A NEW website has been launched with webmasters claiming that it makes chatting on the Net easier than ever.

If you want to have a simple discussion page on the web, a place where you and your friends can talk about things that interest you in a straightforward, web-based environment, it hasn't always been so straightforward.

You could build a site of your own, if you know a bit of programming, but the easier alternative is to use one of the many free 'web board' services available.

E-groups, for example (www.egroups.com), offers free mailing lists combined with free web services, so members of each list can use an on-line calendar, chatroom and can read and post messages on the web, without using any e-mail software.

Naturally, as a free service, E-groups has to make money somehow, so the e-mail and web messages are plastered with advertising.

Now a simpler, advertising-free service is available at Quick Topic (www.quicktopic.com).

Quick Topic works differently because you do not have to register or subscribe to anything to start using it.

You just go to the front page, put your e-mail address and topic title in the boxes, and off you go.

Quick Topic instantly creates an on-line discussion space for anything you like, with a nice set of features.

It's completely free, and there's no annoying advertising anywhere.

Best of all, Quick Topic is very easy to use. You can have new messages sent to you by e-mail if you like, so you don't even have to worry about checking the web page all the time.

Each discussion will last as long as you like, and there's no limit to the number of messages it can store.

The discussion is private because each new topic is given a distinct and randomly generated URL.

With billions of URLs available, it means the address of your topic is unguessable.

Only you know the URL when you create it, and it's up to you to spread that URL around to other people you'd like to join the discussion.

You can send it to your friends by e-mail, but the only way the discussion page will ever get found by a search engine is if you link to it from another web page.

As the makers of Quick Topic admit, the privacy of your discussion depends on the trustworthiness of the members of your group, but only the members know the address, so the board should remain secret unless someone spills the beans.