Book Image

vBulletin: A Users Guide

Book Image

vBulletin: A Users Guide

Overview of this book

Written specifically to allow you to create a discussion forum, vBulletin, provides all of the tools, features and functionality for you to set up and develop a vibrant community. Because it specializes in this one aspect of your website, all the features are geared towards this goal, and you can leave the improvement and additions to the vBulletin developers while you get on with managing the rest of your website. If you are either already running a community forum based on vBulletin, or are planning on establishing one, then this is the book for you. This book will guide you through installing, configuring, managing and maintaining a vBulletin discussion forum on your own website. The book begins with the initial installation and configuration of vBulletin on your system. You will then go on a tour of vBulletin and its features, for both users and administrators. This will grow your understanding and familiarise you with the power and possibilities of vBulletin. vBulletin's Administration Control Panel is where you can control every aspect of your board. From users, forums and word filters to skins, templates and maintenance, everything can be done through the web-based control panel. The book devotes significant sections to covering these, getting you up to speed on the options available to you, and offering advice to help you make the right choices with your board administration. To make your forums stand out from the rest, we cover skins and templates to take your first steps in customising your forum. vBulletin is one of the most popular forum platforms available. Well known for its power and speed, it drives many of the most popular discussion forums on the Internet.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Building Forums with vBulletin
Credits
About the Authors
Preface

The vBulletin Administrator Experience


What are the differences for an administrator compared to a regular member? Well, there are quite a few. We'll take a look at some of the more important ones now.

Forum and Thread Tools

The first differences are the forum and thread tools. Forum tools allow the administrator to view the posts and attachments that are in the moderator queue. (These are the posts and attachments that need to be approved before being made visible.) The administrator tools also allow threads to be moved and pruned and allow a moderator to be assigned to the forum.

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...