Copyright © 2001, 2002 Advanced Internet Designs Inc.
Copyright
This manual is © Copyright 2001, 2002 by Advanced Internet Designs Inc.
This manual can be redistributed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
Table of Contents
Abstract
FUDforum 2.3 is web based forum software designed in PHP, utilizing MySQL or PostgreSQL back-end released under the GPL Open Source license. It is designed to work on any web server that supports PHP, which makes it usable on virtually very OS. The forum includes i18n and templating support allowing for a complete customization of it's output as well as a very capably group based permission system.
This manual is primarily intended towards forum administrators, it's aim to explain how to use the various features of the forum.
This manual is available in several formats, which are downloadable from http://fud.prohost.org/doc/.
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FUDforum 2.3 is an Open Source web forum released under the GPL license that is written in PHP 4 and can be used on virtually any operating system. FUDforum combines an extensive feature set while maintaining the ability to generate forum web pages extremely fast.
One of the most significant FUDforum features is the ease of use, which begins right with installation process where a user is guided through 5 step install wizard. The entire installation process even for novice user may literally take less then a minute from the point of installation to the point a user has a working web forum. Unlike installation of similar software, the user does not need to deal with multiple files, all of the forum's data is stored in a single file, the install script. The installation script itself is written in PHP so no additional software is required to complete the installation.
The upgrade process is even easier. After downloading the upgrade script, the user is only required to run the script via their browser, the upgrade script will take care of the rest.
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FUDforum 2.3 includes numerous features. This chapter will briefly overview most of those features to give you an idea about the full capabilities of FUDforum 2.3.
FUDforum 2.3 supports a fully functional spell checker, that if enabled would allow forum users to spell check their messages before posting.
The spell checker utilizes PHP's Pspell library and supports multiple languages.
FUDforum 2.3 contains a fully customizable templating system, that allows you to completely customize the the look and feel of your forum. For optimal performance the templates are compiled, so you do not lose any speed as you do in other forums by having a templating system.
The Template Editor can be found inside the administrator control panel.
FUDforum 2.3 has full i18n support, that allows an easy translation of the forum into a language of your choice. Currently FUDforum 2.3 is distributed with 8 languages: English, French, German, Swedish, Polish, Turkish, Spanish and Chinese.
More languages will be available in the near future. During the installation process you will have the opportunity to choose the forum's language. This option can later be modified via the FUDforum 2.3 Theme Manager.
FUDforum 2.3 supports a highly capable permissions system, which can be used to control what forum users can and cannot do. Using this system you can grant special access rights to certain users, block users from seeing and/or accessing certain forum etc.
This system also includes support for "group managers" who have the ability to manage users in the groups they control. This option allows the admininistrator to delegate responsibility to trustworthy forum members.
The Group Management is done via two control panels. The first control panel is the administrative group manager, which allows admininistrator(s) to add/remove groups as well as assign group managers and specify what permissions the group managers can assign and/or take away. This control panel also allows the administrator to make groups inherit permissions from other groups, which eliminates the need to specify new permission every time for similar groups.
The second control panel, the user group manager, which allows the group manager(s) and the admininistrator(s) to add and remove users from a group as well as set permissions for individual users. It can be a accessed via a link available to all Administrators and Group Managers on most forum pages.
FUDforum 2.3 includes a private messaging (PM) system that if enabled via the global control panel allows forum members to send private messages to one another.
The private messaging system supports forwarding, the ability to send a message to multiple users and reply notifications. If allowed by the administrator, the users may also attach one or more files to their private messages. Just like in a mail client the sent messages are stored in a special folder, 'sent', so that the user can easily refer back to them if the need arises. There is also a 'drafts' folder where the user can keep their unfinished messages.
Via the private messaging controls administrator(s) can specify what features the users may use inside their private messages, as well as the amount messages the users can keep in their PM folders.
If permitted by the administrator, users may attach files to their forum & private messages. The amount of files that the user can attach as well as their maximum size can be defined by the administrator on a forum by forum basis via the forum control panel. The ability to attach files to private messages can be defined by the administrator via the private messaging system controls.
In addition to specifying the size and the quantity limits the administrator may also indicate what file types can be attached to the messages using the file attachment control panel. The attached files will be matched against the FUDforum 2.3 MIME listing so that (1) a proper file icon can be assigned to the file, (2) the file download form can send the proper header to the browser, and (3) the browser can interpret the file properly.
It is also possible to restrict certain users from being able to attach files or only allow certain users to attach files using the group management system.
FUDforum 2.3 supports a complete polling system, which mnay enable users to add polls to their messages. Permissions to create and vote on polls is controlable by the admins via the group management system.
Polls contain multiple choice questions, which can be used to gather user opinions on poll issues or questions. The forum tracks the votes and ensures that people cannot vote more then once to prevent ballot stuffing.
The users on the forum have the ability to subscribe to topics & forums. By subscribing to a topic a user will receive an E-mail or ICQ notification about any new posts made inside that topic. The subscription to a forum on the other hand will notify the user of any new topics created in the forum.
