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	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	SMF Bulletin Board Code
	superscript		*
	subscript		*
	teletype		Monospace font.
		[O]circle	:(
Shocked		:o
Cool		8)
Huh		???
Roll Eyes		::)
Tongue		:P
Embarrassed		:-[
Lips Sealed		:-X
Undecided		:-\
Kiss		:-*
Cry		:"(

Please note that not all of the smiley codes will be correctly parsed and converted to images unless their opening spaces are present.

Hello, Khabravites!

Quite recently I was puzzled by the idea of ​​​​creating a forum. Nowadays, creating a forum does not cause much difficulty for users, since there are quite a large number of ready-made forum CMSs that greatly facilitate this task. But among their abundance, it can be very difficult to choose the truly necessary CMS. Therefore, I decided to write my own review, which, at least a little, will perhaps help the user make a choice in the direction of one engine or another.

Free engines

#1 - PunBB
Beautiful and easy to use engine. Convenient and intuitive admin panel interface. The forum is very compact, has a small number of functions (with under boxes), but this can easily be corrected with add-ons. Convenient and easy to create themes. If you need a forum that is simple and easy to install, configure and use, this is the ideal choice.
- Russian-speaking community

There are many more different engines that I did not include in the review, because I think that they are not as in demand and popular as those mentioned above. Well, as for my subjective opinion, I would recommend PunBB or XenForo.

Tags: create a forum, forum cms, forum engine

This article is not subject to comment, since its author is not yet a full member of the community. You will only be able to contact the author after he receives an invitation from someone in the community. Until this moment, his username will be hidden by an alias.

Well, let's start giving little tips on optimizing and promoting sites (forums) on phpBB. In this case, we will perform a small hack that will help get rid of an external link like " Powered by phpBB ©...". In this publication we will look at 2 ways in which you can do this - a technique for phpBB 3.x.x.

Removing an external link Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group and Russian phpBB support

The first way to remove an external link that says Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group. And so, the easiest way is to delete using the admin panel. We go to the administrative panel, go to the “Styles” menu item, on the left we see the panel where the block in the menu is located, we are interested in the “Style Components” block, and in it “Templates”. According to the standard, in the proposed window we will see the following: prosilver and subsilver2, although there could be others if you installed them. In general, that's not the point. From the proposed set, select the default one. Click on the "edit" button next to the template. Next, a window appears asking you to “Select a template file.” Next, select “Template file” - “overall_footer.html”. The HTML editor appears below. We find the following code: " Powered by phpBB 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group"and just delete it, although you can set your own link and caption."
(TRANSLATION_INFO) " (which is located below, can also be deleted) - this code is responsible for localization, for example an external link with the inscription "Russian phpBB support".

The second way to remove an external link that says Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group. This method is similar, but we connect to the site via Pratacol ftp. Go to the following path styles/template_name/template/overall_footer.html. And we edit the same code that we edited above. If you change the code, do not forget to set the UTF encoding - this way, “crackers” (squares and other incomprehensible symbols) may appear in place of the anchors.

Everyone knows that I simply cannot live without Joomla, but, in my opinion, there is no good forum for components. That's why I work with forum engines. One of the new ones that I just recently started using is Let's start a new SMF category with hopefully useful stuff. We start small, and as beginners it’s very useful.

First steps in search engine optimization Simple Machines Forum: removing copyright and external links

Let me make a reservation right away that I only work with smf 2 and this article will relate specifically to this version of the free forum engine.

And so, regular readers know how much I don’t like to put “10” external links to the official websites of engines, including forum ones. That is why, first of all, we remove the copyright and as many as 4, attention 4 external links of the form " SMF 2.0.2 | Simple Machines | SMF © 2011 | XHTML"! To do this, connect to the site via FTP forum/Themes/ name of your theme/ and edit the file index.template.php. Naturally, at the very bottom there is a code (about line 330) that displays external links that we don’t like so much. Therefore we delete: "

", theme_copyright(), "

" And "

", $txt["xhtml"], "

". It's all so simple and easy. In the coming publications, expect new materials on promoting and optimizing forums on SMF/