SMF1.1:Features and Options

The Features and Options section of the Administration Center is the section for editing core forum related settings that help shape the core elements of how you want your forum to behave. Many common features that perhaps are not specific enough to have their own section appear throughout the pages in this section.

There are several tabs in this section of the Administration Center:

[[Core]] [Default] - A newcomer or quick approach to enabling and disabling certain "Core" features of your forum.
[[Options]] - Some important settings can be configured in here, much of the settings are miscellaneous, but some of the settings deal with numbers and how certain numbers are to be formatted, as well as the setting for allow guests to browse your forum at all and whether members can select their own language to use on your forum.
[[Security]] - On the Security page you can configure settings that directly relate to the security of your forum. Settings include whether to allow email addresses to be viewable, whether to allow the reporting of personal messages along with other personal message security options, as well as whether to log errors that come up when viewing the forum.
[[Layout]] - The Layout page has settings specific to the layout of your forum, such as whether to show the "Go Up" and "Go Down" links inside of topics and whether to show "Today" and "Yesterday" in replace of the actual date when those conditions are true.
[[Karma]] - The Karma page has settings specific to the "Karma" feature of the forum. You can disable karma and apply some restrictions to its usage such as how many posts you need to change someone's karma (positive or negative) and how long you have to wait in between changing two different member's karmas.
[[Moderation]] - The Moderation page has settings specific to the warning system of the forum, such as what to do when a user reaches a certain warning level.
[[Signatures]] - The Signatures page allows you to apply whatever restrictions you want to what members can and cannot have in their signatures. You can configure appropriate dimension restrictions to the signature as well as control what bbcode can be used inside of signatures.
[[Profile Fields]] - The Signatures page allows you to add custom profile fields to your forum. You can also control whether the built in profile fields are to be shown on the registration page and whether they are active at all.
[[Log Pruning]] - The Log Pruning page allows you to configure the pruning of old logs from your forum. Logs include the moderation and forum error log among a few others.

General

This article needs some work for the following reason: Expand: Enable buddy/ignore lists; Server timezone; Enable who's online list
This template may be removed when cleanup is complete.

Poll mode - This selects whether polls are enabled or not. If polls are disabled, any existing polls will be hidden from the Topic listing. You can choose to continue to show the regular Topic without their polls by selecting "Show Existing Polls as Topics". To choose who can Post polls, view polls, and similar, you can allow and disallow those permissions. Remember this if polls are not working.
Allow guests to browse the forum - If checked, guests will have the privilege of browsing your forum. Otherwise, only registered users will be allowed to browse your Forum and when a guests trys to access the Forum they will see a login screen and a note that the Forum is only for registered members.
Enable buddy/ignore lists -
Allow users to edit their displayed name - SMF gives you the ability to use another name for a user. It is called the display name. So user John could have his name displayed to others as SMF lover in various parts of the forum. The name is edited from a user's profile.
Allow non-administrators to hide their online status - With this option enabled, all members will be able to hide their online status from other users (except from administrators). If disabled, only users who can moderate the Forum can hide their presence. Note that disabling this option will not change any existing member's status - it just stops them from hiding themselves in the future.
Enable custom titles - Switching Custom Titles on will allow members with the relevant permission to create a special title for themselves. This will be shown underneath the Display name in posts made by that member.
For example:
Jeff
Cool Guy
Default personal text - Sets the default text a user will have as their "personal text." This will be shown underneath the avatar.
Search engine friendly URLs - This changes the format of URLs a little, so search engines will like them better. They will look like index.php/topic,1.html.
Meta keywords associated with forum - These keywords are sent in the output of every page to indicate to search engines (etc) the key content of your site. They should be a comma separated list of words, and should not use HTML.
Default time format - You have the power to adjust how the time and date look for yourself. There are a lot of little letters, but it's quite simple. The conventions follow PHP's strftime function and are described as below (more details can be found at php.net).
The following characters are recognized in the format string:
%a - abbreviated weekday name
%A - full weekday name
%b - abbreviated month name
%B - full month name
%d - day of the month (01 to 31)
%D* - same as %m/%d/%y
%e* - day of the month (1 to 31)
%H - hour using a 24-hour clock (range 00 to 23)
%I - hour using a 12-hour clock (range 01 to 12)
%m - month as a number (01 to 12)
%M - minute as a number
%p - either "am" or "pm" according to the given time
%R* - time in 24 hour notation
%S - second as a decimal number
%T* - current time, equal to %H:%M:%S
%y - 2 digit year (00 to 99)
%Y - 4 digit year
%Z - time zone or name or abbreviation
%% - a literal '%' character
* Does not work on Windows-based servers.
Default number format - You can use this setting to format the way in which numbers on your Forum will be displayed to the user. The format of this setting is 1,234.00. Where , is the character used to split up groups of thousands, . is the character used as the decimal point and the number of zeros dictate the accuracy of rounding.
Overall time offset - Not all Forum administrators want their Forum to use the same time zone as the server upon which it is hosted. Use this option to specify a time difference (in hours) from which the Forum should operate from the server time. Negative and decimal values are permitted.
Server timezone - The server timezone tells PHP where your server is located. You should ensure this is set correctly, preferably to the country/city in which the city is located. You can find out more information on the PHP Site.
Enable who's online list - This option allows you to turn on or off the ability for users to see who is browsing the forum and what they are doing.
User online time threshold - Set the number of minutes to show the people who are active in X number of minutes on the Board index. Default is 15 minutes.
Track daily statistics - This will allow users to see the latest posts and the most popular topics on your forum. It will also show several statistics, like the most members online, new members and new topics.
Track daily page views (must have stats enabled) - Adds another column to the stats page with the number of hits on your forum.
Allow users to disable announcements - This will allow users to opt out of receiving email notification of posts sent out as announcements.
Don't allow Post text in notifications? - This option removes the option to receive the text of replies and posts in notification emails. Often, members will Reply to the notification email, which in most cases means the webmaster receives the reply.