To prevent sending multiple notifications the notification system will only notify the user if they have no unread notifications for that particular forum or topic. This is extremely useful for active forums where many messages can be posted in a short period of time causing a massive amount of notifications to be sent to the user about the same content.
Each forum member has access to a personal subscription control panel, which can be used to see what subscriptions they currently have and allow the user to unsubscribe from any of the subscribed to content.
If specified by the administrator, the forum can include the full body of the message in the E-mail notification, so that a user can read and reply to the message directly via their mail client. These notifications come specially formated, so that they are properly displayed on all e-mail clients, regardless of whether those mail clients support HTML or not.
In addition to the standard way of viewing messages inside the forum, FUDforum 2.3 supports a tree view, which builds a tree of messages akin to the one used by the newsgroups.
Example 2.1. Sample Tree View
[*] Main Message [-] Reply To: Main Message [+] Reply To: Main Message [+] Reply To: Reply To: Main Message [-] Reply To: Reply To: Reply To: Main Message [-] Another Reply to Main Message
FUDforum 2.3 includes a full text search that allows users to search the posted messages by entering one or more keywords. The user has the option of limiting the search to a particular forum or category or they can search the entire forum. A user may either limit a search to a particular forum or category or search the entire forum.
The search form allows the user to specify whether to use the strict AND logic, which will find only the messages containing all of the specified keywords. Or to use the more relaxed OR logic, which will find any message that matches at least one of the specified terms in the query.
The search results can be sorted by date, allowing the user to specify whether the most recent messages should be shown first or last.
I-SPY is a neat feature, that if enabled will allow forum users to see what other forum users are doing at this very moment.
The forum also keeps track of the currently online users, an indicator is placed beside each message showing whether the author of the message is currently online or not. This too can be disabled via the global control panel.
FUDcode is a series of text formatting tags that allow users to style the text of their messages & signatures. More information about these features as well as the complete list of supported tags can be found here.
Smilies are commonly used codes to represent emotions, such as :-) to indicate happiness. FUDforum 2.3 has a list of 30 commonly uses smiley codes that will be replaced with image representing the corresponding emotion the author is trying to convey. The administrator can add/edit/delete the supported smilies via the smilies control panel.
Whether or not text codes are replaced with corresponding images can be defined by the administrator on a forum by forum basis. The group management system can also be used to disallow usage of smilies.
If permitted by the administrator, users may choose to associate an avatar image with their posts and messages. Users may upload an image of their choice to the server, specify a URL to an image or selecting a file from their harddrive or choosing an image from the forum's built-in avatar galleries. The avatar images will be displayed beside the user's name on all of user's posts.
In FUDforum 2.3 the administrator can assign users an unlimited number custom tags that would appear on user's profile and beside user's posts. This feature can be used to indicate any special roles or functions of the user.
Custom tags can be added or removed via the user control panel.
User Ranks are assigned to users based on the number of posts they have made on the forum. These ranks may contain a text and or image indicator showing the user's rank.
The administrator can add, edit, or delete the available user ranks via the rank manager.
In FUDforum 2.3 the administrator can specify that certain words or strings will be replaced automatically by alternatives provided by the administrator. This is most commonly used to filter inappropriate language that the administrator does not want to allow in the forum.
The administrator can specify the strings that are to be replaced via the replacement control panel, which supports both basic replacement and regex pattern matching.
FUDforum 2.3 tracks the IP addresses of all users as they submit posts to the forum. Administrators and forum moderators can see the IP address of the author beside each message. In addition, the IP address itself is a link to a URL that will attempt to look up the ISP of the user who submitted the post or message.
FUDforum 2.3 logs all actions taken by privileged users such as moderators. The action log allows administrator(s) to see time-stamped details of actions that have been taken by users with special privileges. The action log will also show all failed attempts to login to the administrator account.
Message mangling refers to the ability to edit, delete, move and split topics and messages. Administrators may grant message mangling permissions to moderators and other users.
The administrator has an extensive set of tools to block people from the forum. The tools include an IP filter to block access to FUDforum from any IP address or IP address mask.
The e-mail filter blocks all users who's e-mail address matches the mask specified by the administrator. The e-mail filter also prevents new registrations using an e-mail that matches the specified mask.
The Login filter, blocks all users who's login matches the mask specified by the administrator. The login filter also prevents people from registering with a login that matches the specified mask.
If cookies are not enabled on the user's computer, FUDforum 2.3 will use URL sessions to keep track of the user. This allows use of the forum even if cookies are not supported or allowed on the user's computer.
FUDforum includes tools which will allow the forum to be used to archive newsgroups (NNTP) and mailing lists. In addition, FUDforum allows the administrator to permit forum members to post messages back to a mailing list or a newsgroup. This feature makes FUDforum an ideal access point to newsgroups and mailing lists for those who cannot access those resources directly.
