards can be kept organized and on topic, but they require more administrative work and they can slow down conversations. Although unmoderated boards offer freedom and speed, they are also more unruly, and certain individuals can sidetrack or dominate conversations.

Both kinds of boards must be monitored at some level, either by customers who call other customers on their behavior, or by site management. Both kinds of boards require tools to delete messages, but only moderated boards require tools to review posts before they appear on the site.

People need to find your message boards to take advantage of them. If you put the boards in a separate area from the rest of the related content on the site, they become harder to find. Also people want to return to the boards they are most interested in and see replies to posts they have written.