Administration and
Setup Manual for
Anyboard
WWW Message Board
System
Thank you for choosing AnyBoard! After using AnyBoard, we're sure you'll find it to be the BEST Web message board system available anywhere.
AnyBoard is better by design. We worked with message board administrators and others who have used other web bbs programs, and we incorporated their suggestions and ideas into AnyBoard to bring you the best program with the features you need. AnyBoard gives you complete control over the appearance and operation of your message board.
AnyBoard was designed to meet the needs of the most demanding live message boards, which have very heavy traffic and suffer from various abuses and attacks. It was designed to provide rich and reliable functionality to both users and administrators.
AnyBoard is the most fully featured discussion board program you will find. AnyBoard's essential features include: threaded/non-threaded forum, file uploading, private discussions, email notification, integrated survey, integrated chat room, pre-moderation, peer moderation, strong anti-abuse capabilities.
Figure 1 - Example Main Forum Screen
The nine basic parts of the AnyBoard Main Forum screen are:
Starting from the top, the first part of the screen is the Forum Header area, starting from <html>. In this example, we do not have any visible elements, but we have set the background to white, using <BODY bgcolor=white>. The background could also have been set to a background .gif or .jpg image with the <BODY BACKGROUND="...> HTML tag. The <BODY> tag is also the place for setting link and visited link colors.
The forum banner above the top navigation bar can physically grouped with the forum header, as they are adjacent to each other, however, logically, they can be set to for different purposes, so they can be modified independently.
The Navigation bar hosts the command links such as Post Message, Register and Login. These links can be set to use icons through the Label configuration. The numbers 1112-1124/1147 on the left edge of bar tell us that there are 1147 messages in this board, and the current page (p.3) is displaying #1112 to #1124. Other pages of messages can be accessed from the page drop list left to the Go button. The Search forum command allows user to find messages based on search pattern and posting time. The Overview command collapses the links, so that only the top level threads are shown. The Register command is for new users to register their names. The Login command is for users to login to the board, so they don't have to type in their names each time they post.
Below the top navigation bar, there is a survey embedded using Java(tm)script.
In the middle is the Message Display area, with the Topic lines (also called Subject lines) and Reply lines visible.
The Topic line background color and the Reply line background color have both been set to different color, providing a contrast between them.
The message lines contain various information:
Finally, at the bottom of the screen is the Forum Footer area. No changes have been made to the Forum footer area on this board.
This is just one example of how AnyBoard can be customized. With all the available AnyBoard options, the number of possible configuration styles runs into the thousands. The "look and feel" of AnyBoard is limited only by your imagination.
Clicking on the Post message link on the navigation bar brings up the post message form
If the board has registration feature turned on but the author did not go through the login process, there will be a password entry box right to the author name. If the author login first, he does not need to enter his name/password when making posts, as shown above. AnyBoard can force users to login first in order to post messages.
This board has enabled private discussion feature. If one enters a recipient name in the "Private message for" entry, then only the recipient will see this message in his/her "My Forum".
Since this board has notification enabled (only available in Gold version), there are various check boxes to allow the author to specify whether email notification is to be sent. If the author check the Email notification box right to the POST! button, an email will be sent to the board administrator. Since Support is an administrator of the board, there is also a "Notify all users" check box, if checked, every registered user would receive notification of the new message.
Also, the author can attach a file along with the message by clicking on the Browse button and selecting a file on his/her PC.
AnyBoard can be configured to allow users to rate messages. Furthermore, AnyBoard can be set to hide messages below certain rate after certain number of votes. The rate can be negative, and the range of rates is configurable, .. The rate message screen looks like,
Of course, the icons for positive and negative rates are configurable.
Note, if you do not enter a value for a field, that field won't be used in the search criteria. For example, if you only specify a date range and no value for others, the search will return all messages posted in that date range. Another example, to find out all messages that contain images, check the "Only if contain image" box and clear out all other fields.
The result from a search looks like this
Note the 1-938/938 p.A label on the navigation bar, which means it is displaying all messages.
The generic command (link) to page N is ?cmd=view_page&pgno=N&depth=d, where N is the page number, and d the link depth to show. For example, to view page 3, but only show the top message of each thread, the link is ?cmd=view_page&pgno=3&depth=1.