FUDforum 2.3 includes an installation wizard that is so easy to use, it will have your forum up and running within minutes. The upgrade process is even easier. Simply download the upgrade pack from the FUDforum 2.3 website and run the script, which will automatically perform all necessary upgrades from any previous version.
FUDforum 2.3 can be successfully installed on systems configured with PHP safe_mode enabled and those which may have the register_globals and magic_quotes_gpc parameters turned off.
Despite its many features, FUDforum 2.3 is still extremely fast. It is probably faster than all the other forum applications that offer similar or even lesser feature sets. FUDforum's excellent performance is the result of highly tuned interfaces to the underlying MySQL or PostgreSQL database and highly optimized PHP code.
In most cases, the forum will generate a page in less than one tenth (0.1) of a second.
Security is an often overlooked feature in web based applications. As a result, many web based applications have large security holes that even the most incompetent hacker can exploit, causing a great deal of damage and annoyance.
Considerable care has been taken to ensure that, given the available programming tools, the default installation of the FUDforum 2.3 is designed to offer the greatest possible security. It would be very difficult if not impossible for a curious user or even a hacker to access your sensitive data.
To achieve this level of security, by default FUDforum 2.3 stores files using the least possible file permissions (0600 for files and 0700 for directories), which allow only the user account under which the web server is running to access FUDforum's files.
On servers that are configured to appropriately switch users for each virtual host (like Apache 2.x) your forum files will be even more secure because they will be accessible by you alone.
Although you may think that giving a web server ownership of the files is equivalent to allowing access to anyone, that is simply not the case. On a secure server, for example, the administrator should implement a PHP open_basedir limitation to restrict PHP scripts from accessing files in directories not owned by a current virtual host, thus preventing access through PHP to source code & data files of FUDforum.
On a properly configured server, any programs running within the CGI wrapper should not be able to access your files because (if a proper suid interface has been implemented by the server administrator) programs within the CGI wrapper should run as the user who executed them.
Consequently, given a well set up server, the forum's data should be quite secure, even on a shared hosting platform.
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Before proceeding with the installation process it is recommended that you determine that you have all of the software needed for the operation of FUDforum. If you would like to install FUDforum utilizing the MySQL backend you will need to make sure you system has PHP 4.0 or greater and MySQL 3.23 or greater installed. If you decide to use the PostgreSQL backend you will need PostgreSQL 7.2 or greater and PHP 4.2.0 or greater. It is always recommended that you have the latest stable version of the software you are using, since each release often fixes many critical bugs. This is particularly true for MySQL where throughout 3.23 release there were numerous fixes for index resolving which would definitely benefit your forum.
If you do not already know what PHP, MySQL or PostgreSQL version your server is running or wish to verify the information that you have,you can determine the version information by doing the following:
Example 3.1. Finding out PHP version
<?php echo "PHP Version: ".phpversion()."<br>\n"; ?>
Example 3.2. Finding out MySQL version
<?php
mysql_connect("127.0.0.1", "USER_NAME", "PASSWORD");
$result = mysql_query("SELECT VERSION()");
list($mysql_version) = mysql_row_arr($result);
echo "MySQL Version: ".$mysql_version."<br>\n";
mysql_free_result($result);
?>
Example 3.3. Finding out PostgreSQL version
<?php
$conn = pg_connect("host=localhost user=USERNAME password=PASSWORD");
$result = pg_query($conn, "SELECT VERSION()");
list($pg_version) = pg_fetch_row($result);
echo "PostgreSQL Version: ".$pg_version."<br>\n";
pg_free_result($result);
?>
If you find that the software on your server is older then the one needed for proper installion of FUDforum, you can download the needed programs from the web, the urls are listed below. MySQL, PostgreSQL & PHP are Open Source and you can download and use them for free, without paying any fees regardless of whether you use them for commercial or personal use.
MySQL http://www.mysql.com/
PostgreSQL http://www.postgresql.org/
If you did not download the sources of FUDforum, you can do so by going to http://fud.prohost.org/download.php. That page will always contain the latest stable version of FUDforum as well as the latest development version if you want the very latest features. FUDforum is always offered in 3 compression formats, bzip2, gzip & zip, so you should not have any problems decompressing the install script on any system. We recommend downloading the bzip2 file, as it is the smallest and will take the shortest amount of time to download.
FUDforum sources can also be obtained from CVS (Concurrent Version System).
Example 3.4. Downloading FUDforum from CVS
cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@asuka.prohost.org:/forum21 checkout fud21_install
Once the files are retrieved, run the following commands to create the install script
cd fud21_install
chmod 644 install.php
chmod 755 create_file_list
./create_file_list install 1>> install.php
You will need to have php binary installed on your system in order to generate the install.php installation script. If you already have a php binary in your system, but it is not inside /usr/local/bin/php, modify the 1st line inside the install.php script to reflect the proper path of the php binary on your system.
If you want a smaller install script and have php compiled with zlib module, you can pass a 2nd argument to the create_file_list script, which would compress the archive data. This will result in a file that is approximately 1/3 the size.
