The FUDforum FAQ provides answers to Frequently Asked Questions. Please consult this FAQ before asking questions on the Support Forum. However, if the answers are unclear, or if you require additional information, please ask anyway!
Good heavens, no! This is a general and unfortunate misconception.
FUDforum stands for Fast Uncompromising Discussion forum. It emphasizes how this forum was built to support very large forums with great performance.
FUDforum is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License. In short, this means that FUDforum is free to download, use, distribute and modify. However, if any of these modifications are released to the public, that code must also be released under the same license as FUDforum. The copyright notice in all the source files must ALWAYS be left intact. Any modification or removal of this copyright is illegal under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence.
Before installing FUDforum, please review the prerequisites in the Install Guide. When done, download the installer and follow the instructions. It should only take a couple of minutes to have a full working forum installed.
Note that we also offer special "pre-installed" versions of FUDforum:
This normally happens with old FUDforum 3.0.1 and earlier releases when the PHP setting detect_unicode is enabled. The unicode detection algorithm chokes on the binary content within the installer. To fix this, create a .htaccess file in the same directory as the installer with the following contents and rerun the installer:
php_flag detect_unicode off
Note that some hosts disable '.htaccess' completely. In addition, hosts that uses phpexec cannot specify PHP settings via .htaccess. In such cases you will have to change this setting in your php.ini file or ask your hosting provider to do it for you.
This normally happens when users run an older version of PHP with a low memory_limit setting (default for PHP 5.3 is 128M) and FUDforum needs more memory to run. To fix it, increase PHP's memory limit, either by adding:
The installer or upgrade script will report this error if the file is somehow incomplete or corrupt. Please download it again and ensure you have the complete file before proceeding.
If you use FTP, please transfer the file in BINARY MODE as these files contain binary data.
If you still get this error, report the problem on the forum and also post the file's checksum so we can verify that it's complete.
Linux example:
$ md5sum FUDforum_upgrade_zl_2-8-1RC1.zip 8d4dde50488f0364f704e61b9aa7f306
Similar Windows checksum utilities are also available, for details see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Md5sum
Themes combine the forum's source code (logic) with templates (for layout) and message files of a particular language. The resulting files are deployed to the forum's web accessible 'theme' directory. You can define multiple themes to support different languages and/or layouts.
To install a new template set, create a subdirectory in the forum's data/thm directory and copy the theme's files to it. You will note that the Theme Manager immediately recognizes the new template set for use.
To create a new theme, create a new subdirectory in the forum's data/thm directory with the same structure as the default template set. Then only copy the files you want to modify to it (not everything!). Missing files (and sections) will always fall-back to the default theme. For more info, see create a new theme.
Besides wanting to create a unique identity for your forum, users who want to change their themes should preferably create a separate theme to prevent subsequent upgrades (which may contain changes to the default theme) from overwriting their changes. If you don't plan to make any drastic theme changes, it's perfectly OK to use the default theme.
After making manual changes to a theme's files (not required when you work through the on-line Template Editor, as you are supposed to), administrators must navigate to the Admin Control Panel -> Theme Manager to rebuild the theme. This is required for FUDforum to combine the theme's template, source and message files into the PHP scripts required to run the forum. The main advantage of this approach is that work is performed up-front, making FUDforum's scripts lightning fast.
To see what variables are available for use, embed the following code into a template, compile it, and navigate the the relevant page to see the output:
<pre>
{FUNC: var_dump( get_defined_vars() )}
</pre>
This will print out all the variables available for that particular page.
The URL format depends on the theme (technically which template set the theme you are using is based on) you are using and what options you've enabled. Some examples:
Changes that can be made with a theme based on the default template set (e.g. the included Default theme) or the Path_Info & path_info_seo template sets :
http://127.0.0.1/forum/index.php?t=index&rid=2&S=1963f7fce4b7d3db9175dc3a4d6e8b7b
http://127.0.0.1/forum/index.php?t=index&rid=2
http://127.0.0.1/forum/index.php?t=index&
It is recommended to first make the preceding two settings and test them before moving on to the PATH_INFO settings.