The message html file is laid out as follows
To be able to create new message boards via the Web, AnyBoard (tm) needs to have a Master Administrator, who has special privileges to create and delete message boards. Each message board has its own board administrator, who can configure the boards, delete or archive messages, delete or disable users, etc. AnyBoard needs one common directory to store crucial password information for Master Admin., which is called the Master Config Directory. This directory also stores user passwords if the user registration feature is enabled. You should choose a directory that is NOT accessible from the Web.
Installation procedure:
http://yoursite/cgi-bin/anyboard.cgi.
You may now proceed to create message boards.
To create new board, you need to access the CGI with the URL:
http://yoursite/cgi-bin/anyboard.cgi?cmd=init
Examples:
http://netbula.com/cgi-bin/anyboard.cgi?cmd=init (system cgi)
http://netbula.com/~ydx/cgi-bin/anyboard.cgi?cmd=init (user's private CGI)
This URL should bring you to a form with the following fields:
This form asks you for the Master Admin name and password which you have entered during installation process, plus the information for the new forum. Each new forum must be in its own directory. The most important one is the Virtual Path to the directory of the new forum.
The virtual path is the path name after the domain name in the URL. This is most important, since AnyBoard will figure out the physical path from the virtual path and create the directories for you. If the wrong virtual path is entered, it will most probably result in a directory creation error.
Examples:
If you choose the virtual path of /forum/, AnyBoard will create a forum that is accessed at http://mydomain/forum/index.html (or whatever extension you've chosen).
After entering the information, submit the form. AnyBoard will try to create the directory for the new forum. If successful, it will bring you to the Admin Login page for the new forum. If there is an error, it will display the error, which is probably due to lack of permission for the script to create directories. In that case, chmod the top directory (change the mode, or set permission).
Initially, there is no password for the forum admin, simply enter the user name you chose (leave password empty) and submit the form, and you will be brought to the administration page for the new forum.
You must now change the password for the admin immediately, then login again.
These are variables that are at the top of the script.
The top_virtual_dir is the top directory under which forums can reside, for example, if it is set to /for/, then all forums must be under /for/ virtual path.
When validate_admin_email is set to 1, a validation email with new forum password (randomly generated) is sent to the admin when a new forum is created.
Set these to appropriate values when your server (such as IIS) fails to pass the path information to the CGI script. Normally, you don't need to set these. Please see installation guide and special instructions for more details.
This allows you to change the Admin login name and the password associated with it.
This allows you to change the Moderator login name and the password associated with it. From this screen you may also select whether or not Moderators are allowed to delete users and/or messages.
The html pages, including the forum index page and individual message files are generated from an index file (.msglist) and message data files under the /postdata directory/. Sometimes, you may need to regenerate the html files. For example, when you move a forum from one server to another, the html files may have links referencing the old site, and you need to recreate the pages to match the current site. You don't need the html files under the posts directory, instead, just copy the postdata/ and archive/ directory, and you can regenerate the files under the posts directory.
AnyBoard does not regenerate individual messages by default, but you can force it to do this by checking the first box in the above figure. When you reconfigure the forum, AnyBoard only regenerates the index page, to make existing messages reflect the change you made, you need to regenerate the individual messages using this function. When you also check the "Delete all files under posts" box, all existing message html files are deleted first, this ensures that the posts/ directory is cleared up. The Date range limit the number of messages to be regenerated. For a large forum, there might be thousands of messages, regenerating all of them may take quite a while, by limiting the date range, one can choose to regenerate part of the messages.
The "Validate index" function is for verifying the consistency of the index files for the active board and archive, and it can repair the index file when you check the "remove bogus entry" box. Index corruption can occur when an abnormal condition happens on your server, such as system crash or out of disk space.
The recover function is for restore a board after a fatal operating system failure which resulted in the corruption of the index file. In this case, the index file may be totally lost, fortunately, the data files under postdata/ directory contains redundant index information, and the recover function uses this to recreate an index. Note, however, upon a recovery, the posters' IP address will be lost.
Backup uses the archive command set in the script (default is zip) to pack/compress the board files and return it to your browser, you should save this file with zip extension.
