The thread tools give the administrator the ability to close, move, copy, edit, and delete threads, as well as merge threads with other threads, split threads into multiple threads, delete posts, and remove redirects. (Redirects are left in place by default when a thread is moved to a different location.)

If an administrator clicks on the Edit button of a post, they get the ability to delete a message (which makes it unavailable to regular users but visible to moderators and administrators) or to remove a message. A reason can also be given for the deletion. Also, an administrator can edit a post (again, leaving a reason if they wish). Other options include closing a thread (so that users can no longer post to it) and making the thread sticky (so that it stays at the top).

If an administrator clicks on the Edit button of a post, they get the ability to delete a message (which makes it unavailable to regular users but visible to moderators and administrators) or to remove a message. A reason can also be given for the deletion. Also, an administrator can edit a post (again, leaving a reason if they wish). Other options include closing a thread (so that users can no longer post to it) and making the thread sticky (so that it stays at the top).

The AdminCP
The tools described in the last section are powerful and allow you to work with forums and threads, but the real power for the administrator of a vBulletin discussion board is in the Administrator Control Panel (AdminCP). You've already had a glimpse at this in the previous article, but now we'll take a closer look at it.
When you enter the AdminCP, you will find a navigation menu on the left-hand side. This expands and collapses as you click on the entries.

Control Panel Home
On the right, is a screen called ControlPanel Home, which has some basic information about the forum and some useful tools and utilities.
This has four key components.
Latest Version Information
First it has a box that tells you whether you are running the latest version of vBulletin. If you aren't, it gives you a link to the member area, where you can download the latest version (if you have a valid and up-to-date license).
Administrator Notes
Below that, is the AdministratorNotes box, where you can type notes. These notes will stay there until you delete them and are very handy there is more than one administrator!
Quick Administrator Links
Below the AdministratorNotes box is the Quick AdministratorLinks box. This makes available a set of tools that administrators often need. These include a QuickUserFinder box that allows administrators to see user profiles, a quick PHP function, and MySQL language lookup search boxes that allow you to search for PHP and MySQL terms. Below that is a useful set of links.
vBulletin Contributors and Developers
Finally on the Control Panel Home screen, is a list of vBulletin contributors and developers, with links to their profiles on the vBulletin site.

vBulletin Options
If you click on vBulletin Options on the left-hand side menu, you will uncover another option, also called vBulletinOptions .

vBulletin Option Tools
Let's take a look at some of the important options available here (we'll cover other options later):
• Turn YourvBulletin On andOff This allows you to switch the forum off to regular users. Administrators can still access the forums but everyone else is faced with a customizable message saying that the forum is off. This can be a very handy tool it allows you to work on the discussion board without interruptions from users and without your changes being visible to them.

• Site Name /URL /ContactDetails This allows you to change the forum name and URL, the homepage name and URL, contact options, and copyright notices.

• Site Name /URL /ContactDetails This allows you to change the forum name and URL, the homepage name and URL, contact options, and copyright notices.

• General Settings This allows you to control features such as the meta-tag information in the page headers. (This information is used by search engines to catalog the site.)
• General Settings This allows you to control features such as the meta-tag information in the page headers. (This information is used by search engines to catalog the site.)
• ServerSettingsandOptimizationOptions You can leave most of these settings alone until you have more experience with the board. However, one setting that you might want to change sooner is called the *NIX ServerLoadLimit. vBulletin has access to the overall load of the server on certain *NIX setups (including Linux), and you can set a value that, if exceeded, results in vBulletin turning away users and giving them a ServerToo Busy message.
If you do not want to use this option, set it to 0. Otherwise a typical level would be 5.00 for a reasonable warning level.
If you make use of shared hosting, then setting this level conservatively can limit the effect that your board has on the many other users on the server. On a server of your own, you can set this limit higher or even remove it altogether.
• ForumsHome PageOptions This page controls the many items that you see on the forum home page. You can use it to rename the main forum page (index.php by default), display user information on the forum (hide the information, display it sorted alphabetically, or display it randomly, which take up less processing power), display birthdays, and display the calendar, holidays, and upcoming events.
• Forum Listings Display Options This page contains the settings for how forums and sub-forums are displayed on the page.
• Forum Display Options (forumdisplay) This page has settings related to how posts are displayed on the page. You can alter these settings according to how busy your forum is and how you want new posts or busy threads to be displayed.
• Thread Display Options (showthread) This page contains the settings for thread display. These settings include how many posts to display and how text should be wrapped.
• Search Engine Friendly Archive vBulletin contains many features that make it particularly friendly to search engines. (vBulletin discussion boards get good coverage in search engines such as Google and AltaVista.) In this page you can control basic settings for the archive.

