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

Some Maintenance Issues


The Update Counters page enables you to change many of the counters in the database.

Note

Take your time

This process can take a lot of time—there is no way to rush it, so it's best to start it and leave it to finish on its own.

These counters are important for the smooth running of the database, but they may require updating following a change to the database. These are some of the changes that you may need to make:

  • Update the forums

    This feature will update the information for each forum including last post information, thread count, and post count. This operation can be carried out after a mass moving or pruning of threads and posts.

  • Update user titles

    This will go through every user on the forums and determine their correct user title.

  • Update user names

    This will update user names everywhere they occur on your forums. This operation may need to be done after changing a user's name in the AdminCP.

  • Update post counts

    This will update the post count for each...