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.phpfile - 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
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, MemorySoftware—Windows, Linux
Of course, these topics could be subdivided even further.
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.
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.
Tip
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.
- Parent Forum. Set this to No one (the default), as we want it to appear as a top-level 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).
You have now set up your forum for administrators and moderators, but there is a potential drawback—you would have to discuss your plans in view of the other members. Fortunately, you can make this forum private so that only administrators and moderators will have access to it. You do this by setting up permissions.
In vBulletin permissions enable you to set up forums within your discussion board that can be used only by the members you want.
We will now make some changes to the access permissions for the new forum. To begin this process, click on the drop-down box next to the Admins and Moderators Only! link, choose View Permissions, and click on Go.
This now brings up the Forum Permissions Manager page.
We are concerned with the section of this page that deals with the forum that we just created.
At the moment everyone has access to this area, but we can change this easily. There are two options:
It is always safer to deny access to all and then allow in the user groups that you want, so this is what we are going to do now. (The other way is prone to leaving out a group by accident.)
To begin the process, click on the Deny All link.
This changes all the usergroup permissions for this forum, denying them all access. The page then reloads, and all the usergroups are now displayed in red showing that they have been customized manually.
Tip
Yellow alert
If the names of usergroups appear in yellow, then they are inheriting permissions from a parent forum. In the example forum, this would happen if we changed the permissions on the Main Discussion Forum, which is the parent forum of both the Big Boards! and Small Boards! forums.
Right now, no one can access the forum! Let's change that.
Click on the Edit link next to Administrators.
The page that is displayed now can be used to customize the forum permissions for administrators.
The next part is the tricky part, and you need to take care. To reset the permissions to standard administrator privileges, you need to set all the options to Yes apart from Always Moderate This Group's Posts (unless you want all administrator posts to be moderated by moderators, which is unlikely).
However, clicking the button marked All Yes changes all the options to Yes apart from Always Moderate This Group's Posts. This is a little-known feature, and users of vBulletin are often unaware of it.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click on Save. You can now repeat the process for the Moderators usergroup.
We will now look at two features of the Forum Permissions Manager page that will make your life a lot easier.
Firstly, there is the color coding. The name of each usergroup is displayed in one of three different colors according to that group's permissions as follows:
- Standard: These are displayed in white. These usergroups have default usergroup permissions.
- Customized: These are displayed in red. These usergroups have custom permissions.
- Inherited: These are displayed in yellow. These usergroups have custom permissions inherited from a parent forum.
But it's not just the colors that help you navigate the forum permissions page. If you take a look to the left of the usergroup names, you will see solid dots and open circles in either red, yellow, or white.
The solid dots represent usergroups who can view the forum in question, while open circles represent those who cannot.
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.