Starting a New Topic
Browse to the board where you wish to post and click the New Topic button (positioned by default at both the top and the bottom of the board, as shown in the ), which should take you to the Start new topic screen. While this presents a number of options, the two most important are the Subject field and main Message field (not labeled as such, but obvious by its size). So enter your subject and start to type (or paste) your message into the main text area, noting that a message missing either a subject or a body will not be accepted for posting until it has both. If you"re happy with your plain text message, you can then post it by clicking the Post button and/or preview it first by clicking the Preview button, but there are many further available to make things that little bit more interesting.
- Some forums show the navigation tree at the top in a space-saving horizontal mode.
- Some forums may be configured to offer an additional Spell Check button alongside the Post and Preview options.
Starting a New Poll
A poll is basically a topic with an added question and voting options, started by clicking New Poll instead of New Topic. To post a poll it is necessary to fill out the Question field and at least two of the Option fields in addition to the Subject and Message fields required by a standard topic. Further options to configure how many choices the user may vote for, how long the poll should run, whether users can change their votes and what conditions must be fulfilled for the results to be displayed should be self-explanatory.
To offer more than five choices in a poll, simply click Add Option as many times as necessary.
Note that it may also be possible for some users in some forums to add a poll to an existing topic.
Posting an Event to the Calendar
Where this option has been configured (it"s not standard "out of the box"), you can post an event by selecting Calendar from the followed by Post Event from the calendar screen. What you see now is a Start new topic screen with additional fields for the event title, date and target board, which simply add your event to the calendar and create a link back to your post in that board.
Replying to a Topic or Poll
Replying to a topic or poll is basically the same as , but it"s not necessary to enter anything in the Subject field unless you wish to change what"s already there. To vote in a poll, you simply have to select your chosen option(s) and click Submit Vote.
If "Quick Reply" has been enabled, a simple reply field will also appear after the post(s) on a page, but you"ll have to type yours and manually if you choose to use it.
Quoting a Post
To reply to a post by quoting it, you can either click the Quote button for the relevant post and add your own message to the quoted text or click the Reply button followed by Insert Quote from the relevant post in the "Topic Summary" below, but note that:
- Both these options add a link to the original post showing the name of the poster and the date and time of the post, whereas the quote tag simply quotes the relevant post without this additional information.
- You can also retain or add the "author" attribute independently of the full Quote function, as demonstrated in the below.
Modifying or Deleting a Post
To modify a post, click the Modify button and make your changes. Note that most forums are likely to be configured to show the date and time of the last edit, but the administrator(s) may also allow a short period to elapse before this happens.
To delete a post, click the Delete button followed by OK from the Remove this message? box that appears. Some forums may also allow you to remove topics or polls that you start, but the buttons for these are usually at the bottom of the page.
Standard Posting Options
Notify me of replies
Check this to subscribe to email notification for the topic.
Return to this topic
Check this to return to the topic (instead of the message index) after posting (NB you can also set this behavior as a preference in your profile).
Don't use smileys
Check this to prevent certain in your post from being parsed and rendered as smileys.
Attachments
If enabled, this feature allows you to attach files to your posts in much the same way as most email clients, so you simply have to browse to the relevant file(s) on your computer before clicking Post. You can delete your attachment(s) or add more by , but please note that:
- The permitted file types and sizes are set by the forum administrator(s).
- Although most forums are likely to be configured to display attached images as part of the post, it"s not possible to preview attachments so you should always browse to and attach your files just before you finally post your message.
References
SMF Bulletin Board Code
The buttons shown belong to the SMF default theme and may differ from forum to forum.