• ServerSettingsandOptimizationOptions You can leave most of these settings alone until you have more experience with the board. However, one setting that you might want to change sooner is called the *NIX ServerLoadLimit. vBulletin has access to the overall load of the server on certain *NIX setups (including Linux), and you can set a value that, if exceeded, results in vBulletin turning away users and giving them a ServerToo Busy message.
If you do not want to use this option, set it to 0. Otherwise a typical level would be 5.00 for a reasonable warning level.
If you make use of shared hosting, then setting this level conservatively can limit the effect that your board has on the many other users on the server. On a server of your own, you can set this limit higher or even remove it altogether.
• ForumsHome PageOptions This page controls the many items that you see on the forum home page. You can use it to rename the main forum page (index.php by default), display user information on the forum (hide the information, display it sorted alphabetically, or display it randomly, which take up less processing power), display birthdays, and display the calendar, holidays, and upcoming events.
• Forum Listings Display Options This page contains the settings for how forums and sub-forums are displayed on the page.
• Forum Display Options (forumdisplay) This page has settings related to how posts are displayed on the page. You can alter these settings according to how busy your forum is and how you want new posts or busy threads to be displayed.
• Thread Display Options (showthread) This page contains the settings for thread display. These settings include how many posts to display and how text should be wrapped.
• Search Engine Friendly Archive vBulletin contains many features that make it particularly friendly to search engines. (vBulletin discussion boards get good coverage in search engines such as Google and AltaVista.) In this page you can control basic settings for the archive.

Editing and Adding Forums
Once the board is set up, you need to give people a place to go to so that the talking (or typing!) can happen. The placeholder forum is there just to show you where the forums appear on the page the developers expect you to create your own!
To create discussion areas, you have two options open to you:
• Edit existing forums
• Add new forums
You can make these changes in the AdminCP. In the left-hand menu, click on Forumsand Moderatorsand then click on Forum Manager .

Clicking here brings up the Forum Manager screen in the right-hand pane. This screen allows you to work with the forums and categories of your discussion board.

The controls here allow you to make a number of changes to the categories and forums displayed. You can go straight to viewing the contents of the forum, edit it, delete it, add a child forum (that is a forum that appears beneath a forum), add a moderator, and add announcements, as well as viewing the permissions.

Editing Existing Forums
We can edit the main category, and give it a more meaningful name and description by using these tools.
Editing the forum gives the administrator power over six areas.
Firstly, they can change the name and description of the forum, and give it a more meaningful title and description. Another interesting and useful feature is Forum Link. If you enter a URL there, anyone clicking the forum link will be redirected to that URL. The Display Order setting controls the order forums are displayed in, wherever they are shown (including the Admin CP). If you set this to 0, then a forum will not show up anywhere to the end user. It can, however, still be accessed if the user types in the direct URL to the forum.

Make sure that you click on Update Display Order if you have changed any of them. You also have control over the default view age for the threads (although users can change this manually), as well as changing the parent forum of the forum (which essentially moves it from one spot to another in your board).

Moderation Options
Below that are the moderator options for the forum. You can set these on a forum-by-forum basis, so you have total control over how each forum is moderated and how the content posted is handled.
There are a number of settings that you can control. You can:
• Enter an email address to be notified when a new thread or post is made
• Require that threads and posts are validated before a post is displayed publicly
• Moderate all attachments before displaying
• Allow members to report posts to moderators and administrators

Forum Styling
vBulletin has an option that allows you to give the forum a style different from the default. You can also let users override your choice of style.

Access Control Options
You may want to control who has access to certain parts of the discussion board. This is easily done in vBulletin, as there is an option that allows you to set a password for access to particular forums. This is useful for creating private forums or for restricting access to certain members.

Forum Posting Options
Not all forums are the same. There are a number of settings that come under the section Posting Options.
For example, this section allows you to control whether the forum can be posted to or whether it is a category below which other forums will appear.
You can also control whether the forum is active or not, open or closed, or whether it should be searchable. (It can be useful to have some areas not searchable. This improves search speeds and reduces the database size, as the search index is stored in the database along with the rest of the data.)