The archive function compact and move the messages to the archive directory, archived messages can't brought back to live discussion and can't be modified (at least, not from AnyBoard).
If you check the "Private messages only" box on delete, then only private
messages are selected in the deletion screen.
When delete by subject or author, you can specify optionally a match
pattern for the subject/author and a thread depth to display. For a board
with thousands of messages, it is time consuming for your browser to render
a page with large and complex structures, by setting these restrictions,
you can reduce the size of the page for the delete form.
The delete by subject form looks like this,
to delete the unwanted messages, check the boxes left to the subject, and then click the submit button (not shown). If the "include whole thread" box is checked, then the messages and their replies are all removed, otherwise, only the messages themselves are deleted. Once the form is submitted, a window pops up with the detailed information about the messages that were deleted.
The Archive message screens look similar to the figure above.
When you enable pre-moderation features (in the Forum Control configuration), all posts must be approved before showing up on the forum. An additional button, "Approve" will show up in the admin panel (you need to reload the admin panel to see it). Clicking on this button brings you to a page similar to the deletion pages, but with two choices, you can either delete or approve messages from that screen.
[画像:Approve/delete new messages in queue]
Entering "Support" in the pattern box, and click on the "Approve.." button, we get:
[画像:The Approve/Delete screen]
The delete by author form looks like this:
if you check the author's name and submit the form, all messages by that author will be permanently removed.
The delete user function removes a user's registration entry from user database, if the "Disable it" box is checked, then this user is added to the .kill file under master configuration directory and is permanently banned.
The change user's password function can set a user's password by the administrator. If the "create if not exist" box is checked, and the user does not exist, AnyBoard creates the user, this can be used by the administrator to control the registration of users. A AnyBoard forum can be setup to require user registration but does not allow user to register themselves, and the admin can use this facility to manual register users.
To add a survey, click on the "Add a survey button", a page like this shows up:
You must enter a id for the new survey, which must be alphanumeric. Here we
choose id "ab". The choices of answers are entered in the format index=answer,
one per line. The "List this survey in index" check box determines whether
the new survey is listed on the polls/index.html page. After submitting
the form, a set of Java(tm)script and HTML files are created/modified, under the
polls/ directory of the forum.
<SCRIPT SRC="http://your-site/your-forum-dir/polls/ab.js">
</SCRIPT>
If you don't see the voting booth, go to <a href="http://your-site/your-forum-dir/polls/ab.html">here</a>
Of course, the Java(tm)script only works on a Java(tm)script capable browser (such as IE3 and Netscape 3 and up), for this reason, we also added a link to the HTML survey page.
The "Send test message" function allows you to test if email will work (even for non-Gold versions).
The "View login records" function allows you to see the login activity on your forum.
Sample admin login record
The "Upload" function allows the administrator to upload files to the forum directory.
AnyBoard has a large set of configuration options, almost all these options can be set independent of each other. Therefore, the number of configuration AnyBoard can have is astronomical (2^300). The configuration is organized in the following sections.
size=-1 color="green"
#ff0000
index.shtml
"Always show the full thread"
<br>
<img src="/images/smiley.gif">
Congratulations
The administrator can configure the board by selecting one category and click on the Configure button. One can also reconfigure a forum using one or all configuration sections of a template, such as the one for AnyBoard support, included in the AnyBoard distribution.
The configurable parameters are entered in the following three types of html form entries,
For instance, a portion of the Colors configuration screen looks like this
The Mood configuration looks like
This page list all the configuration parameters, and their meaning are explained in more detail below.
(The following is not a complete list, as new features are getting added frequently)
The "Control" screen allows configuration of the following options:
When enabled, users cannot post if they do not enable cookies. AnyBoard uses cookies for several functions, including registration, counting user violations, allowing users to edit messages, tracking and exposure of posters with multiple identities, and more.
Display Posters Aliases:
By tracking the IP Address of a user, AnyBoard can determine when a user is creating multiple user accounts and "expose" the user. Tracking still occurs even if this feature is turned off.
Auto fill E-mail address:
Automatically fill in the email address for registered users when they post.
Do NOT show link to forum on login/register form:
When this is checked, there will be no link to the forum on the login and register form.
