4. What are the system
requirements?
Software: Perl 5.004 and up and http server
compliant to the CGI standard, including Apache server,IIS and Netscape
server. Hardware: 300MHZ and up CPU (Intel or AMD), 64MB ram minimum.
5. I am using Windows
NT and IIS server? Does AnyBoard support them?
Yes. However, for IIS server you alwyas need to set the $fic_top_url
and $fix_top_dir variables and set $no_pathinfo to 1.
6. How did you make it
reliable?
When two or more users are trying to post
messages at the same time, they will be updating the main forum page
simultaneously. If this is not handled properly, the message board
will be corrupted. Message boards like WWWBoard suffer from such problems.
Whenever two people are modifying the WWWBoard at roughly the same time,
the whole board will be corrupted and the information on the board becomes
inconsistent or totally lost.
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.
7. How do you make
it fast?
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 16,000
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.
8. How do you make
it secure?
AnyBoard uses the UNIX password checking mechanism: passwords are
one-way encrypted. All vital operations are authenticated with username
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.
9. I want to edit the
script to change some look & feel, can I do that?
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.
10. How do I report
a problem?
If you are reporting a problem to tech support, don't just say "
it does not work", you need to provide information such as the
operating system name, http server software name, perl version, the
detailed description of the problem, the error messages you got. Questions
to support without any specific information is useless and will be simply
discarded. If you are a completely novice, you should get your sys admin
to help you , or you can purchase the installation package and we will
install the software for you.
11. I installed AnyBoard,
but got internal server error from my http server.
The internal server error could be caused
by syntax error in the final 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. The error can also occur
when the web server is heavily loaded and low on resource.
Netbula can install the script for you
at a small cost (see order form).
12. What is the meaning
of the URL 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.
If $no_pathinfo is set to 1 (e.g, for
IIS servers), then the equivalent URL of the above is
http://site/cgi-bin/anyboard.cgi?fvp=/dir1/dir2&cmd=log
13. How do I setup a
list of forbidden words or names?
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. Never put a | at the begining of the end of a pattern,
it will cause the pattern to match anything.
14. I changed the
inline message options in the Presentation settings, but I can't access
the old posts.
AnyBoard only regenerates the main forum
page on configuration changes. You need to let it regenerate forum pages
AND individual messages.
15. What does "Require
posters to send Cookies" actually do? I know what cookies are,
but what purpose are they used for with AnyBoard?
When enabled, people can't post if they
do not enable cookies. AnyBoard uses a cookie for several functions,
registration, editing, exposure of multiple identities, and more.
16. Regarding "Disallow
user after this many violations"- What exactly is a violation?
Can this be turned off?
It means 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 to
turn it off.
17. How can I tell if
my system can use the "Enable file locking" feature?
AnyBoard will try to see if it is possible
to enable it. If it can't, you are probably missing the Fctnl module
and need to ask your admin to fix it, as this is standard on most UNIX
systems.
18. If my system does
not have flock or I do not enable flock, will AnyBoard crash?
NO! AnyBoard will not crash. Without flock,
it is possible that the some individual html files or even the main
forum page can get corrupted, but that is not the end of the world,
since these file are merely products from the data files. You can regenerate
them easily; just login to the forum and do any configure operation
(you don't need to change anything, just submit one configure form),
the main page will be regenerated.
19. Regarding "Physical
path (not URL) to the rules file"- What is a rules file? What is
it for and what does it do?
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, a page will show up with the rules
file, which are the conditions for participating on the board (whatever
you want them to agree to). The user needs to 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).
20. What should the
format of the rules file be?
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.
21. AnyBoard can't
send email notifications, it got error XXX.
1) check if Socket module is there.
2) check SMTP server setting
3) check Notifier email address, some SMTP servers do not allow email
to be sent from an outsider.
4) If got "550, relaying denied", ask your sys admin
for help...
If you do not have a direct access to
a SMTP server, you can try using the sendmail command. There are variables
in the script to switch to using sendmail.
22. What does "Adopt
orphan message" mean? What does it do?
When you delete a message in the middle
of a thread, you are breaking the links. The message below the now deleted
one is orphaned and will become a top level message. However, when this
option is enabled, the orphaned message will be placed under a zombie
parent, maintaining the threading.
23. In "Overview"
mode, the background image does not appear as it does in "Newest"
mode where you see all the messages. Is there a way to set this?
You must specify an absolute URL (start
from / ) for the image.
24. When reading the
actual messages, is there a way to set the background image or color
of these pages?
Use the message header configuration.
Since it starts from <body> you can specify everything like color,
font, background image, link color, etc. You can even use different
styles to do it. The same applies to the main page and the post message
form.
25.How do I detect a
posting bomb?
Set the minimum interval between two posts
from the same IP address to some bigger number, for example, 30 seconds,
then 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.
26. How do I ban a user?
You can ban users by userid, IP address
pattern, full or partail domain name or by cookie track. You can very
effectively ban a user by employing these banning methods together.
27. What are the names
shown in parentheses after the poster's name?
Those are the names he or she used in
the past. You can disable this by unselecting the "Display aliases"
feature.
28. How do I use image
icons for the labels (such as Post Message)?
In the configure Label section, set the
labels to a <img src="..."> tag.
29. How do I remove
the "Admin" link on the front page?
You edit the layout template of the navigation
bar and remove the ADMLNK macro.
30. Where is the configuration
stored?
The configuration is stored in a file
named .forum_cfg under the forum directory. This and only this file
determines the look & feel and policies of the forum. Therefore,
if you copy one forum's .forum_cfg file to another forum, the other
forum will look identical to the first one. If you have settings you
want to keep, simply copy the .forum_cfg and place it in the new forum
directories you create. The new forum(s) will then have the same settings
as your present one.
