296 CHAPTER (Web host forum) 10 SECURING AND MAINTAINING PHPBB
296 CHAPTER 10 SECURING AND MAINTAINING PHPBB Appoint members that visit regularly: Your moderators should be around your community on a regular basis so that their assigned forums are properly maintained. I ll leave it to you to define regular basis. Limit moderators to one or two forums at first: It s tempting to create supermoderator positions moderators who control every forum and give every moderator free reign. However, especially in the formative stages of your community when you may or may not know your staff members well, you will want to keep moderators limited to one or two forums. They will not be able to use their powers outside those forums, and that s an important step in securing your forums. Keep supermoderators to a minimum: If you wish to create supermoderator positions, with power over all forums, appoint just enough (one or two is usually plenty, but that can vary depending on traffic) to provide backup to existing moderators. Ideally, you should appoint supermoderators only when your board s traffic increases to the point where you need a couple people to back up the moderators. Use extreme caution when appointing additional administrators: As your board grows and the administrative tasks increase, you won t have a choice but to add another administrator or two. Appoint someone who you can trust and have worked with (preferably a moderator). Administrators should have enough technical savvy to operate the board s controls, know how to fix problems, and know how to avoid problems. Administrators should also know how to put on a good public face, as they will likely be contacted often by new members who may be unfamiliar with the phpBB software. (I consider prior experience with the board software a major plus in an administrator.) How to Audit Moderators and Administrators Keeping an eye on who is permitted to do what is incredibly important. Sadly, phpBB 2.0 does not contain an easy way to audit the number of people with administrator or moderator rights. I typically resort to periodically running two simple SQL queries using the phpMyAdmin front end to MySQL. Here, I ll explain how to run those queries. Note Contact your hosting provider to determine the location of phpMyAdmin on the server, as this location varies from host to host. When you have phpMyAdmin open, select the database you created for phpBB (when you installed phpBB, as described in Chapter 
by clicking the name of the database in the left pane. This will load a listing of this database s tables in the main area of the window. Newer versions of phpMyAdmin (which most hosts run) have a SQL tab just above the area where the tables of the database are listed. Click that tab, and you ll be presented with a SQL query box, which should resemble Figure 10-1.
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