Enable user registration with name and password:
Allows users to register so they can "claim" a particular User Name. A registered user will have an (R) sign after the name.
Enforce user password registration:
This forces Users to register to be able post messages.
Enable moderation function:
Posts must be approved before showing up. When this is enabled, an additional
button, the Approve button will be displayed.
Require e-mail validation on user registration:
When enabled, an email with validation information will be sent to the user when they register. A user account is not activated until he/she accesses the activation link. You must setup the SMTP server information during installation for this to work.
CC validation e-mail to admin:
CC the validation e-mail, which contains user's password in plain text to admin.
Do not share user/password among different forums:
If unchecked, user name and password are shared among all forums, otherwise, a user has to register for each forum.
Enable user login:
Once logged in, the user does not need to enter their user name again, AnyBoard will enter it for them automatically. This can be enabled with or without tuning on the registration function.
Require user to login first:
This option forces a user to Login before they can post any messages.
Require user to login first to read message:
As it says.
Allow user to search message body:
This option allows users to do text searches on the message content and author's names. This is very handy for finding a specific post, or for finding posts on a specific subject..
List of forbidden names separated by |:
This text box is where you would the list user names that you don't want to be able to Register, Login or Post. Applies to the "Subject" or "Posted by" fields.
(For example, "Test|Make Easy Money|Make Money Fast!"
Disallow user after this many violations:
After this number of violations (using Forbidden Words), the poster will be locked out from the message board. Setting this number to nothing (leaving the field empty) will effectively turn this function off.
This number sets the maximum number of messages that will be kept. When the number of messages is greater than this number, AnyBoard will delete the excess messages automatically.
Works in conjunction with "Automatic Purge". Instead of deleting excess messages, AnyBoard will archive them.
Determines whether or not AnyBoard will record errors to a log file for later viewing.
Most UNIX servers have file-locking capability (flock). This prevents messages from being overwritten or merged if server traffic is heavy (or if many users are all posting at the same time). ALWAYS use this feature if your system supports it. AnyBoard will check for the availability of file locking and return an error if it is not available on your server.
Just what it says. Nobody can post new messages when this option is selected.
Prevents posters from replying to messages, but allows then to post a new top level message.
Shows message links linearly, rather than threaded.
This text box is where you list any words or word patterns that you don't want a user to be able to use in a post. If they do use any of these words, a configurable message is displayed, warning the user. Each time the user does this, it counts as a "violation" against them. Once the violation count is met, the user is automatically banned from the forum. NOTE: "RE" stands for "regular expression".
This text box is where you list any IP Addresses that you do not want to be able to use the forums. IP Addresses in this box will be "screened out" and will not be able to access the message board.
This is where you set the "Forbidden Words" error message you want displayed to an offending user. HTML is allowed in this text box.
Put some warning message here. Note: failed admin logins are logged.
Sets whether or not user may embed HTML code in the message body. This a very desirable feature for the advanced user, as it allows them to display images, make selected text bold or italic, etc. With this set, any legal HTML tag is allowed in the message body.
By default, when user reply to a message, AnyBoard carries the original subject over, prepended with "RE:", uncheck this box to disable this.
By default, AnyBoard does not quote the original text in the reply form, checking this box enables the quoting.
With this checked, the user is provided a text box at the bottom of the "Post Message" screen, where they may enter a "clickable" URL that will be available to anyone who reads the message. The URL could, for example, lead to the posters home page or a web site of interest.
With this checked, the user is provided a text box at the bottom of the "Post Message" screen, where they may enter a URL to an image file. Users that view this message will see the image specified in the URL.
With this checked, an additional text box appears at the bottom of the Post form, which allows a user to select an attachment file to be sent along with the message text. The uploaded file is stored in the uploads/ directory for a forum. If the attachment is a GIF/JPEG file, it will be automatically linked with a <IMG> tag.
If set, the user name on the main page will be linked to an "Edit message" page, which allows the user to go back and edit the messages that they post. This is an excellent feature for things like correcting spelling mistakes, adding additional text to the message, etc. To use this feature, you must also enable the registration feature, because the user must be authenticated to modify his/her message.