Now that you have the FUDforum installation script, install.php, copy the script into a web browseable directory. It is recommended to copy the script into the web directory where you intend to install the forum. To begin the installation of the forum, use your browser to access the install.php file.
Once you've accessed the script, you will see the 1st step of the installation wizard, which consists of five steps.
During the 1st step of the FUDforum installation, you get the opportunity to specify where you want the forum's files to be installed, as well as the URL of the forum. The install script will automatically put some default values for the options asked, you can use those values, or you can change them.
If your PHP has safe_mode enabled, you'll see an indicator that it is enabled in red on top of the install wizard. If safe_mode is enabled, you CAN NOT use specify the directory where you've placed install.php as Server Root or Forum Data Root.
The Server Root option allows you to specify the directory path where the forum's browseable files will be stored on your server's hard-drive. You will need to specify the full path to the directory. For example:
*NIX: /home/user/public_html/forum/ Windows: c:\\web\\my website\\forum\\
You need to enter \\ as directory separator on Windows because normally, \ is interpreted as an escape character. Since PHP is smart enough to convert / to \ internally, on Windows, you may want to use / as the directory separator and save yourself the hassle of having to deal with \\.
This is the location on your server's hard-drive where the forum's data files will be stored. It is highly recommended not to keep this directory inside a web browseable directory, since sensitive files such as messages bodies will be stored in it. For example:
*NIX: /home/user/public_html/forum/ Windows: c:\\web\\my website\\forum\\
You need to enter \\ as directory separator on Windows because normally, \ is interpreted as an escape character. Since PHP is smart enough to convert / to \ internally, on Windows, you may want to use / as the directory separator and save yourself the hassle of having to deal with \\.
If you for whatever reason, you choose to keep this directory in a location where it can be accessed with a web browser, consider using your webserver's security settings to block access to regular users to this directory. For example, .htaccess rules on Apache such as:
Example 3.5. Securing directory with .htaccess
<Location /> Order Deny,Allow Deny from all </Location>
The directories that you have specified as Forum Data Root and Server Root must exist and the webserver must have the permission to write to those directories before you click on the next link on the install wizard.
On *NIX systems there are several ways you can assign proper permissions to the directories you intend to use. The simplest method is to run command chmod 777 /home/user/directory in your shell account.
If you do not not have a shell account you can assign proper permissions to a directory by using your FTP client.
Example 3.6. Changing permissions with CuteFTP
Select the directory
Press CTRL+SHIFT+A
Enter 777 in the manual textbox
Press OK
Example 3.7. Changing permissions with WS_FTP
Right click on the directory
Choose the chmod UNIX option
In the dialog that appeared check all the checkboxes
Press OK
Enter the URL to your forum, after the forum is installed, visitors will be able to access the forum by going to this URL. Any files places inside Server Root should be accessible by going to this URL.
Once you've entered all the values, click on the next link to proceed to step #2 of the installation.
Now that the forum's files were successfully decompressed, you will now need to specify the database settings for your forum.
This is the IP address or a UNIX domain socket that will be used to connect to the database server you intend to use.
For optimal performance, we recommend using UNIX domain sockets.
Example 3.8. Database Server
Standard IP 127.0.0.1
UNIX Domain Socket :/tmp/mysql.sock
A alphanumeric string that will be prepended to all FUDforum's table names. This is done to prevent conflicts with your existing tables, which may share same names as the tables used by FUDforum. As well as allow you to install multiple forums into a single SQL database by specifying a different prefix.
By default, this option has a value of "fud2_", if you are not sure, leave this value as is.
Cookies are little bits of information that are stored on the user's computer, which are sent by the browser to the website which set them. Unless otherwise specified, FUDforum 2.3 uses cookies to track the currently logged in users, thus the user is not required to login every time.
In order for the cookie to be set properly it needs to have a correct domain specified for which you are sending a cookie. The installation script automatically figures out the most optimal cookie domain based on the URL you've entered in step #1.
If you decide to change this value make sure the domain has no less the 2 '.' in it, for example:
.mydomain.comThis is necessary because many browsers will not accept a cookie unless the domain has at least 2 dots in it.
Due to the nature of cookies, cookies cannot be set for IP address' or domains without any dot's in them. In this case, the forum will revert to using URL based sessions to keep track of users. The downside of this, is that after certain period of inactivity, usually 30 minutes, the session will expire and the user will be required to re-login.
In this step you get to choose the language that your forum will be in, the list of available languages is listed in the select box. This setting is not permanent and if you so desire you will be able to change it later once the forum has been installed.
The last step of the installer involves the creation of the 1st administrator account. You will need to enter the login name, password and the email address into the specified text boxes.
You will be able to make additional Administrators once the forum is installed.
The forum installation has now been completed, if you click on the next button you will be taken to a login form that will allow you to login into the administrator account you've created on step #5
It is of critical importance that you remove the install.php file once the installation process has been completed. Otherwise someone could re-install over the forum you have created.