| Tag Name | Button | Code | Output | Comments | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bold | [b]bold | bold | * | ||
| * | |||||
| * | |||||
| * | |||||
| Glow | glow | The three attributes (eg red, 2, 50) in the "glow" tag are color, strength and width respectively. | |||
| The two attributes (eg red, left) in the "shadow" tag are color and direction respectively. | |||||
| move | move | Not valid XHTML, but can also be used for images! | |||
| Simple Machines Forum |
Simple Machines Forum | Preserves critical text formatting, rendered in a monospace font. | |||
| left align | * | ||||
| centered | * | ||||
| right align | * | ||||
| Right-to-Left | * | right to left! | Typical usage would be to post Arabic or Hebrew in an English document. | ||
| Left-to-Right | * | left to right! | Typical usage would be to post English in an Arabic or Hebrew document. | ||
| * | |||||
| font size | * | ||||
| font face | Only fonts installed on the user's computer will be displayed, so use with caution! | ||||
| Font Color | Change Color Black Red Yellow Pink Green Orange Purple Blue Beige Brown Teal Navy Maroon Lime Green | red | red | Select the color from the drop-down. | |
http://somesite/somefile.swf |
http://somesite/somefile.swf | Please note that, if embedded Flash has been disabled by the forum administrator(s), the Flash file will appear as a straight hyperlink as shown here. The two attributes in the "flash" tag (where relevant) are width and height respectively. | |||
http://somesite/image.gif |
Type the width and height attributes to resize the image. | ||||
http://somesite/image.gif |
|||||
| http://somesite/ | http://somesite/ | NB the "url" tag opens in a new window, but you can type "iurl" tags to open in the same window. | |||
descriptive link |
descriptive link | ||||
someone@somesite |
someone@somesite | * | |||
ftp://somesite/somefile |
ftp://somesite/somefile | * | |||
descriptive link |
descriptive link | ||||
| * | No meaningful output from the "table" tags alone. | ||||
| * | No meaningful output from the "table" and "tr" tags alone. | ||||
content |
|
Note the correct nesting of the tags, so the "table" tags contain the "tr" tags, which each contain an equal number of "td" tags! | |||
| SMF Bulletin Board Code |
|
||||
| superscript | * | ||||
| subscript | * | ||||
| teletype | Monospace font. | ||||
Let's start right away with the main script code:
#!/usr/bin/perl
# which-forum.pl script
# (c) 2010 Alexandr A Alexeev, http://site/
use strict;
# commented lines - for rigor
# if the task is to collect engine statistics, leave it as is
# if you make a list of forums - uncomment
my $data ;
$data .= $_while (<>
)
;
# check how much was Powered by phpBB without a link in the footer You will find this and other scripts mentioned in the post in this archive. Script which-forum.pl examines the HTML page code to see if it contains signatures of the forum engine. We used a similar technique when defining WordPress and Joomla, but there are a couple of differences. Firstly, the script itself does not load the page code, but reads it from stdin or a file passed as an argument. This allows you to download the page once, for example, using wget, and then run it through several analyzers, if we have more than one. Secondly, in this script the presence of a signature is 100% a sign of the engine. Last time, the presence of a signature only added weight to the corresponding engine and the engine with the greatest weight “won”. I decided that in this case, such an approach would only unnecessarily complicate the code. To test the script, I did some research. I compiled a list of several thousand forums and ran each of them through my script, thereby determining the percentage of program responses and the popularity of various engines. To get the list of forums, I used my Google parser. Queries like this were sent to the search engine site:forum.*.ru and so on. You will find the complete query generator code in the file gen-forumsearch-urls.pl. In addition to zone.ru, .su .ua .kz and .by were also used. Last time, it was difficult to conduct such a study, since WordPress and Joomla sites do not have such signatures in the URL. Catalogs like cmsmagazine.ru/catalogue/ do not provide a sufficient sample size. What is 600 Drupal sites? I must admit, the results of the experiment disappointed me. Of the 12,590 sites studied, the engine was successfully identified on only 7,083, that is, only in 56% of cases. Maybe I didn't take into account some engine? Was it really true that half of the forums had Bitrix installed? Or should I have spent more time searching for signatures? In general, additional research is required here. Among the 56% of successfully identified engines, the most popular, as expected, were IPB (31%), phpBB (26.6%) and vBulletin (26.5%) They are followed with a large lag by SMF (5.8%) and DLEForum (5.3%). My favorite punBB was only in 6th place (1.64%). I wouldn’t recommend