If registration is optional on your forum, checking this box disallow the messages posted by a unregistered user to be modified, even if the user register the name later.
When this is set, a registered user can delete his/her own posts.
When checked, users can fill out the Subject line without having to put any text in the message body itself. This is very handy for quick, one line replies to a message or to ask a simple question that doesn't require any explanation.
If checked, the user has the ability to make his/her message stand alone, so that others can't post a reply for it.
By default, AnyBoard rejects a post which has identical subject line with one of the last 20 posts (maybe the user posted the same message twice?). Check this allows duplicated subjects, always.
When enabled, a user can rate the messages in 5 star rating scheme. AnyBoard detects attempts by a user to rate the same article two or more times.
Don't display the average rating until this many votes have been received.
Sets how many characters maximum the Subject line can contain.
Sets how many characters maximum the user's name can be.
Sets how many characters maximum the message body can contain. Use this setting to prevent posters from pasting in 500K of text, for example.
Used for detecting "message bombing", where a malicious poster uses a program to "flood" the board by sending (for example) 1000 messages. A good base setting is in the range of 30 to 60 seconds. Set to 30 seconds, an e-mail robot will only be able to send two messages a minute.
Sets the number of seconds that 20 messages can arrive in before AnyBoard will notify you by email. This feature is used to detect a suspicious "flood" of messages that suddenly begin arriving. (From a "posting bomb", for example.)
Lets the users see how the board is configured, but does not allow them to change any of the settings.
Enter the physical location to your "Rules" file into this text box. This is the file that AnyBoard will show to new users, who must view and agree to the contents when the "email registration" feature is turned on. (For example, "No flaming", no advertising", etc.)
The path is NOT an "http:" location, but is the server's directory path to the file (for example, "/usr/home/yourdomain/newuserfaq.htm")
The following table describes the macros and their meaning:
The AnyBoard support forum's (the one used as example) navigation bar is laid out as follows.
<td>GOPAGEBTN</td>
<td bgcolor=#99ddff align=center>POSTLNK </td>
<td>CHATLNK</td></td><td>FINDLNK OVERVIEWLNK NEWESTLNK</td>
<td bgcolor=#ffffcc align=center>REGLNK LOGINLNK OPTLNK </td>
May be set to an image of your choice, a horizontal rule <HR>, a line of text, or may be left blank.
Sets how "deep" links will be displayed on the main forum page. Typical settings are from 4 to 128.
Shows the "Subject:" line in bold text so it stands out more clearly.
This makes the message link lines shorter.
Adds a small text line in the Subject line that indicates how big the message body is.
When set, a message topic has a +n sign to indicates that it has n immediate follow ups.
If checked, a registered user will have a (R) sign after their name on the front page.
Allows users to see if a particular message has an image link in it. Ref: img label in label configuration.
If checked, author's email address is not shown in the message. The email information is still captured and stored, so the user can receive notifications.
Display number of visits to each message.
Messages has more this many reads will show the number of visits in red color.
Adds an additional Navigation bar at the bottom of the screen. Mainly a convenience for users so they don't have to scroll back to the top of the page.
If unchecked, the forum name won't show up on the navigation bar.
Set the number of minutes a message is considered to be "new". Messages marked as "new" have the time and date field shown in a dark green color.
Default color for new posts are dark green, but can be set to a different color with this configuration.
Put the contents of a message and the contents of its follow-up messages into the same HTML file.
Put the contents of all messages into the main page of the message board.
The inlined message text will be indented according to its depth just like message links on the main page.
When you delete a message in the middle of a thread, you are breaking the links to any messages above or below it. The message below the now deleted one is "orphaned" and would normally become a top level message. However, when this option is enabled, the orphaned message will be placed under a "zombie parent", maintaining the threading.
Automatically make a hyper link to URLs present in the message.
If a user's PC sends a "new line" character, AnyBoard will change it to the HTML "<BR>" tag. This box would normally be left "checked".
Pushes replies to a message "in" from the left edge so they can be easily distinguished from the parent message This box would normally be left "checked".
With the message links area in percentage or absolute value.
The following items are all color selections, their meaning should be obvious. All are set with an RGB-hex format number tag, such as "#00FF00" for pure blue, or "#FF0000" for pure red.
