SMF Tutorial

How to Administrate SMF

SMF (Simple Machines Forum) provides very advanced and extensive interface to administrate your Simple Machines Forum.

The Basic Features settings page holds some general settings that are important to the general everyday functioning of your forum. More often then not, settings on this page have more to do with the core operating of your forum than settings specific to theme layout settings, as well as settings relating to posts and topics and some other slightly more specific settings that are instead located on some other more specific settings page.

You can find full basic features list here: http://docs.simplemachines.org/index.php?topic=106

Core Features (Version 2.0 Only)

Calendar -The calendar can be configured according to membergroups allowed to view, post, and edit events. There are also other options such as showing the week numbers, showing holidays, birthdays, and events.

Advanced Profile Fields - Enabling this ability will allow you to make custom profile fields for your members. You can edit the location in the profile as well as whether to display these on their posts. You can also allow the users to set these during the registration process.

Karma - Karma is basically the popularity of a member. Just like how the description says, members may "smite" or "applaud" each other. This feature may be configured based on the amount of posts they have. You can also change the way the karma is displayed in their posts(or whether it is displayed in posts at all!) and you can even change "Karma", "applaud" and "smite" to other words if you want.

Moderation, Administration and User Logs - SMF keeps logs of records of various things that happen on your forum. This option includes three separate logs, one for logging moderation actions made by moderators, one for logging the administrative actions made, as well as one made that logs user profile changes that members of your forum make.

Post Moderation - On certain forums or membergroups, a member will have to have their post approved before it appears for everybody else. This is helpful for an articles forum or a FAQ forum, and when used in conjunction with the warning system it's usefulness is doubled.

Paid Subscriptions - With Paid Subscriptions, members can make payments on your forum to allow them to be a part of a special membergroup designated for those who pay for a subscription on your forum. You can grant special access rights if desired to the membergroups that members can be added to when they pay for certain subscriptions.

Report Generation - Allows you to view a summary of your forum in an easy to view manner. You can select from 5 different types of a report to view: Boards, Board Permissions, Membergroups, Group Permissions, and Staff. These are especially useful for a rather large forum.

Warning System - The warning system in SMF 2.0 allows for better member moderation. If you have a member that just doesn't get it, who won't get along with everybody and never follows the rules but at the same time doesn't really deserve a ban you can use this system to help "guide" that member in to following the rules. This warning system is also a great help to the moderators of your forum. It has a "warning level" that moderators can raise if the member acts up, the member will know that they have been "warned" and hopefully cool down. Their warning points will go down 1 point every 24 hours. The cooldown time can be changed in the admin panel, as well as many other options.

Search Engine Tracking - With this enabled certain search engine "spiders" can be tracked, meaning logs and statistics can be saved of the spiders you have added to be tracked for your forum. To configure the settings for this, go to the Search Engines section of your Administration Panel.