Q. How do we use the forum?A. Your FTH website comes complete with its own Forum, or discussion board application known as phpBB (http://www.phpbb.com).
phpBB is a high powered, fully scalable, and highly customizable Open Source bulletin board package. phpBB has a user-friendly interface, simple and straightforward administration panel, and helpful FAQ. Based on the powerful PHP server language and your choice of MySQL, MS-SQL, PostgreSQL or Access/ODBC database servers, phpBB is the ideal free community solution for all web sites.
With phpBB, FTH website administrators get the best of both worlds: first, they get the convenience of the automation and integration within a template driven website -- meaning these forums are already setup and ready to use. Second, they get power and the ability to completely customize the phpBB application by creating new boards, setting moderation preferences, etc.
Technical Note: phpBB is a very powerful and complex application with hundreds of pages of documentation -- way too much to even consider documenting here. For complete support on phpBB, see http://www.phpbb.com/support/ .
Default setup. When you are first given your FTH website, your forums are setup for you. The forums color scheme is always set to match your chosen website color scheme -- you will never have to change that manually within phpBB. There are four boards setup for your club by default -- all linked to your left-hand menu. They are:
- Club News
- Speech Feedback
- Brainstorming
- Speaking Tips and Tricks
Member registration. When you add a member into your FTH member database, they are automatically registered on the discussion boards. Therefore, they just need to enter their member username and password to "log in" before they post.
Forum administration. As webmaster, you most likely will need to delete posts that you did not make. To do this, you must be logged in to the forums as the administrator. Depending on the version of phpBB you are running and when you started your FTH account, this administrator log in could be different. First try "Admin" as the username, and your current admin password. If that does not work, try your admin username and your current password. If that still does not work, reset your admin password in the FTH admin area, and try again.
Remember: When we refer to "log in" to the forums as administrator, we are not talking about logging in to the main FTH admin area, we are talking about clicking the "log in" icon on the forums page.
When you log in as the forum administrator you will be able to click on any post and edit or delete it (via icons within the post). Also, you will see a link at the VERY bottom of the forum screen -- below the FTH admin area link called "Go to Administration Panel". By clicking this link you will be able to:
- create new forums
- delete forums
- change posting permissions (make it so only club members can read/post)
- make it so others cannot register
- ban users
- and much more
Awesome Feature: Within the FTH admin area, you can set it up so that each time a post is made to your forum, either a) you (the webmaster) is notified or b) the entire club is send a message.