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FUDforum 2.3 is controlled via series of control panels that are readily available to all of the forum's administrators via the "Admin Control Panel" link found on nearly every single page of the forum.
Using these control panels the administrator is able to adjust all of the forum's aspects as well manage the forum's files & modify the forum's templates via a convenient template editor.
Forum consistency checks the integrity of FUDforum's data and repairs it if any inconsistency is found. This process also regenerates forum caches of various data such as moderators, topic views etc... It is highly recommended to run a consistency checker once per month on high traffic forums and once every two or three months on low traffic forums.
If you see some irregularities with the forum data or inconsistent information being displayed, run the consistency checker, in most cases this will resolve the problem.
If the problem persists after running a consistency check, please take the time to report it as a bug, by going to the FUDforum 2.3 support forum
While this process is running your forum will be disabled.
FUDforum includes a full text search that allows the user to search the messages posted on the forum by both subject and message body.
When a user posts a message the text of that message is automatically added to the search index, unless you've set your FORUM_SEARCH option to no.
The search index rebuild process will go through every message on the forum and re-index it's data for the search engine. This process, as you can imagine, is VERY CPU intensive and will take a fair amount of time to run. The actual time taken depends on the number of messages you have in your forum.
This process is generally unnecessary, unless you've decided to re-enable the full text search of the forum or have completed an conversion process from a forum other then FUDforum to FUDforum and need to generate a search index of the imported messages.
While this process is running your forum will be disabled.
FUDforum will try compact it's message storage file. During normal operation FUDforum only writes to it's message file, never deletes from it, this is done because it has great performance benefits and is a very fast way to store message bodies. If you are running low on drive space you can try to have FUDforum try to compact it's message file, this will try to remove all the old unused bodies off all edited messages.
Unless there is a lot of deletion and message editing on your forum, the amount of space saved will be minimal.
While this process is running your forum will be disabled.
This control panel allows you to alter the various system settings of the forum. Pay careful attention to what you are doing while making changes on this control panel, since it possible to break your forum by entering wrong values in certain places.
Due to the importance of that control panel there is basic help for every option on the control panel itself.
This toggle shows you whether or not your forum is enabled as well as allows you to enable and disable your forum.
When your forum is disabled the users will see the message you put inside Disabled Reason when they try to access any of the forum's pages.
When your forum is disabled this message, which can contain HTML will be displayed to anyone trying to access the forum's pages.
This is where all the compiled forum include files (*.inc) will be placed.
Do not alter this option unless you are % certain of what you are doing.
If you change this directory make sure the webserver has write permissions to it.
Safe Mode users also must make sure the directory is owned by the same account as the webserver.
This is the base URL of your forum.
Do not alter this option unless you are % certain of what you are doing.
This is the directory where the forum's error logs will be stored.
Do not alter this option unless you are % certain of what you are doing.
If you change this directory make sure the webserver has write permissions to it.
Safe Mode users also must make sure the directory is owned by the same account as the webserver.
Inside this directory the bodies of all message, normal & private are stored.
Do not alter this option unless you are % certain of what you are doing.
If you change this directory make sure the webserver has write permissions to it.
Safe Mode users also must make sure the directory is owned by the same account as the webserver.
This is the directory where any temporary forum files will be placed.
Do not alter this option unless you are % certain of what you are doing.
If you change this directory make sure the webserver has write permissions to it.
Safe Mode users also must make sure the directory is owned by the same account as the webserver.
Inside this directory all the file that are attached to forum's messages are stored.
Do not alter this option unless you are % certain of what you are doing.
If you change this directory make sure the webserver has write permissions to it.
Safe Mode users also must make sure the directory is owned by the same account as the webserver.
Various settings file that are created by the forum are stored inside this directory.
Do not alter this option unless you are % certain of what you are doing.
If you change this directory make sure the webserver has write permissions to it.
Safe Mode users also must make sure the directory is owned by the same account as the webserver.
Mogrify is an ImageMagick utility that allows you to manipulate images. If you have such a utility specify the full path to it in this option. By doing so, you will gain the ability the scale down user uploaded avatars if they exceed the dimensions you've specified.
ImageMagick and its utilities can be downloaded freely from ImageMagick website.
The IP or UNIX Domain Socket of your database server. We recommend using the UNIX Domain Socket since it is much faster then TCP/IP.
If you decide to specify a UNIX Domain Socket you need to put ':' in front of it. For example: :/tmp/mysql.sock
Use persistent connections when connecting to a database. This is a performance enchanting feature which if enabled will make your forum somewhat faster. Improvement is the result of PHP not needing to open a new database connection each time a script is executed, but rather use an existing connection instead.
This option does have it's drawbacks, on forked web servers such as Apache, every Apache child will create a persistent socket for itself. This can potentially exhaust number of allowed database connections if the number of Apache children with open connections to database exceed the allowed number of database connections, thus preventing topics without an open connection to connect to the database server.