31. How do I upgrade
to a new version of AnyBoard?
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.
32. When I upgrade AnyBoard,
does the forum configuration remain unchanged?
AnyBoard tries to maintain backward compatibility
as much as possible, therefore the configuration will be mostly kept
on upgrade. To be sure, test any upgrades with a test board before upgrading
your existing forums.
33. I created a forum
with all the settings I want. How do I duplicate it instead of creating
new forums afresh?
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.
34. How do I make
my cool configuration show up as a optional setting for other forums?
Copy the .forum_cfg file to the master configuration directory,
rename it to a file with extenstion .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.
35. Can you explain
the purposes of the directories for a forum?
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.
36. Where are passwords
stored?
They are stored in the .fYz directory
under the master config directory or the .fYz directory under the board
directory, depending on the share password among boards option, if passwords
are not shared then the one under the board directory is used. 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.
37. I lost the admin
password, what can I do?
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).
38. I click the "Reconfigure
with default setting" button by accident, can't login as admin
anymore.
All your settings are lost, the default
administrator login is "admin" and there is no password.
39. How do I make file
X (or directory X) inaccessible from the Internet?
Most web servers provide you with the
mechanism to protect a page or directory. Consult your web server manual
or service provider.
40. How can I change
the fonts used on the pages?
In the Configure->Fonts section you can set the fonts for various
parts of the forum.
41. There's a feature
I'd like to see in AnyBoard. What do I do?
Please tell us about it. It may be an
undocumented feature and we can tell you how to use it. If not, you
will find us very receptive to new ideas and features. AnyBoard is the
outstanding program that it is because we listen to users and administrators
and have incorporated many of their suggestions. We are eager to hear
your suggestions and may adopt them as well.
42. What are the common
URLs in AnyBoard?
Login master admin panel: http://site/cgi-dir/anyboard.cgi?cmd=admin
Login forum at /dir1/dir2: http://site/cgi-dir/anyboard.cgi/dir1/dir2/?cmd=log
or if $no_pathinfo is set,
http://site/cgi-dir/anyboard.cgi?fvp=/dir1/dir2&cmd=log
URL of the lead page:
http://site/cgi-dir/anyboard.cgi?cmd=ablist
43.
What should I put for the forbidden word patterns (and other patterns)?
These patterns must be PERL regular experssions. It is important to
remember that this is different from the wild cards used on UNIX and
DOS command lines. If you use * incorrectly, you may run into severe
problems, such as everything becomes forbidden. The following are the
basic rules:
. macthes any single character except
new line
* means zero or more ocurrance of preceding character or pattern
+ means one or more occurance of preceding character or pattern
| alternatives
To match a * character, you must write \*
44.How do I
ban a user?
You can use the
bocked IPs and domains to ban users.
First, never put
| at the begining or end of the pattern, | should be only in between
two patterns. If you say "|206", it means nothing or 206, which causes
it to match anything. To ban all IPs from 206.96.*.* You can just put
206\.96\. The pattern means anything contains "206.96.", try not to
use *s, as it's trciky to get them right.
To be more accurate, you can put ^206\.96\. here ^ means the begining
of something, so the pattern would only match IPs begining with 206.96
You can also ban
by domain, suppose your user comes from *.someisp.com Just enter "someisp.com"
into the forbidden domain list, everyone from that isp will be banned.
But that's a crude way to ban someone.
To ban many IP patterns,
enter something like "206\.96|206\.95|206\.94", which bans
anything from 206.96.*.*, 206.95.*.* or 206.94.*.*
If you go to delete
the message, you will be for each post there is something like: 970474783.045a6311
This is a cookie track for the PC the user is using. You can enter this
track string into the box for "Delete user ____ ban it X" on the admin
panel, check the ban it box, and click on the "Delete user" button,
then only this user is banned. For more control, you should enforce
registration.
45. .I switched to one of the styles
come with AnyBoard package, but the image links are broken, is this
a bug?
Only the built-in style has valid image URLs which point to images
on icon.anyboard.net. The image URLs of other styles point to images
contained mostly images in the anyboard_doc.zip file, you must install
those images and adjust the URL accordingly using the configuration
tool on the admin panel, most of the images URL are set in the label
and emoticon sections of the configuration.
46. How do I convert from another board?
AnyBoard uses a standard file format, MIME. The spefication of the
format is at http://netbula.com/anyboard/abformat.html.
A converter for wwwboard has been developed, it is a rather straightforward
matter to write converters for other forums, using the API in that wwwboard
converter.
47. Is it possible to setup a completely
private forum?
Yes. AnyBoard can set be set to store all files off the web directory
tree. By setting the $off_webroot variable to 1, and set the fix_top_dir
to somewhere not in the web directory, and enable require login to read
feature, one has to login to see the forum index page and individual
messages.
48.My server time
is off, how do I adjust it to my time zone?
There is time offset setting in Configure->Style sectio of AnyBoard.
You can enter positive or negative values to adjust the time display.
You can enter decimal numbers, so even time drift on the server can
be corrected.
49. What are the
common problems with running Anyboard under Win32?
*) If you are running IIS, then you should set the no_pathinfo
variable to 1, and set the fix_ variables.
*) If you are running Apache for Win32, then you should know Apache
use the #! for CGI scripts, just like UNIX.
*) Your PERL may be missing some core functions, such as alarm(), crypt
and flock(), you must delete the lines which contain the unimplemented
functions for AnyBoard to run.
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