Administering Your Forum
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 article 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.php file
• 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
Setting Up 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, Memory
• Software 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.
Creating the Forum
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.
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 Managerscreen 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 Adminsand ModeratorsOnly!.

• Description. Enter some text to back up the name given to the forum.
• ParentForum. Set this to No one (the default), as we want it to appear as a top-level forum.
• Forum isActive. Set this to No for now, as you don't want it to appear to others until you have it set up properly.
• Forum isOpen. 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.
Forum 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 Adminsand ModeratorsOnly! link, choose View Permissions, and click on Go.

This now brings up the Forum PermissionsManagerpage.
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:
• We can click on Deny All and then specifically allow access to the Administrators and Moderators user groups.
• We can deny access specifically to all groups except Administratorsand Moderators.
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.)

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.

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 DiscussionForum, 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 Editlink next to Administrators .

The page that is displayed now can be used to customize the forum permissions for administrators.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click on Save. You can now repeat the process for the Moderatorsusergroup.
Viewing Permissions
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.
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 Managerpage, scroll down to Posting Options, and change both Forum isActive and Forum isOpento 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. 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).

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.

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.

Other Changes to the config.php File
There are several other changes that you can make to the includes/config.php file in addition to creating a super administrator. We will look at four of these changes.

Admin Log Viewing Permission
The Admin log keeps track of all the changes and edits that the administrators have carried out. To view this, click on Statistics& Logsin the left-hand menu, and then click on Control PanelLog .

This gives you access to the Admin log.

By default, only the first administrator account has access to this. (This is the account, with user ID 1, that was created during the setup of the vBulletin board.) To give this power to more administrators (or take it away), you should make a change to the section of code in the includes/config.php file labeled ****** USERS WITH ADMIN LOG VIEWING PERMISSIONS******.

Make the change to this line of code:
$canviewadminlog = '1';
Remember to separate each user ID with a comma.
Save the file, and upload it to make the changes active.
Admin Log Pruning Permission
As well as controlling who can view the Admin log, you can control who can prune it (in other words, delete stuff from it).
Add the user IDs of all Administrators you want to have this power here:
$canpruneadminlog = '1';
User ID 1 is there by default.
Query Running Permission
This is a powerful permission that you should grant with care. Giving someone the power to run queries allows them to interact with the actual database that holds the vBulletin data. We've not looked at this yet and won't until Article 9. For now, let's just look at how to give this power to or take it away from administrators.
The line of code you need to edit is this:
$canrunqueries = '';

Add the user IDs inside the single quotes. Separate multiple user IDs with a comma.
With great power, comes great responsibility
Be very careful with this. The ability to run queries is a very powerful tool that we will come to later. Running queries can easily damage or destroy your discussion board and any other data in the database. For the safety and security of your board, you may want to remove all user IDs from this list and allow queries to be run only through phpMyAdmin or through a shell.
Undeletable and Unalterable Users
You might want your administrators (or other members) to be undeletable and unalterable. (This refers to the profile settings.) This setting can be handy, because it prevents you from deleting or demoting administrators (including yourself!) by accident.
The line of code you will need to edit is this:
$undeletableusers = '';