5

Administering Your Forum

There's a lot to do as a forum administrator. It's not just about participating in the discussions, facilitating new discussion, and making the tough decisions as to who should be moderated or banned. There's a lot to do behind the scenes—the day-to-day care of the forum as well as routine maintenance. You will also run into problems from time to time, and then you will need to carry out emergency repairs to get your forum going again.

This chapter is about the most common tasks an administrator performs, some of which will be mundane while others will be vital to your forum's survival!

We will be looking at:

•How to create a forum

•How permissions can be used to restrict access to a forum

•Super administrators

•Some useful changes that can be made to the config.php file

•Backing up, repairing, and optimizing the database

•Some changes to the counters in the database that may be necessary from time to time

•How smilies and avatars can be used to give a human feel to a forum

Setting Up a Forum

As administrator you will create several forums within your discussion board so that members can find the right place for the topics they want to discuss. For example, you might divide a discussion group related to computers into two different forums called Hardware and Software.

However, these forums may become crowded so that you would find it useful to break down these topics into subtopics as follows:

•Hardware—PCs, CPUs, Hard drives, Video adapters, Memory

•Software—Windows, Linux

Of course, these topics could be subdivided even further.

Administering Your Forum

By now, you probably get the picture on how this works. But there's a deeper level that you can take this to. First thing's first. A forum doesn't appear from nowhere. It takes planning and preparation.

Your discussion board will probably have moderators who will take care of moving posts and deleting unacceptable comments, as well as hosting discussions within the forums. You might also have other administrators. It would be good to have a place where you can come together with these other contributors and discuss the running of and future plans for the forum. One solution would be to set up a forum for administrators and moderators, and this what we will do.

Creating the Forum

Let's walk through the setup process for setting up a specific area on a board for administrators and moderators. For this we will continue to use our generic board, because the fewer distractions there are, the better—you might want to work through this on your main forum or on a test forum.

vBulletin test forum

If you have a valid license for vBulletin, you are entitled to set up an additional test forum so that you can test any code, template, and database modifications. To make this clear to vBulletin and its license verification system, you should place this installation in a directory called testvb and password protect it. This installation must not be accessible by the general public.

We recommend that you take vBulletin up on this. Having a test forum allows you to roll out changes there and test their impact on the board without letting members see the result. It also allows you a safe way to experiment with the vBulletin source code without any risk of bringing down your main active installation.

Start off by accessing your discussion board's AdminCP. Expand the left-hand menu by clicking on Forums & Moderators, and then click on Add New Forum.

This brings up the Forum Manager screen on the right.

This is where you can enter all the details for the new forum. We only need to concern ourselves with a few of these options:

•Title. Enter the title of the forum here. We will choose something clear and descriptive—Admins and Moderators Only!.

•Description. Enter some text to back up the name given to the forum.

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•Parent Forum. Set this to No one (the default), as we want it to appear as a toplevel forum.

•Forum is Active. Set this to No for now, as you don't want it to appear to others until you have it set up properly.

•Forum is Open. Set this to No for now too. Until you've got the forum set up properly, you don't want any posts made there.

•When all this is done, click on the Save button.

The forum will be created with the settings you prescribed.

Finally, we'll move the new forum so that it appears at the top of the forum listing. To do this, change the display order to 0, and click on Save Display Order. This will move the new forum to the top of the list of forums (as you can see from the first screenshot in the next section).

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