Enable/Disable Features
Finally come the Enable/DisableFeatures options. If you are creating or modifying a category, then BB Code, [IMG] Code, Smilies, PostIcons, and ThreadRatingsare not needed.
Note that it is not recommended that you enable HTML code anywhere within your forum.

The options for a forum rather than a category post would include all these options apart from Allow HTML enabled by default.
When you have finished making changes, click the Save button to save the changes or Reset to go back to the previous options.
Here is what the forum looks like after a few small modifications.

Branding
One thing that's important to the growth and success of a forum is branding. For a community to grow it needs to have a place that it feels is special and unique to it. vBulletin is a great discussion board tool because it is highly customizable, but forum owners can feel a little out of their depth at the beginning. Because vBulletin is so customizable, it can seem like there's an awful lot to do!
However, this doesn't have to be the case. You can start small and build from there. A good place to begin to establish your own brand and feel is to have your own logo on your forum!

Changing the Logo
As we saw earlier in this article, the default logo for a vBulletin discussion board is the vBulletin logo. Changing this logo is easy, but you have to know where to find it! First of all, make sure that you've uploaded your logo to the web server and that you know the location for it. You will need this later! To change the default logo follow these steps.
First, create or modify a logo suited to your needs. This can be the hardest part as it can be difficult to make a logo that fits in with the rest of the color scheme. (In Article 7 we will look at how to customize the look of the discussion board.) Eventually, you are bound to move away from the default look and feel, but for now let's just think about changing the logo bigger changes can come later.
Go into the AdminCP and click on Styles& Templates in the menu on the left to expand it. This will open a new page in the right-hand window. In this click on the option marked Style Manager .

This will now take you to the style manager screen. At first this screen can appear confusing to some, as it crams a lot of power into a small space. For now don't worry about all the options, just click the button marked Go, which takes you to All Style Options selected by default in the drop-down menu.

This will now take you to a screen that is huge and seems even more bewildering at first than the style manager page and that's probably because it is! All Style Options is just that all the style options for vBulletin displayed in one place! We're not even going to attempt to show it in a screenshot here as it's massive and contains hundreds of options all of which you can change!
Scroll down to a section labeled ImagePaths (you don't need to scroll too far to reach this), and there you will find an option marked Title Image .

Once you find this you can change it to point to your logo. Just type the URL in the box (either the full URL that begins with http:// or a relative one with respect to the installation folder of vBulletin).

Once you've done this, you need to scroll all the way down to the bottom on the screen (a long way!) and then click on the button marked Save. You can then view the changes in the forum.
Undoing the Change
Now we come to another powerful and immensely useful feature of vBulletin. Let's say you're not happy with the change you made and want to go back and either change it to point to another logo or perhaps even go back to what it was before. This is a lot easier with vBulletin than with other discussion boards. If you now go back to the All Style Options page and make your way down to the section labeled ImagePathsyou'll find something different about the Title Image section. The text in the box is now red, and there is a checkbox beside it marked Revert. Also the setting is marked as (Customized in this Style) .

This makes finding changes that you have made a lot easier (although the more changes you have made the harder it becomes to find the last one!) The Revert checkbox is also handy, because if you check this and then save the settings, this option will revert back to what it was originally. This should give you the confidence to make changes, certain in the knowledge that, if something goes wrong, you can quickly and easily roll specific changes back to the default.

Summary
In this article we've tried to give you a whistle-stop tour of vBulletin from both the end user's perspective and the administrator's point of view. By now it's probably clear to you just how big, powerful, and customizable vBulletin is. The more you dig, the more options and settings you end up finding! Once you get comfortable with using vBulletin, this is great, but in the beginning it can make it seem like a huge learning curve. What we've tried to do with this article is give you a fast track up that learning curve to a base camp at a point where you have a working forum and are in a position to begin making a few basic changes to it.
At this stage we recommend that you take a break from reading and spend some time with your vBulletin installation again (a few hours if possible) work through the options outlined here and get a feel for what's on offer and how it's presented by the interface. If you feel confident enough, then make some small changes to your installation, and see what implications they have if you don't like them, undo the changes. By having some hands-on time with your forum, you'll gain the confidence you need to perform the bigger, more complex tasks we'll be looking at in later articles.