Play with these settings to give your message board a unique look, with your own personalized color scheme. Remember, that in general, dark text on a light background is easiest on the eyes. Try to avoid garish or contrasting color combinations that will give your users headaches.
Background color of next topic header (This one may be set to empty)
Background color of topic header
Text color of topic header
Text color of next topic header
Background color of follows:
Background color of follows of next topic
Background color of the navigation bar
background color of the follow up links in message
Background color of the post message form
background color of the command forms
Forum header html, starting from <html>
Html between top navigation bar and message list
Html between message list and bottom navigation bar (if present)
Forum footer html
Message header html, starting from <body>
Message footer html, ending with </body> </html>:
Post form header html, starting from <body>
Post footer html, ending with </body> </html>
Separator between message header and message body: (Typically set to a horizontal rule <HR> or to nothing.)
Delimiter at the end of message body
Appears at the bottom of the message text. This is often set to a horizontal rule <HR>.
Controls the maximum number of links that will fit on the Main Forum page. Older messages go on separate pages, accessed from the "Previous" link.
As it says.
Attributes of the frameset. Default is COLS="40%, *", for a two column frameset. Change COLS to ROWS for horizontal frames.
URL of the welcome page
Url of the right or bottom frame. Default is about:blank.
Suppose you enter the font attribute as
size=-1 face="Arial"
AnyBoard will wrap the affected text with the tag
<font size=-1 face="Arial"> </font>
The following font settings are available
Any of these labels may also be set to display a graphical image (like a button) by using the <IMG SRC=...> tag, referencing an existing image file on your server. The image URL you provide should be an absolute URL to the image file, for example http://site/images/image.gif or simply "/images/image.gif".
Alternatively, labels and their associated links may be hidden by simply deleting the text in the corresponding text field.
"(N)" next to a command label indicates that this command link appears (or could appear) on the Navigation bar.
"(P)" next to a command label indicates that this command link appears (or could appear) in the Post Message screen.
"(R)" next to a command label indicates that this command link appears
(or could appear) in the Read Message screen.
Sends an email to the addresses in the "List of e-mail addresses" text box every time a new message is posted. This can be useful when your message board is for technical support (notify support), or for work discussions (notify people in a mailing list).
Gives the user the option of whether or not AnyBoard will send e-mail notification. This option is only seen when e-mail notification is turned on.
As it says.
When selected, the entire message is put into the notification e-mail that is sent.
When enabled, lets posters know their message has been delivered.
Enter the e-mail addresses to be notified in this text box. (For example: joesmith@somedomain.com,billjones@anotherdomain.com, programmers@internal). Entries must have a comma separating them or no mail will be sent.
Notification e-mails will have this as the return address. This is also used as the FROM address of validation e-mails to the users when e-mail registration is turned on.
When a user posts a new message, he/she can check a box to indicate that e-mail notification of replies to the message is requested. Note, if the user is registered, she/he does not need to input an email address, as AnyBoard can take the email from his/her profile, however, if an email address is specified in the post, it is the one that will be used.
This allows a replying user to optionally notify the author of the message which is being replied to.
SMTP server for sending email (override script setting):
This allows the admin to specify a SMTP server name different from the one set in the script.
For instance, if you want to add SSI (server side includes) tags into the pages, you should use shtml for the file extension.
Resets the message board with the stock options.
This button does just what you'd expect- it deletes a user account, when the Disable box is checked, the user is banned forever. Note: This feature is disabled in the distribution version of AnyBoard.
This allows you to view the user list, you can enter an optional regular expression to display only users that match the pattern.
This option allows you to selectively delete messages based on the Subject line, reply depth, the date of post, IP Address or author. If "Subject" is selected, all current messages will be shown, you can limit the number of messages displayed by supplying an optional match pattern and an optional limit for the depth of the links.
Allows you to archive all messages that meet the criteria selected, such as a specific thread, or by date, IP Address or author. Note: This feature is disabled in the distribution version of AnyBoard.
In some case, you need to manually regenerate the forum from data and index files. For example, when you change an inline option, you need to regenerate both the main page and individual messages html files.
