In the previous chapter we looked at the vBulletin installation process. This process involved downloading the installation files, making edits to the configuration files, creating or preparing a database for vBulletin, uploading the installation files, and finally going through the vBulletin installation wizard. We also looked at how to import posts and settings from another discussion board into vBulletin.
Now that you have a working vBulletin board, the next thing that you need to do is familiarize yourself with it. That's what we are going to be doing in this chapter.
We will look at:
- How a vBulletin discussion board is experienced by both unregistered users and members
- How a user can become a member by registering
- The administrator's experience of a vBulletin discussion board
- The Administrator Control Panel
- Forum management
- Branding and changing the logo for a discussion board
Before we look at vBulletin in detail from the perspective of the administrator, let's take a look at it from the user perspective.
In the last chapter we got vBulletin working, and the discussion board that we set up is open and ready for visitors.
First question that people have is "Where is the board?" The answer to this depends on where it was installed.
If you installed it into the root of your website, then accessing the site is all you need to do.
So, for example, if your site is at www.example.com and you installed vBulletin into the root folder, then just typing http://www.example.com into the browser will take you to it (the main 'page' of vBulletin is a file called index.php). Similarly, if you typed http://www.example.com/index.php, you would get to the main page of the forum.
If, on the other hand, you installed the vBulletin software into a folder on the server, then you would need to access that folder. We installed it into a folder called vb, so to access this, we would use http://www.example.com/vb to get to the main page of the forum (or, if we wanted to type more, http://www.example.com/vb/index.php).
Getting to the AdminCP (Admin Control Panel) requires you to go to a different URL. Using the examples above the AdminCP would be at http://www.example.com/admincp or http://www.example.com/vb/admincp (again the main 'page' here is index.php).
There is also a ModCP (Moderator Control Panel). Getting to this requires you to go to yet another URL. Using the examples above, the ModCP would be at http://www.example.com/modcp or http://www/example.com/vb/modcp (once again the main 'page' here is index.php).
OK, you know where to go, but what do people see? Well, this is what a visitor to your vBulletin site sees if they are new and aren't already logged in:
At the top left of the page is the logo for the discussion board. By default this is the vBulletin logo, but it is easy to change. (We'll show you how later.)
Below that, you have the forum title and login box. The Remember Me? box is checked by default, and when members log in, their details are saved to a cookie so that they can access the site at a later time without logging in again.
Below that, we come to the navigation bar, also known as the navbar. The job of the navbar is to put tools and functions within easy reach of the user.
The navbar makes use of expanding and collapsing panes in order to save on precious screen space. Clicking on some of the links (marked by a downward pointing arrow) causes the panes to open, while moving off them causes them to close. The contents of the navbar changes dependent on whether the user is logged in or not.
Below that, are the forum welcome banner, the introduction to the discussion board and the forums themselves. The welcome banner and introductory message are only shown to unregistered users (or members who have not logged in).
Below this, comes the main body of the discussion board. This is where the forums appear. To get you started, there's one already created.
Even as an unregistered user, you can click on the link to the Main Forum, which then takes you from the forum view into the thread view. (This is default behavior—all the permissions can be changed, as you will see in Chapter 5.)
There are no threads to show because there have been no posts in the last 30 days. (This is the default view—this can be changed too.) In fact, there are no posts at all.
Notice the New Thread button. If an unregistered user clicks on this, they are taken to a screen asking them to log in or register. This screen also contains a password reset option, handy for people who have forgotten their passwords. This sends them a new password.
Tip
A word about passwords
vBulletin doesn't store passwords as plain text in the database. Instead it uses an algorithm called MD5 to create a one-way hash of the password, and this is stored instead. A one-way hash means that passwords entered can be easily converted into the hash but the plain text password can't be recovered from this hash. The password password is transformed by the MD5 into 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99, and this is stored in the database instead.
When a member logs in to the forum, the password they enter is converted to the one-way hash, and this is compared to the hash stored in the database—if the hashes are the same, the member is let in, otherwise they are rejected.
Let's now take a look at the registration process for new users. We can begin this process by clicking on the register link. Clicking on this link brings up a page outlining the forum rules. There are default rules in place, but you can customize these.
Anyone registering on a vBulletin discussion board has to agree to the rules of the forum by checking the box, before clicking on the Register button. These rules are customizable, but a generic set of rules is pre-installed.
The next step is the registration screen. Here you have to enter basic information such as desired username (give this some thought—many people end up stuck with a silly username because they didn't give it enough thought!), a password (six to eight characters—letters and numbers are best), and an email address.
Clicking on Complete Registration completes the process, and a confirmation page is displayed.
A member, also known as a "registered user", will see a number of changes in the way that the forum looks and behaves, and they will have a lot more options and customizations open to them.
To begin with, they can create new threads for others to read by clicking on the New Thread button and filling in a short form.
The main components of the form are:
- Title—the title of the thread
- Message—the main text of the message
- Post Icons—icons that appear next to the post title
These three fields will need to be filled in before a new thread can be posted.
Finally you click on the Submit New Thread button. Not only can the post contain text, but you can also use emoticons (also called smilies—those little smiling-face graphics) to add character to a post. Also, files can be attached to the posts and made available to other members.
