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

Avatars


An avatar is a small picture that can be set to appear next to a username to give the user a visual identity. Users can choose from a set of preloaded avatars, or the administrator can allow custom avatars to be uploaded.

To control avatars, click on Avatars in the AdminCP to expand the options, and then click on Avatar Manager.

You will then be able to use the avatar manager to control avatars, in much the same way that you use the smilie manager to control smilies.

We will now see how to add and store avatars.

Adding Avatars

Just as with smilies, there are two ways to add avatars—use avatars already on the server or upload new avatars. You can either add avatars singly or in batches, depending on what information you provide.

The only difference with this process compared to the smilie upload process is that you have to provide a number for the Minimum Posts field. This is to control who has access to which avatar. So, for example, if you supplied an avatar and you only wanted people...