How many file attachments a user can attach to each private message. Setting this option to 0, will disable file attachments for private messages.
The maximum size, in bytes, of the file(s) a user can attach to their private messages.
PHP has it's own limitation on the size of the file uploads, via the 'upload_max_filesize' php.ini setting. If the php.ini value is smaller, then the value set in the forum, then the php.ini will be used to limit the file uploads.
Whether or not smilies/emoticons in private messages will be converted to their graphical equivalents.
This option allows you to limit how many images can users include inside their private messages.
This limit will only work if the tag style is FUDcode, won't work if you allowed your visitors to use HTML.
What kind of text formatting options are available to the user.
FUDcode Users can use FUDcode styling tags to format their messages.
HTML The users can use HTML inside their messages.
NONE only plain text is allowed.
The path of cookie used by the forum. Outside of this path the cookie will not be accessible.
By default the cookie path is the path to the forum. For example, if your forum URL is "http://mydomain.com/forum/" the cookie path will be "/forum/". If you wanted your entire site to be able to access the forum's cookies, change the value of this option to "/".
The domain name for which a cookie is being set, the domain MUST be the same as the one used to access the forum, as specified in the WWW_ROOT option.
For browser compatibility this values MUST have no less the two '.' in it.
Do not alter this option unless you are % certain of what you are doing.
The name of the cookie that will be used by the forum. By default a random value is picked for this option to prevent conflicts with any other cookies you may already have. In the very unlikely event that you already have a cookie with such a name, change the value of this option to something else.
This is the period of time, in seconds after which the browser will remove the cookie. The user who's cookie expired will then need to re-login in to the forum.
By default the cookies are set to expire 7 days they are set. Each time the user access the forum the cookie is renewed for another 7 days.
If cookies are not used or are not available sessions will be used instead. They work by passing the information normally stores in a cookie via GET/POST across the forum. Each time a user access' a page their session gets renewed.
This option defines the amount of time, in seconds after which the session expires and a user will be required to re-login. For security reasons do not set this to a high number.
By default, sessions will expire after 30 minutes.
This toggle defines whether or not the administrator(s) need to approve all the URL & Uploaded avatars before they are activated.
Leave this option set to YES, unless you have absolute faith in your users and are certain they will follow the size limitations you've defined.
FUDforum 2.3 allows for a number of ways that a user can specify their avatar, if avatars are allowed. This option allows you to define is avatars are allowed and if so, what type of avatars the users may use.
The URL & Uploaded avatars will first need to be approved by the administrator before they are activated, unless you specified in the Avatar Approval option, that the administrator does not need to approve those avatars.
URL The user can specify their avatar by entering a URL of an image.
Uploaded The user can upload an image from their hard drive to be their avatar.
Built In The user choose an avatar from the ones available in the forum's avatar gallery.
You can add avatars into the avatar gallery via the Avatar Manager control panel.
ALL The user can specify their avatar by specifying a URL to an image, uploading one to the server or choosing from the forum avatar galleries.
OFF The avatars are disabled.
The actual control panel will have additional values allowing you choose a combination of any of the first three options.
This is a limit, in bytes, on how big of an image a user can upload as their avatar.
This the maximum width x height dimensions of the avatar the user can specify.
The uploaded avatars can be scaled down by the administrator during the avatar approval process if the path to Mogrify utility is specified.
Whether or not forum users can specify signatures that will be appended to their messages.
What kind of text formatting options are available to the user.
FUDcode Users can use FUDcode styling tags to format their messages.
HTML The users can use HTML inside their messages.
NONE only plain text is allowed.
Whether or not smilies/emoticons in signatures will be converted to their graphical equivalents.
Whether or not the spell checker is enabled.
This option will only work if your PHP has the pspell module enabled.
Allow the users to send e-mails to other forum members using the forum's internal e-mail client.
Whether or not to use FUDforum SMTP gateway to send email instead of standard PHP mail() function.
Not recommended, unless you need SMTP AUTH or wish to use alternate SMTP server on UNIX systems.
If your SMTP server requires SMTP Authentication, use this field to specify the login name that will be used when accessing the SMTP server.
If your SMTP server requires SMTP Authentication, use this field to specify the password that will be passed to the SMTP server.
If enabled each new registration will need to be confirmed via email. A special URL will be sent to the e-mail specified by the user during registration, which once accessed will activate their account.
Unconfirmed accounts will be removed after a set amount of days as defined by the UNCONF_USER_EXPIRY option.
All of the system e-mails sent from the forum, such as e-mail post notification, registration confirmation etc... will come from this address.
If enabled, then e-mail notifications will include the complete HTML body of the message, allowing the user to read the message's text via their e-mail client as well as reply to the message by clicking on the reply/quote buttons.
In the event the user's e-mail client does not support HTML, the e-mail contains a text version of the message as well.
The maximum number of smilies/emoticons to show shortcuts for on the message posting forms. To see the rest the user will need to click on the "list all smilies" link.
