Global Settings Manager
The Global Settings Manager admin control panel allows administrators to alter the various system settings of the forum. Pay careful attention to what you are doing while making changes on this control panel, since it is possible to break your forum by entering wrong values in certain places.
Due to the importance of this control panel there is basic help for every option on the control panel itself.
The title of the forum. This title will appear inside the forum header and HTML <title> tag.
Description of the forum. This description will appear inside the forum and HTML header (description meta tag).
This toggle shows you whether or not your forum is enabled as well as allows you to enable and disable your forum.
When your forum is disabled the users will see the message you put inside Disabled Reason when they try to access any of the forum's pages.
When your forum is disabled this message, which can contain HTML will be displayed to anyone trying to access the forum's pages.
This toggle allows you to enable or disable new user registration.
This is the base URL of your forum. Do not alter this option unless you are 100% certain of what you are doing.
The location on the disk where the forum's images are stored. If you change this directory make sure the webserver has write permissions to it. Safe Mode users also must make sure the directory is owned by the same account as the webserver.
The directory where the forum's internal data is being stored. If you change this directory make sure the webserver has write permissions to it. Safe Mode users also must make sure the directory is owned by the same account as the webserver.
The IP or UNIX Domain Socket of your database server. We recommend using the UNIX Domain Socket since it is much faster then TCP/IP.
If you decide to specify a UNIX Domain Socket you need to put ':' in front of it. For example: :/tmp/mysql.sock.
The login name for the database you intend to store forum data in.
The password for the database you intend to store forum data in.
TIP: You need to change the password in the forum's Global Settings Manager BEFORE changing it on the database (i.e. MySQL). Alternatively, administrators can change it directly in the forum's GLOBALS.php file.
The name of the database you intend to use to store your data in.
Use persistent connections when connecting to a database. This is a performance enchanting feature which if enabled will make your forum somewhat faster. Improvement is the result of PHP not needing to open a new database connection each time a script is executed, but rather use an existing connection instead.
This option does have it's drawbacks, on forked web servers such as Apache, every Apache child will create a persistent socket for itself. This can potentially exhaust number of allowed database connections if the number of Apache children with open connections to database exceed the allowed number of database connections, thus preventing topics without an open connection to connect to the database server.
Use temporary SQL tables to optimize some operations (dependent on the ability to create temp tables).
If enabled, regular and private messages will be stored inside a database. This is not recommended for performance reasons!
Whether or not forum members can send private messages to one another.
How many file attachments a user can attach to each private message. Setting this option to 0, will disable file attachments for private messages.
The maximum size, in bytes, of the file(s) a user can attach to their private messages.
PHP has it's own limitation on the size of the file uploads, via the 'upload_max_filesize' php.ini setting. If the php.ini value is smaller, then the value set in the forum, then the php.ini will be used to limit the file uploads.
Whether or not smilies/emoticons in private messages will be converted to their graphical equivalents.
This option allows you to limit how many images can users include inside their private messages.
This limit will only work if the tag style is FUDcode, won't work if you allowed your visitors to use HTML.
What kind of text formatting options are available to the user.
- FUDcode Users can use FUDcode styling tags to format their messages.
- HTML The users can use HTML inside their messages.
- NONE only plain text is allowed.
The maximum amount of data, in bytes, the users can store inside their private message folders. This does not include the space taken up by the file attachments attached to private messages.
The maximum number of bytes of private messages that a moderator can have at a time.
The maximum number of bytes of private messages that an administrator can have at a time.
The path of cookie used by the forum. Outside of this path the cookie will not be accessible.
By default the cookie path is the path to the forum. For example, if your forum URL is "http://mydomain.com/forum/" the cookie path will be "/forum/". If you wanted your entire site to be able to access the forum's cookies, change the value of this option to "/".
The domain name for which a cookie is being set, the domain MUST be the same as the one used to access the forum, as specified in the WWW_ROOT option. For example, if your site is at http://www.mysite.com/forum/, this would be .mysite.com.
For browser compatibility this values MUST have no less the two '.' in it.
Do not alter this option unless you are 100% certain of what you are doing. A minuscule error here can have not so minuscule side effects such as preventing you from reaching the admin log in screen, after which you will only be able to change settings in the GLOBALS.php file.
The name of the cookie that will be used by the forum. By default a random value is picked for this option to prevent conflicts with any other cookies you may already have. In the very unlikely event that you already have a cookie with such a name, change the value of this option to something else.
This is the period of time, in seconds after which the browser will remove the cookie. The user who's cookie expired will then need to re-login in to the forum.
By default the cookies are set to expire 7 days they are set. Each time the user access the forum the cookie is renewed for another 7 days.
If cookies are not used or are not available sessions will be used instead. They work by passing the information normally stores in a cookie via GET/POST across the forum. Each time a user access' a page their session gets renewed.
This option defines the amount of time, in seconds after which the session expires and a user will be required to re-login. For security reasons do not set this to a high number.
By default, sessions will expire after 30 minutes.
Allow session ids to be passed not only via cookies but, via URL variables.
Make the cookie last only for as long as the browser window is open. If a security is a major concern, turn this option on.
Always check to make sure that the referring URL is on the same domain as the forum.
Whether or not to validate session's against user IP While this may increase security it will cause annoyances for users who's IP address frequently changes as they will need to re-login each time their IP changes.
