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).
Simple answer, no we will not. We are not being difficult when we say this we are actually trying to help you. phpBB has a reputation for being easy to install, that reputation is we believe well deserved. It is a simple process of unarchiving a single file, uploading the resulting directory/files to their intended location and entering some data in a web based form. The sequence of events, what to type where, etc. is covered in detail in the accompanying INSTALL.html documentation. If you cannot install phpBB 2.0.x the chances are you will be unable to administer or update it. There are people, companies (unrelated to your hosting provider), etc. that will install your forum, either for free or for a payment. We do not recommend you make use of these offers. Unless the service is provided by your hosting company you will have to divulge passwords and other sensitive details. If you did not know how to use an ATM would you give a passer-by your bank card and PIN and ask them to show you what to do? No, probably not! The same applies to your hosting account details! We think a better solution is for you to carefully read the enclosed documentation, read our tutorials forum at www.phpbb.com and if necessary ask for help on any thing you get stuck on. However, the decision is yours but please note we may not offer support if we believe you have had the board installed by a third party. In such cases you should direct your questions to that company or person/s. The old addage "You get what you pay for" is particularly true for hosting services! However if you must use a free service (and recognise its limitations) you will find details on common pitfalls in our tutorials forum at http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/. We provide the software, we have absolutely nothing to do with any board that runs it (beyond phpbb.com of course!). The GPL grants the user an unlimited right of use subject to their adherence of that licence. Therefore we cannot prevent, dictate, control or otherwise limit the use of phpBB 2 software. So please do not contact us for such matters. If you have a problem with a given board please take it up with them, not us. We are not and cannot be held legally responsible for any third party use of this software (much like Microsoft et al cannot be held responsible for the use of Windows in illegal activities, etc.). Additionally we do not track the use of phpBB software in any way. So please do not ask us for details on a "given" board we will not be able to help you. If any law firms or lawyers out there send us writs, Cease and Desist orders, etc. for third party website use of this software we reserve the right to charge for time wasted dealing with such issues ... No, they probably are not. phpBB uses sessions to keep track of users as they move between pages. The session information tells us who this user is. Therefore in order to determine what a user can do on a page we first need the session details. Once this data is available we can check whether the user is permitted to do whatever it is they are trying to do. This can result in it appearing as if a user is reading a topic in a forum they should not be able to access. Or perhaps viewing private messages when they are only guests, etc. In practice the user is not doing these things, they are viewing a "You are not permitted to do this" type message. The session data has simply been updated before we were able to determine what the user could or could not do. Of course this only applies where permissions have been set correctly! This error will occur if phpBB cannot send mail. phpBB can send email two ways; using the PHP mail() function or directly via SMTP. Some hosting providers limit the mail() function to prevent its use in spamming, others may rename it or limit its functionality. In either case you may need to make use of SMTP. This requires that you have access to such a facility, e.g. your hosting provider may provide one (perhaps requiring specific written authorisation), etc. Note that if your provider requires authorisation we only support the simple AUTH method using plaintext username/password. We do not support secure sockets layer (SSL), POP3 send or any other method. Please see http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/ for additional help on this matter. If you do require SMTP services please do not ask (on our forums or elsewhere) for someone to provide you with one. Open relays are now things of the past thanks to the unthinking spammers out there. Therefore you are unlikely to find someone willing to offer you (free) services. You must have deleted a language pack or the language pack is incomplete. phpBB will try to send emails in the users selected language. If it cannot find a suitable email template it will switch to the boards default language. Some forms in phpBB make use of arrays to "post" or submit data, e.g. polls, forum management, etc. A bug exists in PHP 4.2.3 (and perhaps older versions) which can cause such data to lose the first four characters of text. This bug is related to the presence of the mbstring module and certain compile time parameters (the problem exists for both compiled in and modular version of mbstring). Please see: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=19460 for more details. Note the bug is fixed in PHP CVS and thus future versions should be immune. Remember, this is not a bug in phpBB 2. 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. 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. 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 &. 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.
phpBB does not by default allow guest voting. This was done to prevent guest users (who cannot be reliably tracked) from voting time and time again in the same poll. There is a Mod available if you really need this feature, please see our Mod forums at http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/. Copyright and disclaimerThis 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. |