putting much faith in these numbers (they say that every third forum on the RuNet runs on IPB), but certain conclusions can, of course, be drawn. For example, if you intend to make a site on a forum engine and plan to modify the forum, say, pay users $0.01 for each message with automatic withdrawal of funds once a week, then you should choose one of the three most popular engines. The more popular the forum, the greater the chances of finding a programmer who is well versed in it. If no significant changes are expected in the engine, then it may make sense to choose a less popular engine, for example SMF or punBB. This will reduce the number of hacker attacks on your forum and the amount of spam automatically sent on it. Scripts for searching/identifying forums can also find many practical applications. The first thing that came to my mind was to sort the identified forums by TIC and post on the first hundred posts with links to one of my sites. However, hundreds of forum dofollow links did not affect the TCI in any way (2 updates have passed), so it is better not to waste time here, unless you are not interested in transitions. It is clear that the mentioned use of scripts is far from the only one. I think you can easily figure out how else you can use them. Tours and holidays in Australia Internet forums are one of the most popular types of Internet resources. This is understandable, since forums are an ideal platform for free communication between visitors. A forum is a great way to organize a community on your site and build a regular audience of visitors. There are many forum engines. I have long wanted to review forum engines. I will not compare them with each other - this is the topic of a separate article. When choosing a forum engine, I advise you to determine the following points for yourself: 1. What forum functionality do you need? Most forum engines have extensive capabilities, but some nuances are not implemented in all forum CMSs. I recommend visiting the official websites of the engines and reading detailed descriptions of the functionality. 2. Paid or free engine - this point also needs to be taken into account. There are only two paid engines in this review - vBulletin and IPB, the rest are free. 3. Community development - when an engine has a developed community both on the English-speaking and Russian-speaking Internet, this is a big plus. The development of the community is directly related to the number of different modifications, improvements and design templates. If the engine has a small community, then you need to keep in mind that many issues will have to be resolved on your own. 4. Date of the last update of the engine - if the engine has not been updated for a long time, this indicates that the developers are not developing it or have abandoned further development. This is a big disadvantage. Internet technologies are constantly evolving, and a forum with outdated functionality will limit the possibilities for its further development. Okay, enough big words :) I'll start with the most popular forum engines, based on this CMS rating. This is my favorite forum engine, and I run my Planet Photoshop forum on this engine. The reason is not only that it is a free forum engine, but also that it has wide functionality, has developed communities both on the English-speaking Internet and on the RuNet, therefore many mods have been developed for phpBB for every taste, with the help of which you can expand the functionality even further. Logs of actions of the user, moderator, administrator, precise settings of access rights of the moderator and administrator, identification of search robots, creation of user groups, polls, attachments in messages and personal messages - these are just part of the functionality of phpBB. I also really like the direction in which phpBB is developing from version to version. phpBB is convenient for both administrators, moderators and ordinary users. My opinion after several years of using phpBB is that it is a wonderful forum engine that does not require hosting resources and provides all the necessary potential for running a forum. Useful resources on phpBB: Invision Power Board is a paid forum engine that is very popular on the Internet. You can find out the cost in RuNet. Many famous forums operate on it. It has developed communities on the English- and Russian-language Internet. There are additional official applications for IPB (gallery, blog, file archive module). In addition, there is a visual message editor, a text version of the forum optimized for search robots, a tool for convenient backup of the forum database, a detailed log of actions of administrators and moderators, as well as a log of search robot actions. Useful sites for Invision Power Board: vBulletin is a wonderful forum engine. It is paid, the cost can be found out. Along with IPB, vBulletin is the leader among paid engines. Podcasting support, automatic generation of forum RSS