SMF2.0:Posts and Topics

The Posts and Topics area of the Administration Center is used for editing various settings relating to posts and topics and includes items such as configuring bulletin board code and censored words on your forum that are changed into something else when posted.


 * Post Settings - The Post Settings page deals with configuring settings specific to making posts as well as modifying posts.
 * Bulletin Board Code - On the Bulletin Board Code page you can configure what bbcode tags can be used by your members as well as configuring a few basic settings regarding functionality of the bbcode.
 * Censored Words - On the Censored Words page you can add words to your forum that will be censored, as well as what text the censored words should be replaced with. You can edit existing ones to meet your needs and configure a couple of basic settings that involve censoring words. There is also a field where you can test words to see how they will look after they are censored.
 * Topic Settings - The Topic Settings page deals with settings specific to how topics of your forum are handled. You can set how many topics to be shown per page in this section as well as what makes a topic "hot" and several other various settings.

Post Settings
This page of the administration center contains some settings regarding the posting of messages on your forum.

Enable/Disable Settings

 * Remove nested quotes when posting - This will only show the quote of the post in question, not any quoted posts from that post.
 * Embed flash into posts - This option will allow your users to use Flash directly inside their posts, just like images. This could pose a security risk.
 * Enable spell checking - Enable spell checking. You MUST have the pspell library installed on your server and your PHP configuration set up to use the pspell library.
 * Disable WYSIWYG editor - This setting will disallow all users from using the WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") editor on the post page.

Numerical Input Settings

 * Maximum allowed post size - Set the maximum characters you wish to allow in a post.
 * Break up words with more letters than - This option breaks words longer than a certain length into pieces so they do not disturb the forum's layout. (as much...) This option should not be set to a value under 40
 * Posts to show on topic summary - This allows you to set the number of previous posts shown in the topic summary at the reply screen.

Time Related Settings

 * Time required between posts from the same IP - Here you can select the amount of time that must pass between postings. This can be used to stop people from "spamming" your forum by limiting how often they can post.
 * Courtesy edit wait time - Number of seconds allowed for a post to be edited before logging the last edit date.
 * Maximum time after posting to allow edit - Number of minutes allowed to pass before a user can no longer edit a post they have made. Set to 0 disable.  Note: This will not effect any user who has permission to edit other peoples posts. 

Bulletin Board Code
Allowed Tags:
 * Enable bulletin board code (BBC) - Selecting this option will allow your members to use Bulletin board Code (BBC) throughout the forum, allowing users to format their posts with images, text formatting and more.
 * Enable basic HTML in posts - This will allow the posting of some basic HTML tags:
 * Automatically link posted URLs - Check this if you would like posted urls to automatically be posted as a link with out having to format it in tags.
 * Enabled BBC tags - Check the bbcode tags that you want to allow members to use in their posts.

Censored Words
This page will let you manage the censored words of your forum. On this page you will see a place to enter the word you want to censor and another to enter as the replacement of that word when somebody types that word in a post.

There are also two checkboxes, one to check whole words only and the other to ignore the case.

You can test the censored word in the bottom box. Enter the word you have censored and click Test. It should show you the new replacement word in the same place.

Topic Settings

 * Enable sticky topics - Stickies are topics that stay above all of the other topics regardless of the last post made in them. They are usually used for important messages. By default, only Global Moderators, Local Moderators and administrators can sticky topics but you can change this with the use of the permission system found in the admin panel.
 * Enable participation icons - This shows a little icon on the topics the user has posted in.
 * Time before topic is warned as old on reply - If this option is enabled a warning will be displayed to the user when attempting to reply to a topic which has not had any new replies for the amount of time, in days, specified by this setting. Set this setting to 0 to disable the feature.
 * Number of topics per page in the message index - Enter the number for how many topics you want displayed per page in a board
 * Number of posts per page in a topic page - Enter the number for how many posts you want displayed per page in a topic
 * Number of posts for a hot topic - The number of posts for a topic to be labeled as a hot topic, thus distinguishing it from other topics. If this number of posts is reached, the hot topic icon will be displayed in the message index next to the topic.
 * Number of posts for a very hot topic - The number of posts for a topic to be labeled as very hot topic, thus distinguishing it from other topics. If this number of posts is reached, the very hot topic icon will be displayed in message index next to the topic.
 * Max topic size to show "All" posts - Set this to the maximum number of posts a topic can have to show the all link. Setting this lower than "Maximum messages to display in a topic page" will simply mean it never gets shown, and setting it too high could slow down your forum.
 * Disable user defined topic/message count per page  - Select this to prevent users from customising the amount of messages and topics to display per page on the Message Index and Topic Display page respectively.
 * Enable previous/next topic links - This will show links to the next and previous topics in relation to the current topic a member is viewing.