Touring phpBB s Features CHAPTER 9
Touring phpBB s Features CHAPTER 9 One of the keys to success of managing your phpBB community is having a grasp of the phpBB software s feature set. While phpBB s end-user features are generally straightforward, they are also quite powerful. Knowing the ins and outs of these features will help you explain and fix problems you (or your users) may run into in the day-to-day operations of your forum. In this chapter, I ll walk you through mastering the end-user features that will help you guide users having difficulty adjusting to your forums, and discuss the administrative options related to these features. I ll also preview the phpBB 3.0 feature set. Reading and Posting to Forums Making posts and reading them are absolutely the most basic functions to a message board. phpBB offers enhancements to these seemingly simple functions to make you and your users lives much easier. Knowing how a particular function works can be a huge help when someone has a question as to why it s behaving that way. Using the Forum Index The Forum Index page is the front page to your forums and contains some very useful timesaving features. It has links to quick searches (some of which are available only to registered users, as explained in the Searching Forums section later in this chapter), a convenient login form, and a look at who is browsing the forums with the Who s Online feature. The forums tell you when the last post was made and who made it, and if there is anything new since your last visit (if you are logged in). The Forum Index page also showcases the newest member to the board, which is a very useful feature in building your community, as it gives users the opportunity to welcome the new users. Finally, the Forum Index page gives some brief statistics on how many users have ever been online at the same time, which can be a fun fact to have. Marking Forums As Read When registered users read forums, phpBB automatically keeps track of the posts they ve read in cookies stored on the users machines. Users have the ability to mark a forum or all forums as read via links on the forum or index pages, respectively. While rare, problems with the marking feature can arise. If users are having problems with this feature, they likely are not accepting cookies from your site. If this problem becomes widespread, you may wish to check the session length under the Cookie Settings options accessed through the Configuration link under General Admin in the Administration panel. If you have
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