At this stage, you might be thinking that this seems like a lot of power for an ordinary member, and you might not be sure that they should have this power. Don't worry—when we look at the discussion board from the point of view of the administrator, you will find that you actually have a lot of power at your disposal to control what members can and can't do—just because they can do something by default, it doesn't mean that you can't take that power away from them later!
Posting a reply is similar to starting a new thread. All you need to do is click on the Post Reply button, and you are taken to a short form similar to the one you saw when you created the new thread.
The main difference between posting a new thread and a reply is that a reply does not require a new title.
Editing a message (say to remove typos or to add something) is an ability that most users will want at some point or other. And vBulletin makes this easy.
All you need to do is click on the Edit button. This loads the current message into a form like the one used to post it.
You then can edit the post, or delete it.
Tip
Controls on editing
Different user permissions can be set for editing posts, and many forums utilize rules where a message cannot be edited after a fixed period of time (a few hours usually). There are several good reasons for this. The first is that edited messages don't show up as new messages, and this makes it hard for the administrators and moderators to moderate comments. Secondly, editing old messages places an additional load on the server (because current messages are cached while old ones are not).
Communication is the cornerstone of a good discussion board. One facility that vBulletin offers is the ability to send a message to another user without that message appearing on the board. There are a number of easy ways to send a private message (also known as a PM) in vBulletin. (We're not going to list them all here.) One of the easiest is the following:
This form is similar to the form used to create new threads and new posts or replies.
The main components of the form are:
- Recipient Username(s)—This is where you enter the username of the recipient (or recipients—by default a user can send one message to as many as 5 users simultaneously). Make sure that the username is typed in correctly. Entering an incorrect username can mean that the message is not delivered or delivered to someone else! (An error message is generated if you enter a username that doesn't exist.)
- Title—Here you enter the title of the message. This is similar to the subject line on an email.
- Message—This is for the main body of the message.
Filling in all three of these is mandatory.
BB Code is short for Bulletin Board Code. BB Code is a safe alternative to allowing users to use HTML to format their messages.
So, what is BB Code? BB Code is a set of codes that users can place in their posts. These codes are translated by the board when the post is submitted so that they are substituted with pre‑approved HTML code.
Tip
Why HTML is dangerous
A long time ago it was decided that allowing everyone the ability to post HTML into a web forum was a really bad idea.
Think about it. Your discussion board is controlled by a combination of HTML, PHP and MySQL queries. Giving others the ability to place code into a post could allow them to do all sorts of things. Now, most people would probably do no worse than format their posts using weird color and font schemes, making them difficult to read. However, you want a lot of people to come to your board, and eventually (the Web being what it is) there would be someone who would think it was a great idea to use HTML, PHP, or script to cause damage to the board. And believe it, they could!
vBulletin does allow you the option of activating HTML on the discussion board, but this is not recommended!
If you've formatted a message for posting onto a vBulletin board, then you will have seen BB Code in action.
Take a look at this short section of text formatted with BB Code:
[B]Bold[/B] text goes here.
This is [I]italics[/I].
This is [U]underlined[/U].
[LEFT]Left aligned.[/LEFT]
[CENTER]Centered.[/CENTER]
[RIGHT]Right aligned.[/RIGHT]
[INDENT]Indented![/INDENT]
[list=a]
[*]Bullet - text
[/list] [list=1]
[*]Bullet - numbered
[/list]
This text looks like this when it is submitted for posting:
BB Code looks a lot like HTML—there are opening tags and closing tags around text. However, one key difference is that the tags have square brackets as opposed to the angled brackets in HTML. For example:
- In BB Code, the opening and closing tags for bold are [B] and [/B].
- In HTML, the opening and closing tags for bold are <B> and </B>.
Using BB Code (especially the in-built codes) is easy because most of the commonly required codes are available from the toolbar in the message posting interface.
The AdminCP allows the administrator to add new codes to the forum. However, care is needed to ensure that these don't cause security problems.
The user has a set of tools at their disposal:
- Thread Tools—These allow the user to work with the thread.
- Search this Thread—This tool allows the user to search the current thread for keywords.
- Rate Thread—This allows the user to rate the thread by giving it a rating from 5-star (excellent) to 1-star (terrible).
- Display Mode—This allows the user to change the way they view a thread.
There are four possible display modes:
- Linear mode (oldest first)—In this mode, the posts are displayed chronologically from oldest to newest. Posts are shown in what is known as flat mode so that many posts can be viewed at the same time.
- Linear mode (newest first)—This is the same as linear mode, except that posts are in the opposite order.
- Threaded mode—In this mode, a tree view is shown along with every post in a thread. This view allows the reader to see the relationship between the posts, in terms of who responded to which post. In this display mode, only one post is shown at a time.
- Hybrid mode—This mode is a mixture of the linear and threaded modes. The post tree is displayed as in the threaded mode, but multiple posts are displayed simultaneously as in the linear modes.
The navbar is also different for the member (or registered user), as it has several significant and useful additions.
The first is a User CP (User Control Panel). After all, moderators and administrators both have their own CP, so why not users? In the User CP, the user can change their default settings, passwords, and email addresses, they can post signatures (default text that appears at the end of their posts) and avatars (images that appear next to their posts), and they can send private messages (messages sent to other users) and attachments.
Another useful feature is the Quick Links navbar menu.
The Quick Links menu provides the user with links to often-used features of vBulletin. (Many of these features can be accessed from within the User CP.)