phpBB 2.0.0 :: FAQ

| phpBB2 FAQ

This is a very basic Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page which attempts to answer some of the more commonly asked questions. It is by no means exhaustive and should be used in combination with the 'built-in' User FAQ within phpBB2, the community forums (particularly the Tutorials forum) and our IRC channel (see README for details).

1. My AOL based users keep getting logged out!

phpBB2 uses sessions to keep track of users as they browse the board. These sessions use a combination of a unique session id and the users IP to identify each user. We make use of the IP as an extra safe-guard to help prevent sessions being hijacked (by discovering the unique session id).

Unfortunately this only works when the users IP is constant as they browse the board. For most users this will be the case. However certain providers route their users via a cluster of proxys. In some cases, particularly AOL this results in different IPs being forwarded as the user moves between pages. We take account of this by not checking the entire IP but only the first "three quads". Again in most cases this will be fine. However again AOL uses IPs which can vary so much that checking only the first two quads results in a fairly static IP being available for session validation.

If you are experiencing problems related to this you can make a small change to the code. Please note that reducing the IP validation length does potentially increase the risk of sessions being hijacked (this is something for you to consider, phpBB Group takes no responsibility should anything happen!). The change requires you to open the file sessions.php in the includes/ directory of the distribution. Find line 250, it contains the following

    $ip_check_s = substr($userdata['session_ip'], 0, 6);

change this to:

    $ip_check_s = substr($userdata['session_ip'], 0, 4);

You need to make exactly the same change to the number 6 in the next line. Save the file (and upload it if required). This should reduce or eliminate the problem noted.
2. I selected X for my timezone but the time is not correct!

I suspect the time is correct but that you may have switched (locally) to daylight savings time. At present we do not support daylight savings only standard local times. Therefore during summer months (depending on whether your nation/state switches to daylight savings) the board times may appear to be one hour behind the real local time. The solution is to either put up with it (just let your users know) or to move the timezone of everyone who is affected (remember that not all your users may be from nations who have switched to daylight savings) on one hour, eg. GMT becomes GMT+1. This requires running some SQL and you should search our forums for information.

If this is not the case then I suspect your servers time is at fault. phpBB 2 stores all times in the form of a unix timestamp. This is a 32bit integer value containing the number of seconds since the unix epoch event, 1st January 1970 00:00:00 GMT. This value is global in nature and will be the same wherever you are in the world. So, if your time is incorrect and you have selected the appropriate timezone chances are your server time is off.

3. I am seeing &#nnnn; sequences output instead of what I typed!

To enable compliance with HTML and XHTML specifications as well as enabling browsers to automatically support a users selected language we enable a charset tag to be output to the browser. This identifies the primary character set the user has selected, eg. iso-8859-1 for Western European languages (English, German, French, etc.), windows-1251 for Cyrillic alphabets (Russian, Bulgarian, etc.) and so on. The downside to doing this is that most modern browsers (such as Internet Explorer) convert any character not present in that character set into what are termed Numerical Character References or NCR's. These take the form of &#nnnn; where nnnn is the hexadecimal number of that characters UNICODE reference.

Unfortunately PHP (which effectively supports only iso-8859-1 at this time) does not appear to attempt to process this data back into normal characters. Therefore phpBB treats them as text the user has entered and wishes to see. phpBB enables this by turning the & into &amp;. This results in the characters appearing as they do. Although we could ignore &#nnnn; (there are pro's and of course con's to doing so) at present we don't.

If you are finding this to be problem the solution is to remove the

    charset={S_CONTENT_ENCODING}

text from all the _header.tpl template files in all templates. The downside to this is a users browser will not automatically switch its charset to that selected by the user (however this is unlikely to be a big problem since users typically run their browser by default in the language they wish to use). Alternatively you can modify the $lang['ENCODING'] entry in the appropriate language file. Until PHP (and all browsers!) trully support UNICODE these problems will persist across all boards.
4. I cannot search for certain words!

   phpBB 2 uses a Fulltext search system, this has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that on large or busy forums it has far less impact on server load than standard search methods as used by many alternative forums (including phpBB 1.x). The disadvantage is that to reduce the size of the database (every post is examined and unique words stored in a table) we have to limit the size and type of words we store. By default words must contain at least three characters but no more than 25, they must be either alpha or combinations of alpha and numerals (numbers alone are not stored). In addition all non-alphanumeric characters are removed, eg. _, +, -, etc. This is standard practice for fulltext search solutions.