Layout and Options

Limit number of displayed page links - This will just show a selection of the number of pages.
Example:
"3" to display: 1 ... 4 [5] 6 ... 9
"5" to display: 1 ... 3 4 [5] 6 7 ... 9
Enable "Today" feature - This will show "Today", or "Yesterday", instead of the date.
Enable Go Up/Go Down buttons - This will add go up and go down buttons, so that Member can go to the top and bottom of a page without scrolling.
Show online/offline in posts and PMs - This will show an image to indicate whether the Member is online or offline.
Show a quick login on every page - This will show a more compact login on every page of the Forum for guests. It Works only if SP1 stats is off.
Members per page in Member list - How many members per page you would like to show in Member list.
Display time taken to create every page - This will show the time in seconds SMF took to create that page at the bottom of the board.
Disable hostname lookups - This disables host name lookups, which on some servers are very slow. Note that this will make banning less effective.
Enable who's online list - This option allows you to turn on or off the ability for users to see who is browsing the Forum and what they are doing. You can reach it by clicking on the online icon found in the info center.

Karma

Karma is a feature that shows the popularity of a certain member. Karma must be activated before be able to use it in core features. If members are allowed, they can choose to to raise (Applaud) or lower (Smite) a person's karma. This is how a member's popularity is calculated.

Karma mode - This option allow to select how the karma feature will be used in the forum:
- Disable Karma - disables the use of this feature
- Enable Karma Total - makes SMF show only the total of points received
- Enable Karma Positive/Negative - shows the positive points as well as the negative points for the user
Set the minimum posts needed to modify karma: admins can set a minimum posts that a user must have before raising or lowering someone's karma
Set wait time in hours: this is the time that an admin specifies, before a user can modify karma again
Restrict administrators to wait time: this specifies whether or not the forum administrators are restricted by the time limit
Karma label - here administrators can define the label that will be shown for the karma field in profile and posts (default karma:)
Karma applaud label - the text that will appear in the link for increase the karma of a user (default [applaud])
Karma smite label - the text that will appear in the link for decrease the karma of a user (default [smite])

Signatures

The Signatures page allows to configure restrictions to what to allow in signatures. Settings would include what bbcode can be used in signatures as well as what are the maximum allowed dimensions of various parts of the signature such as the maximum allowed width and height of images and the maximum number of characters allowed in the signature.

The following are all of the settings found on this page:

Enable signatures - This allows administrators to set whether signatures are allowed in the first placed.
Maximum allowed characters - The maximum number of characters that a user can have in their signature (0 for no max.).
Maximum amount of lines - The maximum number of lines that a user can have in their signature. A line is measured with the effect of hitting the "Return" key to start a new line (0 for no max.).
Maximum font size allowed in signatures - This allows you to specify how big the maximum font size can be in a signature, the number must be expressed in pixels (0 for no max.).
Allow smileys in signatures - This allows administrators to set whether smilies are allowed in signatures.
Maximum smiley count - The maximum number of smilies allowed in the signature (0 for no max.).
Maximum image count- The maximum number of images allowed in the signature, excluding smilies (0 for no max.).
Maximum width of signature images (pixels) - The maximum width allowed for any image in the signature (0 for no max.).
Maximum height of signature images (pixels)- The maximum height allowed for any image in the signature (0 for no max.).
Enabled BBC tags - Here administrators can check which bbcode tags will be allowed to use in signatures.

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