Changes that can only be made with themes built using the PATH_INFO and PATH_INFO_SEO template sets:
The PATH_INFO and PATH_INFO_SEO template sets (in conjunction with the Use PATH_INFO style URLs setting) can be used to enable search engine friendly/optimized (SEO) URL's. If you enable this feature, a typical URL will look like this:
http://127.0.0.1/forum/index.php/i/
To do this, do the following:
1. Go to Administration -> Global Settings Manager -> Use PATH_INFO style URLs and set it to YES
2. Enable path_info support in the theme. You can do this with the Default Theme by going to Administration -> Theme Manager -> Edit and select path_Info or path_info_seo for the template set and click Update, then Rebuild.
What is the difference between the path_info and path_info_seo template sets?
Search engines like keywords in the URL. The default URLs (including the ones built by the path_info template set) do not have the forum or topic title in them, so they will have no keywords. The path_info_seo template set adds the title of the post to the URL of the post. So the above URL might look something like this:
http://127.0.0.1/forum/index.php/t/1-welcome-to-fudforum/
Note: Since search engines will ding you for duplicate content, you should also follow the suggestion below under Can I prevent search engines from indexing certain pages?.
Note: There is no information that shows that making the URL shorter is any better for SEO. This is merely a human-readable thing.
For the shortest possible URL, you can remove the index.php portion of the URL. The example URL above would then look like this:
http://127.0.0.1/forum/i/
This is done in four steps.
It is highly recommended you take a backup of your forum and/or any of these files you edit prior to attempting this change. If you mess it up, you can make your forum inaccessible.
1. Enable Path_info support in Apache. This will vary with your configuration. For a WHM/cpanel setup of Apache, this is done by creating a conf file for that user in /usr/local/apache/conf/userdata/std/2/<username>/<virtual hostname> called forum.conf and putting the lines below in it and then restarting Apache:
<Directory /home/<username>/public_html/forum>
Options +Includes
AcceptPathInfo On
</Directory>
Note: If you'd like to test that PATH_INFO has been enabled before continuing on with the following steps, try steps 1a-1d below:
1a. Create a file in your /forum directory called phpinfo.php that contains the following
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
1b. Point your browser to <yoursite>/forum/phpinfo.php/testpath-info
1c. If PATH_INFO is enabled, you should see a screen listing all your PHP variables, and one of them will be PATH_INFO and its value should be "testpath-info"
1d. Remove the phpinfo.php script, as having it there is a security risk.
2. Assuming PATH_INFO is now enabled, create a .htaccess file that adds rewrite rules to make PATH_INFO work without index.php. The example below assumes the .htaccess file is in the directory where FUDforum is installed.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*) index.php/$1 [L]
3. The next step is to tell FUDforum not to display the index.php string in the URLs
Open FUDforum/include/compiler.inc with a text editor and change
$cmpl['ROOT'] = 'index.php';
to
$cmpl['ROOT'] = '.';
4. Rebuild the theme and test. (Administration -> Theme Manager - Rebuild)
There are several ways to do it:
post_descr: Topic Description:
<tr class="RowStyleB"><td class="GenText">{MSG: post_descr}</td><td><input ...
If you see this message during a upgrade or when you generate a theme, you need to edit your "header.tmpl" and replace all occurrences of
{meta-content-language}
with
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset={CHARSET}" />
Yes, you may remove the copyright from the footer, but please don't! If you must, please try to keep at least a small (or invisible) "Powered by FUDforum" with the link back to http://fudforum.org/ somewhere on your site.
You can select all topics on a page (single click) and bulk move them to another forum. If you have too many pages of threads in a forum, increase the number of topics per page (setting in user control panel / set limit in Global Settings Manager). This will allow you to select and move more messages at a time.
Steps to relocate you forum to a new server:
Alternatively, transfer all the files and DB content (backup & restore), when done fix-up the symlinks and paths in GLOBALS.php.
Edit the old forum's index.php file and add:
<?php $url = 'http://new.forum.url/forum'. $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header("Location: $url"); ?>
Users that use a PATH_INFO theme may want to add the following lines to their robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing redundant pages:
User-agent: * Crawl-Delay: 2 Disallow: /forum/a/ Disallow: /forum/bl/ Disallow: /forum/d/ Disallow: /forum/ef/ Disallow: /forum/gm/ Disallow: /forum/h/ Disallow: /forum/i/ Disallow: /forum/il/ Disallow: /forum/ip/ Disallow: /forum/l/ Disallow: /forum/lk/ Disallow: /forum/m/ Disallow: /forum/ma/ Disallow: /forum/mar/ Disallow: /forum/ml/ Disallow: /forum/mn/ Disallow: /forum/mv/ Disallow: /forum/ot/ Disallow: /forum/pdm/ Disallow: /forum/pl/ Disallow: /forum/pmm/ Disallow: /forum/r/ Disallow: /forum/re/ Disallow: /forum/rm/ Disallow: /forum/s/ Disallow: /forum/sel/ Disallow: /forum/st/ Disallow: /forum/tt/ Disallow: /forum/u/ Disallow: /forum/uc/
NOTE: Your forum's URLs may differ.
