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The forum is the whole installation, and usually contains multiple boards. You should always enter the forum through a link that ends in forum.pl (not forum_show.pl) to let the forum know when you start a new session. Otherwise the forum won't know when to mark posts as new or old.
A user is anyone who registers an account in the forum. Registration is usually not required for reading, but only registered users will see statistics about new/read posts. Users can be granted membership status to selected boards, enabling them to see private boards and post in read-only boards.
A board contains topics, which in turn contain the posts. Boards can be set to be visible to registered users or to administrators, moderators and board members only. Boards can be anonymous, meaning the user's ID won't be stored with the post (this doesn't guarantee full anonymity from administrators, though), and can optionally allow posts by unregistered guests. Announcement boards can be read-only, so that they only allow posts by administrators, moderators and members, or reply-only, which means that only administrators, moderators and members can start new topics, but everybody can reply. Another option for boards is moderation. If this option is activated, new posts will be invisible to normal users until an administrator or moderator approves them. Users can subscribe to a board, which means that they will get all new posts in that board by email regularly (frequency depends on forum setup).
A topic, otherwise known as thread, contains all the posts on a specific subtopic, that should be named in the topic's subject. Boards have expiration values that determine after how many days their topics will expire or get locked after their last post has been made. Administrators and moderators can also manually lock topics, so that no new messages can be added to them. Users can subscribe to a topic, which means that they will get all new posts in that topic by email regularly (frequency depends on forum setup).
A post is a single public message by a user. It can be either a base post, which starts a new topic, or a reply to an existing topic. Posts can be edited and deleted, which might be limited to a certain time frame. Posts can be added to personal todo lists and can be reported to the administrators and moderators in case of rule violations.
In addition to the public posts, private messages may be enabled in a forum. Registered users can send each other these messages without knowing the email addresses of the recipients.
An administrator can control and edit everything in the forum. A forum can have multiple administrators.
A moderator's powers are limited to the boards he is moderator in. A moderator can edit, delete and approve posts by normal users, lock and delete topics, add and remove board members and check the list of reported posts. A board can have multiple moderators.
The creator of a topic can add a poll to this topic, if this feature is enabled. Each poll can contain up to 20 options. Registered users can cast one vote for one option per poll. Polls can't be edited, and can only be deleted as long as there haven't been any votes.
| Yellow icons indicate new posts respectively topics or boards with new posts. In this forum, 'new' means a post has been added since your last visit. Even if you have just read it, it is still a new post, and will only be counted as old on your next visit to the forum. |
| Checkmarked icons indicate that the post respectively all posts in a topic or board have been read. Posts are counted as read once their topic had been on screen or if they're older than a set number of days. Since new/old and unread/read are independent concepts in this forum, posts can be new and read as well as old and unread at the same time. |
| Icons with dotted outlines indicate topics/posts that are invisible to other users, because they are waiting for approval by an administrator or moderator. |
| The lock icon indicates the topic has been locked for some reason and no new posts (except by administrators and moderators) are allowed. |
For security reasons, mwForum only supports its own set of markup tags, no HTML tags. Available markup tags:
| [b]text[/b] | renders text bold |
| [i]text[/i] | renders text italic |
| [tt]text[/tt] | renders text nonproportional |
| [img]address[/img] | embeds a remote image (if the feature is enabled) |
| [url]address[/url] | links to the address |
| [url=address]text[/url] | links to the address with the given text |
The following emoticons are displayed as images (if the feature is enabled): :-) ;-) :-( :-o