Book Image

phpBB: A User Guide

Book Image

phpBB: A User Guide

Overview of this book

phpBB is a free, open source Internet community application, with outstanding discussion forums and membership management. Written in the PHP scripting language, and making use of the popular MySQL database, phpBB is a standard among web hosting companies throughout the world, and is one of the most widely-used bulletin board packages in the world. This book is an abridged version of "Building Online Forums with phpBB 2", (ISBN 1904811132), focusing on a complete set of topics to help you set up and run your own phpBB-powered online community. This book gives you the power to use phpBB to set up and run your own online discussion forums with ease. It takes you through the whole process of setting up your phpBB site, and helps you create, customize, and manage your own online community with phpBB. Written by experienced phpBB administrators and enthusiasts, the emphasis is on simple and practical guidance for you to get the most from phpBB. Packed with step-by-step examples, this book is your ideal guide to learning phpBB.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Security Tips


Making sure that your board is as secure as possible should always be a concern. Here are some tips that can help you get started.

Administrator Password

Make your administrator password difficult to guess. It's a very important password, so you wouldn't want other people to guess it and play around with your board. This is also true for any moderators you decide to assign later on. Remind them to change their passwords to something really hard to guess. For example, using the same password as the username is definitely not advisable. Be creative and go with something like y0u11n3v3rgue$$ (read "you'll never guess") and wh00p3375 (read "whoopee 75"). It's also a good idea to change this password regularly and to use it only for this board (not for other services like Hotmail and the like).

Disallow Remote Connections to the Database

Remote connections allow you to access your database from a remote location. For instance, from your local machine you can query the database that...