   A further downside is that non-latin alphabets, eg. Cyrillic, Greek, etc. require proper locale support to be compiled in and available on the server your board is running on. If this is not the case it is quite likely that words will not be properly indexed for storage. In many cases this can be recified by altering the setlocale(LC_ALL, '[LOCALE_HERE]'); statement in the appropriate language file. If you are experiencing problems you should change whatever is currently in place of [LOCALE_HERE] with the locale as available on your server. If you do not know this please ask your hosting provider. Some examples may be ru_RU.WIN_CP_1251 for the codepage used for the Russian translation, ko.KOI8 for Korean, etc.

   Please note that support for multibyte character sets remains very limited in PHP4 and therefore Japanese, Chinese, etc. may have difficulty getting the fulltext search working correctly at all.

5. My screen is filled with errors when I try to view the forum!

   Are they errors? Are you sure they are not warnings? They probably are ... What you're seeing is PHP warn you about unset variables. Great care has been taken with phpBB 2.0 to ensure it is secure. Unset variables while being a potential security risk really shouldn't be in 2.0. Unfortunately some hosting providers have decided that any unset variables equal security problems and force PHP to output these warnings even though phpBB 2.0 is set to ignore them.

   We have worked some way toward checking and/or setting all variables before use but this will take time to complete (if it can be). Therefore I am afraid for the time being you will have to manually modify the code or ask your hosting provider to be more realistic with their setup.

6. How do I use the avatar settings?

   There are three types of avatar; upload, remote and local.

   - Upload types require you to create a directory (the default is images/avatars) and to set this to public read/write (ie. chmod a+rw), users can then upload avatars (subject to width, height and size limits definable by you).
   - Remote avatars allow the user to supply a URI pointing to an image available on the internet, PLEASE NOTE that size limits do not apply to remote avatars!
   - Local avatars allow you to upload your own avatars to a set directory, users can then pick from this avatar gallery. The default location for this is images/avatars/gallery. PLEASE NOTE that avatars are categorised according to sub-folders in this location! ie. you MUST place your avatars in subdirectories, eg. images/avatars/gallery/cartoons, images/avatars/gallery/real-life, etc.
7. No matter what I set the uploadable avatars to I cannot upload one from my computer!

   There are two possibilities here, the first is you have not created the directory you specified as the storage location for avatars, ie. as specified in the Admin->General Configuration->Avatars section. If the directory does not exist uploadeable avatars are automatically disabled. You should create the required directory (ensuring it has global write access or other appropriate permissions to allow the webserver to write files to it).

   The second possibility is that your provider has disabled file_upload support, possibly because of a recently found serious security issue with PHP before version 4.1.2. You should contact your provider and ask them if this is the case. It may be unrelated to the security issue and your provider has simply decided to disable such things in general. In either case I'm afraid there is not a lot you can do, there are still three other avatar settings left to choose from including uploading via a URL which will work fine

8. I just cannot get gallery avatars to appear!

   Chances are you have not followed our instructions above. phpBB 2 categorises gallery avatars and it does this by reading through folders contained in the location you specified as being the gallery path. For example, if you set the gallery path to "images/avatars/gallery" phpBB 2 will expect to find a series of folders within that path, eg. "images/avatars/gallery/moviestars", "images/avatars/gallery/cartoons", "images/avatars/gallery/misc", etc. Placing images directly in "images/avatars/gallery/" will result in nothing being listed in your gallery.

9. How do I set forum permissions?

   You set forum permissions from the administration control panel -> Forums -> Permissions. This system has two modes of operation; Simple and Advanced. Simple uses a set of pre-defined authorisation levels, these set each type of authorisation setting to a specific level. Advanced settings allow you to specify individual levels for each operation in each forum. Experiment!