feeds, the ability for visitors to create social groups and interest clubs on the forum, user photo galleries, tags are supported, the ability to add forum topics to social bookmarks by users themselves - these are the most interesting features of vBulletin, in my opinion. punBB is a very light and simple forum. The forum control panel is convenient and intuitive. punBB has fewer features, but this is compensated by its speed and low requirements for hosting resources. The developers of punBB focus on lightness, speed and compactness. Useful resources on punBB: YaBB is a free forum engine written in Perl. Unlike most other forum engines, YaBB uses files rather than a database to store data. A convenient text editor for writing messages, ample opportunities for administrators and moderators, the ability to change settings and templates on the fly, the ability to convert a page into a “printable version” - these are not all the capabilities of the YaBB forum engine. Now a small digression. If you are interested in learning about those promotion methods that give a good effect for increasing target traffic, then I can offer my paid research SEO intelligence http://seorazvedka.ru/, in which I showed, using the example of 10 profitable young sites from different topics, how they are promoted and described how this can be used to promote their resources. SMF is another fast and lightweight forum engine. It is undemanding to server resources and is actively gaining popularity. OpenID support, a user warning system, the ability to pre-moderate topics, messages and attachments if necessary, a WYSIWYG editor for messages - and that’s not all that SMF allows! Intellect Board is the original free engine. The idea behind the Intellect Board developers is to create a website based on a forum. The functionality of Intellect Board is very wide - a collection of articles, presentation, news, archive of files, photo gallery, IRC chat, encyclopedia. In essence, Intellect Board is a full-fledged website management system. The main features of the Intellect Board - The ability to set rules for all sections, support for graphic libraries GD and GD2 for creating small copies of pictures and photographs, the ability to issue warnings and rewards by moderators and administrators (and warnings can be either indefinite or time-limited), rating topics, articles, files and photos/ ExBB (Exclusive Bulletin Board))
ExBB is a lightweight and free forum engine. It, like YaBB, does not require a database and stores information in text files. ExBB has the following advantages: pages are generated very quickly, the load on the server is minimal, a high degree of resistance to hacking, the forum runs on files, no databases are required, for it to work it is enough that the hosting has PHP support. Vanilla is an original forum engine that is interesting for its modularity. A big plus of this forum CMS is that most modules can be installed in one click Advantages of Vanilla: its own framework that allows you to write extensions, the ability to build communities (voting, tag clouds, blogs, chat, karma-like add-ons, etc.), ease of installing add-ons (in most cases, upload it, press one button - and that’s it!), extensibility of standard functionality (modularity) due to add-ons, of which about 450 have now been written. Another interesting feature of the Vanilla forum engine is the “Whisper” system - you can simply send a message to someone in a whisper without leaving the topic page, or create a “whisper” topic, which will be a visual history of correspondence.
print "phpbb \n"
if ($data =~ /
# $data =~ /viewforum\.php\?[^""]*f=\d+/i or
$data =~ /phpBB\-SEO/i or
$data =~ /)
;
print "ipb \n"
if ($data =~ /
$data =~ /
$data =~ /
$data =~ /index\.php\?[^""]*showforum=\d+/i)
;
print "vbulletin \n"
if ($data =~ /Powered by:?[^<]+vBulletin[^<]+(?:Version)?/i
or
$data =~ /)
;
print "smf \n"
if ($data =~ /
$data =~ /index\.php\?[^""]*board=\d+\.0/i)
;
print "punbb \n"
if ($data =~ /
# $data =~ /viewforum\.php\?[^""]*id=\d+/i);
print "fluxbb \n"
# if($data =~ /viewtopic\.php\?id=\d+/i or
if ( $data =~ /
print "exbb \n"
if ($data =~ /
# $data =~ /forums\.php\?[^""]*forum=\d+/i);
print "yabb \n"
if ($data =~ /
$data =~ /YaBB\.pl\?[^""]*num=\d+/i ) ;
print "dleforum \n"
if ($data =~ /\(Powered By DLE Forum\)<\/title>/i or
$data =~ /
print "ikonboard \n"
if ($data =~ /
$data =~ /\n"
if ($data =~ /\n"
# if($data =~ /forums\.php\?fid=\d+/i or
# $data =~ /topic\.php\?fid=\d+/i or
if ($data =~ /
print "stokesit \n"
# if($data =~ /forum\.php\?f=\d+/i or
if ($data =~ /
print "podium \n"
# if($data =~ /topic\.php\?t=\d+/i or
if ($data =~ /
print "usebb \n"
# if($data =~ /forum\.php\?id=\d+/i or
if ($data =~ /
print "wrforum \n"
# if($data =~ /index\.php\?fid=\d+/i or
if ($data =~ /
print "yetanotherforumnet \n"
if ($data =~ /Yet Another Forum\.net/i or
$data =~ /default\.aspx\?g=posts&t=\d+/i)
;
site:talk.*.ru
site:board.*.ru
site:smf.*.ru
site:phpbb.*.ru
....