Toggle the showing of the partially resolved host name of the message's author to other users. For example:
me.myself.com will appear as .myself.com
This may slow down the posting process, especially, if the user's host mask takes a while to resolve.
The maximum number of characters of a user's location to show on all pages with the exception of user info page.
Whether or not the list of currently logged in users is displayed. By default this list is shown on the forum's front page.
The amount of time, in minutes, after which a user is considered to be no longer logged in.
If enabled it allows other forum users to see what their counterparts are doing on the forum at the time.
This option requires that the Logged in List be enabled.
If enabled, this option will indicate whether a user is online or offline beside all their message.
If enabled, each user would have the ability to specify a nick name other then their login name, the specified nick name, would then be displayed on the forum instead of that user's login name.
If enabled, this option would allow the user to have more then 1 simultaneous logged in sessions from different browsers/computers. This is useful, if many of your users use more then 1 computer to connect to your forum and do not wish to re-login each time they switch between computers.
By default this option is disabled, because a left over session on a computer could allow another person with access to that computer use the forum under the logged in person's account. Normally, when a user logs in, all of that user's other sessions are immediately invalidated by this action.
If enabled the users, will be required to indicate whether or not they are older then 13 years of age before registration. If they are not, then their legal guardians will be required to confirm the the account via Fax or E-mail.
All US based sites must leave this option enabled to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA)
Whether or not to allow tree view of the thread listing. Since this form can be fairly cpu intensive, if you have a high traffic forum and/or limited cpu capacity, it is adviseable to leave this feature disabled.
This option defines how many topics to show per page, on the thread listing in a tree format. This option is seperate from the Topics Per Page option, since the tree view will generaly take up more screen space then flat view.
If a a tree reaches a level greater then this number, a 'more' link will be drawn and further levels will not be displayed beyond that point.
Subjects longer then the specified length, will be trimmed to the length specified in this option. This is done to prevent long subjects from ruining the layout of the form.
Allows the administrator to specify the default message and topic view.
Flat View thread and message list Standard bulletin board view.
Tree View thread and message list Draws a tree like view of the messages. Similar to how messages in the newsgroups are displayed.
Flat thread listing/Tree message listing The thread listing will be displayed in flat format, while the individual threads will be drawn as trees.
Tree thread listing/Flat message listing The thread listing will be displayed in tree formar, while the individual threads will be drawn in flat format.
The last two options will only be avaliable if the Allow Tree View of Thread Listing is enabled.
This setting defines on how many characters to wrap message bodies on, any text string longer the the number of characters specified in this option will be broken down into 1 or more strings using a space as a separator.
Set this to 0 to disable word wrapping.
The number of days unconfirmed forum members are held in the database. They will be removed from database after this period of time.
The minimum time delay, in seconds between message posting. This option is used to prevent automated posting scripts that would attempt to post many messages at once.
The number of days to show a pointer of a moved topic from the original forum to the new forum. The pointer will be removed after this period of time.
If enabled the users will be able to do full text searches on the content of the posted messages. If you wish to increase the speed of the posting process or save on space used by MySQL you should turn this option off.
In the event Forum Search is disabled the search index will not be populated at the time of posting. If you later on decide to enable the search engine you will need to Rebuild Search Index.
If enabled it will allow forum visitors to search for registered forum users by login and/or email.
How many page links to display beside a topic that exceeds 1 page in length as defined by the THREADS_PER_PAGE option.
This is the number of direct links to pages that will be shown in the pager, excluding << < > >>.
If enabled then all the messages that were later edited by the author of the message will have an indicator showing that the message was edited by it's author.
If enabled then messages edited by the moderator or the administrator will have an indicator indicating showing that the message was edited by someone other then the message author.
The time limit, in minutes, past which the users will no longer be able to edit their own messages.
Set the value to 0 to give unlimited editing time.
Whether or not to display the IP address of the message's author for all forum users.
All forum administrators and moderators will be able to see the IP of the message author regardless of this option.
The maximum number of images a user may include in their forum messages.
This limit will ONLY work if the FUDcode style is being used.
An indicator of how many forum moderators to show beside each forum on the front page.
If enabled, at the bottom of each page forum users will be able to see how long it took to generate the page as well as how many MySQL queries were ran and their timings.
The Replacement & Censorship System allows the administrator to replace certain strings in the messages, signatures and biographies of the users with another text string.
The most common use of this system is to censor certain words and phrases that the admin feels are in appropriate for the forum. For this purpose FUDforum 2.3 offers two syntaxes for replacing text ranging from a simple replace to a complex regular expression.
The most basic and the easiest to use string replacement option is "String Replace". This option will allow you to specify the 'Replace' string with its alternative the 'With' string. For example, if you specify the replace string as "haystack" and it's alternative as needle then
this haystack is sharp.will be converted to:
this needle is sharp.
Perl Regex will use a perl regular expression library to perform a replacement on a text or a text mask. This although slower then str_replace it allows for a much more powerful and sophisticated text manipulation.