10. How do I set user and group permissions?

    These are set from Admin -> Users (Groups) -> Permissions. The system may appear strange but it's very powerful. When you look up a user or group it will give you basic information (at the top of the page) followed by the available forum listing and current settings for this user. You can assign moderator status to users and groups and if you have PRIVATE forums (or forums with any of their individual operations set to PRIVATE) you can also assign access.

11. How do I set a user (group) as moderator?

    See above

12. Why are there no entries in the user (group) permission "Allow Access" column?

    You can only allow (or deny) users access to PRIVATE forums, or forums which have one or more operations set to PRIVATE

13. I (or my users) cannot stay logged in to the forum!

    If you (or your users) are, after attempting a login, being returned to the index (or other page) without appearing to be logged in the most likely problem is incorrect cookie settings. phpBB 2 uses cookies to store a session id and a small amount of user data. For this data to be stored correctly the cookie domain, path and secure settings must be correct. You can check this in Admin->General Configuration->Cookie settings. Typically the cookie domain can be left blank and the cookie path set to / (a single forward slash). Do not set the cookie as being secure unless your board is running over a secure sockets layer connection, ie. https://

    If you still have problems try setting the cookie domain to your full domain name, eg. www.mysystem.tld, www.something.mydomain.tld. You must ensure the domain name contains at least two dots or browsers will be unlikely to recognise the cookie, eg. .mydomain.com, mydomain.com. Do not add http:// or anything else to the domain name!

14. My users are complaining about being logged out too quickly!

    You can increase the default length of sessions (ie. how long before a users session is considered 'dead') in Admin->General->Configuration->Cookie Settings->Session Length. Set it to whatever value your users feel comfortable with, remember that security issues may affect your decision (ie. having too long a session may allow non-users to abuse your board should a user forget to logout or otherwise leave a current session on a public workstation).

15. I am having problems with HTML!

    If you want to allow your users to make use of HTML in posts you need to do two things. Firstly enable HTML in Admin -> General -> Configuration. Secondly to need to make sure that the tags your users will post are in the Allowed HTML Tags field (again Admin -> General -> Configuration). If users post using tags not on this list they won't be displayed as HTML! eg. to enable someone to post Flash you could add the embed tag to this field. Be careful which tags you allow, it is very easy to break the boards own output if the wrong tags are used in posts.

16. Can I suggest a feature for phpBB 2.2?

    Yes you most certainly can, phpBB 2.0.0 is now feature frozen and only bug fix releases will be made from this line. However, work has already started on the next release of phpBB, phpBB 2.2. We already have a number of features in mind and these are listed on our task manager:

    http://sourceforge.net/pm/task.php?group_project_id=13524&group_id=7885&func=browse.

    Some of these features will also be discussed on forums at http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/.

    To suggest a feature first consult the task list mentioned above, if your idea is already listed then the chances are good that it will appear in 2.2. If your suggestion is not listed please submit it to our feature request tracker:

    http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?group_id=7885&atid=357885.

    Before submitting please read through the already present suggestions, if one matches or is similar to yours please add to it rather than creating a new entry.

    We make no promises to the inclusion of features but we will endeavour to introduce the most requested or most interesting ones.

17. Why is phpBB 1.x faster than phpBB 2.0?

    The original phpBB 1.0 saw a very large decrease in page generation times from version 1.0/1.2 to 1.4. This was achieved by rewriting many of the SQL queries and splitting the database. These changes came about from work on phpBB 2.0. With phpBB 2.0 we have introduced numerous additional functions and features, not least of which is full templating (the separation of page design from code). This results in a slowdown from phpBB 1.4, we suspect though that the new features will outweigh the small difference in page generation times.

18. My question isn't answered here! Feel free to search our community forum for the information you require. PLEASE DO NOT post your question without having first used search, chances are someone has already asked and answered your question. You can find our board here:

    http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/

## Copyright and disclaimer

This application is opensource software released under the GPL. Please see source code and the Docs directory for more details. This package and its contents are Copyright © 2002 phpBB Group, All Rights Reserved.