The indexes from which main page is generated are stored in a separate file, this function allows you to regenerate the index from the individual data files. For example, if you had a operating system crash and the index is lost, you can recover using this function.
Please note, some of the features are disabled in the AnyBoard distribution version downloadable from the Netbula site. The rating, moderation, delete user, and archive functions are not available.
Total access, total control, total configuration, total integrity... for both administrators and users.
Perl 5 and http server compliant to the CGI standard.
Note: IIS is not compliant to the CGI standard, we have a special
code to handle it.
IIS has a broken CGI implementation, the normal installation procedure won't work for IIS. Follow the IIS installation instructions.
AnyBoard is designed to be robust under race conditions. In addition, on systems with flock, AnyBoard uses flock to protect all critical sections. With our superior design, even on systems which do not have flock, the risk of corrupting the whole message board is also zero (though individual messages may get corrupted). AnyBoard has built-in triple fault tolerance and error recovery. Even if you delete the crucial index files by accident, it can still recover.
AnyBoard is designed and written by software engineers who have in-depth knowledge of operating systems, networking, and Perl 5. It does things as fast as possible. Firstly, don't be scared by the size of the AnyBoard script. When AnyBoard is executed, not all of its near 5000 lines of code is compiled by Perl. Instead, the code is compiled as needed. You can time the compilation time by doing a dry run of the script on the command line, it is fast. Secondly, AnyBoard uses very efficient algorithms to do things.
Starting from version 6.2, AnyBoard is mod_perl compatible. mod_perl allows the perl script to be compiled once and reused by the http server, thus greatly improve performance. Note, however, most ISPs do not provide mod_perl support.
AnyBoard uses the UNIX password checking mechanism: passwords are one way encrypted. All vital operations are authenticated with user names and passwords before they are performed. Passwords are sent using a cookie, which makes the authentication process transparent. The cookie is destroyed upon the end of your browser session.
You are strongly discouraged from doing that. 1) Almost every aspect
of AnyBoard can be configured from the admin page. 2) Editing the code
can easily break the program.
The internal server error could be caused by syntax error in the script or missing modules. Make sure that Perl 5 is used and that there are no simple typos in editing the script. If you have command line access at the server, run the script on the command line, and see what errors Perl reports.
Netbula can install the script for you at a small cost (to be determined).
This problem is caused by the fact that your system's CGI is running as a user different from your ftp/shell login. To solve the problem, write, install and then run a one line CGI script to change the permissions. Example:
#!/bin/sh
chmod 777 a_file_or_directory
"http://site/cgi-bin/anyboard.cgi/dir1/dir2/?cmd=log ?"
Here, the /dir1/dir2/ is merely an additional parameter passed to the script. It is called PATH_INFO. AnyBoard uses this to identify different message boards.
The exclusion pattern must be a Perl regular expression. If you want to disallow a list of words, you must separate them by |. You can use other Perl expressions that will allow you to exclude groups of words without entering each one. \sex.* for instance, will exclude sex and any word starting with it, like sexy, sexual, etc.
AnyBoard only regenerates the main forum page on configuration changes. You need to let it regenerate forum pages AND individual messages.
It means that AnyBoard will lock out any user that has used banned words as specified in the forbidden words list, after a predetermined number of times. You can simply set that number to a large number or leave the field blank to turn it off, in effect.
AnyBoard will try to see if it is possible to enable file locking, and will return an error message if it can't. If it can't, you're probably missing the "Fctnl" module. Ask your system administrator to fix or install it, as this is a standard module on most UNIX systems. You should ALWAYS use file locking if it is available on your server.
NO! AnyBoard will not crash. Without flock, it is possible that the some individual html files or even the main forum page get corrupted, but that is not the end of the world, since these files are merely products from the data files. You can regenerate them easily: just login to the forum and click the regenerate button.
AnyBoard only regenerate the main forum page on configuration changes. You need to let it regenerate forum pages AND individual messages.
When you enable the moderating feature, a new message is placed in a queue for review before showing up in the message board, the administrator can then click the "Approve" button to view and approve the pending messages, or click the "Delete" button to delete unwanted messages.