FUDforum uses PHP's mail() function to send e-mail. If it cannot, it will complain in the forum's Error Log Viewer ACP. Ensure that E-mail notifications are enabled in the Global Settings Manager and the user's profile. If enabled, and you don't see any errors in the ACP, the mail was successfully handed over to PHP/ your system. At this stage it's out of FUDforum's hands. Ensure you system can deliver mail and if all else fails, check your spam folder.
For starters, check that your server's date and time is correctly set. Also, ensure that the forum's timezone setting corresponds with that of your server. Lastly, check if the timezone of your profile is correctly set by navigating to Control Panel -> Account Settings -> Time Zone:.
This normally happens when the wrong locale was selected for a theme. Navigate to the Admin Control Panel -> Theme Manager to change your locale. When done, rebuild your themes.
The correct locale depends on your operating system. For example, one should typically use german on Windows systems, but de_DE.utf-8 on Linux/Unix systems. If available, always pick a UTF-8 locale. Windows is the exception, as it doesn't have UTF-8 locales.
To get a list of installed locales on Linux (there is no equivalent Windows command), execute:
$ locale -a | grep de de de_DE de_DE.ISO-8859-1 de_DE.ISO-8859-15 de_DE.UTF-8 <-- If possible, always pick a UTF-8 locale! deutsch
Settings are stored in a file GLOBALS.php in the forum's include directory. You may edit it with a text editor to fix whatever is required.
When you browse your FUDforum site and you get a blank page, it usually means that an error occurred, but PHP is configured not to display it.
error_reporting(E_NOTICE | E_ERROR | E_WARNING | E_PARSE | E_COMPILE_ERROR);
ini_set('display_errors', '1');
ini_set('display_startup_errors', 1);
define('forum_debug', 1);
php_flag display_errors on php_flag display_startup_errors on php_value error_reporting 2047
FUDforum stores its metadata in the database and message bodies on disk in the FUDdata/messages directory (default setting, can be changed). If you can see your forums, users, etc., but your messages are empty, you need to check if your message files are still there and check if the webserver has read/write permissions on them. If required, restore them from a recent backup.
To trace the message path:
SELECT file_id, foff, length FROM fud30_msg WHERE id = 528; 10000 976757 2092
$ ls msg_10000
$ od -a -j 976757 -b 2092 msg_10000
Yes, navigate to the ACP -> Global Settings Manager and enable debug mode.
Alternately, edit index.php (or the required script) and uncomment the following line:
#define('fud_query_stats', 1);
If tables have different collations, MySQL will report an "illegal mix of collations for operation" error. Go to the SQL Manager and execute:
ALTER IGNORE TABLE ... CONVERT TO character set utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
This error indicates that your MySQL database must be repaired. Go to the SQL Manager and execute:
REPAIR TABLE ...;
If you are moving your forum's directories (copy, FTP, etc.) and database (SQL import) to the new host, not using the provided facilities as you are supposed to, you need to:
./GLOBALS.php -> ./data/include/GLOBALS.php ./scripts/GLOBALS.php -> ./data/include/GLOBALS.php ./adm/GLOBALS.php -> ./data/include/GLOBALS.php
update fud28_attach set location = replace(location, '/old/forum/dir/', '/new/forum/dir/');
None of the above is required if you use the forum's Make forum datadump and Import forum data admin control panels as it automatically takes care of all these complexities.
FUDforum is a community project and new contributors are always welcome to get involved and participate in the development and support effort. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:
If you are a developer:
If you are a web designer:
If you are a translator, see Translating.
We look forward to your participation!
There are too many sites to list here (do a Google search to see for yourself). Here are a couple, just to show that you are in good company:
PS: Feel free to add your forum to the above list.
If you don't want to install and maintain your own forum, contact one of the following providers to host your FUDforum solution for you:
Feel free to add your hosting offering to the above list (only if you provide specific FUDforum services).