This functionality uses PHP's PECL library and utilize the preg_replace function. PHP's documentation of this function and its capabilities & syntax can be found here.
Lets say, you want to replace all words containing the string 'spoon' with 'fork'. Clearly you cannot use String Replace for this because it would not replace the entire word but only the 'spoon' part. For this purpose you need to use the power of regular expressions.
Inside the 'Replace' field we enter the
!(\s|^)([^\s]*?)spoon([^\s]*?)(\s|$)!iregular expression and enter
\1fork\4as the 'With' alternative. The end result of this regex that any word containing the string 'spoon' will be replaced with "fork". Because we've added the 'i' parameter to our regex, which made it case-insensitive, so even the "SpOon" instances will be found and replaced.
Because the regular expression is generally rather complex there is no easy way FUDforum 2.3 can figure out how to reverse it back, so that when the person is editing their text they can see the text that they have originally entered. Therefor you get 2 extra fields ('From post' and 'To')were you get to specify the "reverse" regex that would convert the replaced data back its original form. Based on the previous example involving "fork" & "spoon" the conversion back strings would look like this:
From post: !(\s|^)fork(\s|$)! To: spoon
The messages & signatures entered prior the the addition of a replace will not be affected by the newly added replace syntax.
This control panel allows you to manage mime types & icons for the various files that the forum users can attach to their messages.
MIME types are special strings sent to the browser that tell the browser how to interpret the file. For example .exe file would have a application/application MIME type, which would tell the browser that the file should be saved to the user's hard rive instead of trying to open the file. On the other hand for .jpg image the forum would send a image/jpeg MIME, which would tell the browser to display the image in the browser window.
The MIME types are determined by the file extension and compared to the extensions of the supported MIME types inside the FUDforum 2.3 database. If the file does not match any MIME types it would be assigned the generic application/ocet-stream MIME type, which would tell the browser to save the file rather then try to display it.
The forum by default comes with 30 or so default MIME types that cover the most commonly used file types, so unless you have special file types not covered by this list you will not need to use this control panel.
Adding of a new MIME is normally a 2 step process, first you upload the image that you want to represent your new MIME and then you enter the actual MIME information such as a description, file extension and mime header. The 1st step can be bypassed if you already have an image that you wish to use in association with this MIME by choosing the image from the list of the ones already available in the forum.
At the top of the MIME managment form there is a simple control, which allows you to choose an image from your drive and upload it to the server. Clicking on a browse link will open up a dialog allowing you to pick the image.
Click on the upload link to upload the image to the forum.
The preview of the uploaded image will appear on the MIME Managment control and the file name will automatically be inserted into the MIME Icon textbox.
Now that you've uploaded your MIME image you can now specify the MIME information. If you choose to use an existing image, by clicking on the "select MIME icon" link that would pull up a pop-up window where all the MIME images in the system will be displayed and you'll be able to choose the one you want by clicking on it.
If you are editing a MIME, the information for the MIME will be automatically inserted in to the appropriate fields so you can easily edit it.
Use this field to enter a quick description of the MIME. This field's data will not show up anywhere on the forum other then this form.
This is the MIME header that will be sent to the browser when the user downloads a file that matches this MIME type.
Files that end with this extension will be attributed assigned mime type.
This value is case-insensitive, so jpg and JPG are the same thing as far as MIME management system is concerned.
This is an image that will be displayed beside all file attachments that are of this MIME type.
Once all the MIME information is set to your satisfaction click on the "Add MIME" or the "Update" button, depending of whether you're adding or updating a MIME, to submit your changes.
The file manager is a utility that allows you to easily manage files inside the forum's directories. Using this tool you can change file permissions, upload files, delete files as well as download files using your web browser.
The file manager displays the file & directory listing akin to the one shown by the *NIX 'ls -lia' command, with a slight addition of showing the permission's integer value.
Example 1.1. File List Example
Mode Owner Group Size Date Time Name Action -rwxrwxrwx- (777) forum forum 0 KB Mar 13 18:28:03 blank.gif chmod | download | delete
This utility is only for *NIX installations, it is not available for Windows installations of the forum.
The file manager allows you to create directories. Simply enter the directory in the 'Directory Name' textbox and and click on the 'Create Directory' link. This will create a directory with the name you've specified inside current directory.
You can also use the file manager to upload files from your computer into the forum.
In the File Upload control use the 'browse' button to select the file from your hard drive. If you want to give name other the the original name to the file you are about to be upload, enter the new name inside the 'File Name' textbox. Now, click on the 'Upload File' button to upload the file into the directory you are currently in.
The file manager can also be used to remove forum files & directories. This can be accomplished by clicking on the delete link beside each file or directory.
Directory MUST be empty before it can be deleted.
For safety there is an intermediate stage in the deletion process that will ask you to confirm the fact that you want to delete a file or directory. This is done to prevent accidental file deletion.
Beside each file there is download link, if clicked it would allow you to download the file to your hard drive.