When you enable the "email validation on registration" feature, an email will be sent to the user with a validation link. The user needs to click on the link to activate his or her account. After the user clicks on the link, they will be taken to a page that has the "Rules file" in it. These are the conditions for participating on the board (whatever you want them to agree to). The user must check a box indicating that he or she accepts the rules, and only then can the account be activated.
If you do not want the email validation/activation, then this will not come into play (default).
It can be a text file, or a file containing html tags, but not the <html>...<body> header and the corresponding closing tags. AnyBoard simply copies the whole file and displays it in an html page.
1) check if Socket module is there.
2) check SMTP server setting
3) check Notifier email address, SMTP servers do not allow email to be sent from an outsider.
4) If got "550, relaying denied", ask your sys admin for help...
You must specify an absolute URL (start from / ) for the image.
Use the message header configuration. Since it starts from <body> you can specify everything like color, font, background image, link color, etc. The same applies to the main page and the post message form.
Set the minimum interval between two posts from the same IP address to some number, for example, 30 seconds. If set to 30 seconds, a posting robot can only post 2 messages a minute. You can also let AnyBoard send an alarm e-mail if new messages arrive too fast.
You can ban users by user ID or IP address.
Those are the names he or she used in the past. You can disable this by unselecting the "Display aliases" feature.
In the Configure Label section, set the labels to a <img src="..."> tag.
In the configure Label section, set the "Admin" label to empty.
You DON'T need to go through the installation procedure again. Simply edit the new anyboard.cgi file to set the few variables (perl path, master_cfg dir, etc.) specific to your configuration and replace the existing anyboard.cgi with the new one.
The configuration is stored in a file named .forum_cfg under the forum directory. AnyBoard tries to maintain backward compatibility as much as possible, therefore the configuration will be mostly kept on upgrade. To be sure, backup your configuration files, and test any upgrades with a test board before upgrading your existing forums.
Simply copy the existing forum (with all its sub directories) to another directory and regenerate the forum main page for the new forum. You can do this by logging in to the new forum using the URL
http://site/cgi-bin/anyboard.cgi/new_forum_virtual_path/?cmd=log
then configure the forum name. The forum pages will be regenerated.
Copy the .forum_cfg file to the master configuration directory, rename it to a file with extension .conf. For instance, if you name it blue-fancy.conf, then blue-fancy will show up as a stock configuration for all forums to choose.
postdata/: directory that keeps the posted data, from which html pages are generated.
posts/: directory that contains the html pages for individual posts, these are generated from data files, therefore, you can delete all the files in this directory and have anyboard reproduce the forum main page and individual pages.
archive/: directory that contains the archived pages. The archived pages no longer have their corresponding data files, and one cannot respond to posts in the archives. If you delete the files in archive, they are gone forever, unlike those in the posts/ directory, which can be regenerated.
uploads/: directory that holds the uploaded files.
They are stored in the .fYz directory under the master config directory or the forum directory, depending on whether passwords are shared among forums. By default, there are 32 password files, a hashing algorithm is used to decide which file is used to store a user's password and profile. This hashing is needed to reduce the size of each password file and improve performance. For example, if a forum has 3200 users, then each file would contain 100 entries only.
Don't panic. You can manually edit the .forum_cfg file to nullify the admin password. Afterwards, you can login (without a password) and then add a password for admin. (more detailed instruction will be provided on request).
Most web servers provide you with the mechanism to protect a page or directory. Consult your web server manual or service provider.
Please visit http://netbula.com/anyboard/license.html for details.
*The license terms listed above may change without notice, always check our web page for most recent information.
To obtain the Gold or Platinum Editions of AnyBoard, you must register and purchase the respective license. Only the Silver version can be downloaded directly.
In all cases, the licensee must retain the program's CGI file base name
(anyboard) to allow users to identify the program.
Netbula is technological leader in RPC (Remote Procedure Call) development tools for distributed computing, its flagship products are PowerRPC for UNIX and Windows NT/95, ONC RPC for Win32, and ORPC for Java(tm). Its customers include enterprises such as CompuServ, Fujitsu, Nokia, Sony and Tektronix. Netbula has strong technical capabilities in areas of operating system,, networking, compiler, and general software development in C++/C and PERL. AnyBoard and AnyEMail are also important Internet products for the company.
