Administering Your Forum

The solid dots represent usergroups who can view the forum in question, while open circles represent those who cannot.

Browser-specific feature

The solid dots and open circles only apply if you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 4+, Netscape 6+ or Firefox browsers. This effect also works in Opera, but the dots are much smaller and can be harder to see.

Opening the Forum

We have nearly finished. Remember how we initially chose not to set the new forum active and open. Well, setting it to open is the final step that we need to take.

In the Forum Manager page, scroll down to Posting Options, and change both Forum is Active and Forum is Open to Yes.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on Save.

The new forum is now visible and available to all members of the administrator and moderator usergroups.

Helping hand

By now you're probably noticing the question mark icon next to items in the AdminCP (and the ModCP). These are the help buttons—clicking on them will bring up help screens on the topic they appear next to.

Super Administrators

If you own the forum or run the forum, then you are probably a member of the Administrator usergroup. But are you a super administrator? Probably not! Want to find out how to set yourself up as a super administrator? Read on!

You need to be a super administrator to have control over other administrators and to change their permissions. For example, suppose that you have another administrator who is your 'second in command' and that you want to change this administrator's permissions on the forum. To do this

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you click on Usergroups in the left-hand menu and then click on Administrator Permissions. However, you come up against a message telling you that you don't have permission.

This message also tells you how to make the changes that will enable you to carry out this action. You do, however, require access to the server to carry out these changes.

Creating a Super Administrator

To create a super administrator, you need to make a change to the includes/config.php file. The easiest way to edit this file is to download it using FTP and edit it locally.

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Administering Your Forum

Local edit versus server edit

Some web hosts might allow you to edit files through a built-in file manager application, but this isn't recommended. By downloading the file, you can keep an unchanged copy of it in case your edits go wrong.

Once you have downloaded the config.php file, you can open it. You may remember that you edited this file to provide vBulletin with the information needed to connect to the database when you first set up the discussion board.

Scroll down to the section market ****** SUPER ADMINISTRATORS ****** as shown below (line number 83).

You need to change this line of code:

$superadministrators = '';

To make an administrator into a super administrator, you add their user ID number inside the single quotes. As the holder of the first account in the vBulletin database, your user ID should be 1.

$superadministrators = '1';

If you want to add more than one super administrator, separate each user ID with a comma, like this:

$superadministrators = '1,2,42';

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