As the name suggests, this form contains all the important global application settings for your vanilla forum. It can be found under the ‘Settings’ tab then under the “Application Settings” in the list of side-bar options. This option is limited and visible to administrative users who have the access necessary to make changes to how Vanilla runs. Any changes must be made with caution as erroneous information entered could cause your forum to quit working and will require you to manually altering settings files to remedy the problem.

This document should cover most of the basic steps to get you started and familiarize you with the global settings here in. For more advanced tips on customizing some of these aspects, see the Tips & Tricks for Administrators section within these documents.

If you’re approaching this screen for the first time and are uncomfortable about making any significant changes in one foul swoop, don’t worry. You can safely change any number of options and always come back to change some more. All changes here are saved to your /appg/settings.php file. If for some reason changes you are making are not taking effect for whatever reason, please consult the troubleshooting documentation.

This is fairly self explanatory; the Application Title appears in the title bar of your browser (much like ‘Lussumo Documentation’ does on this page), and Banner Title is the banner/logo which appears above the tabs (depending on your style) - in a similar fashion to that of ‘Lussumo Explained’ on this page. The Banner Title control allows use of html for displaying images and such.

• Enable Whispers
  • If this option is turned off, users will no longer be able to whisper to one another. Any previously whispered comments and/or discussions will be completely hidden from everyone.

• Allow members to change their usernames
  • This option allows you and your users to switch your username whenever you desire. For example: JoeUser123 can change this name to SnazzyJoe without any admin intervention. By default this option is on. In a busy forum it might be recommended to turn this option off to prevent any confusion.

• Allow non-members to browse the forum
  • This option defines whether the forum is public or private, by default this is turned off and anyone can read the discussions whether registered or not.

• Allow discussions to be categorized
  • This is mainly beneficial to those forums which will contain discussions on a variety of topics and allows to to break your forum up into categories. By default this option is enabled allowing you to see the categories tab in the main menu. As well when viewing the discussions listings, underneath the topic of every post will contain information on which category that discussion belongs to.

• Log & monitor all IP addresses
  • If this is checked, any time a user signs (or is re-validated by cookies), their ip address will be recorded. There are related extensions which allow you to then view this information if you like.

In this area, you can find options for the maximum number of items a user can see in either discussions, discussion lists, searches or in their side bar panel. Each of the controls listed is fairly self explanatory, and offers a variety of options to choose from depending on the list in question. By default, each of these will be set to a fairly reasonable value which should strike a balance between the number of items displayed while keeping server performance in mind. If you run a busy forum, keeping these numbers down will result in faster page loads and less overall page cluttering.

One of the major benefits of Vanilla is its in-built core spam protection features; with years of experience administrating forums of various genres, we realised early on that it was a very important feature in any piece of software. Not only to protect the server but the fellow users’ experience as well.

• Max characters in comments
  • This input limits how many characters a user is allowed to put in his or her comments. This number is entirely up to you, the default is set at a reasonable ‘5000’ characters, you may wish to bump this up or down depending on your user base. You will need to bear in mind, however, that it needs to be long enough to hold a fairly detailed discussion, but not too long that it will over-load the database.

• Posting Limits
  • These inputs allow you to define the number of comments/discussions a user may post within a set timeframe. It is worth noting that this timeframe will be reset when the user attempts to post. For example: If a user posts (by default) 3 discussions within 60 seconds, their account will be locked for 120 seconds. If they attempt to post another discussion within 119 seconds, it will be locked for a _further_ 120 seconds.

• Support name
  • This is the friendly ‘from’ name you or the user will see in confirmation messages and which you will see in bug reports.

• Support email address
  • The return email address the email will be coming from. This address should be one which you can at least receive email to and one under your control. Confirmations will still be sent out then under that non-existant address.

• SMTP host, user, and password
  • Typically Vanilla will use the mail server that is set up on the system where Vanilla resides. If, for some reason, you want to use a separate SMTP mail server to send outgoing e-mails, you can configure it with these three options. If you do not want to use an SMTP server, leave these fields blank.

The discussion labels will appear in-front of discussion topics on the main discussion page. The discussion label prefix and suffix will be placed on either side of the discussion label. If a discussion label is left blank, the discussion label’s prefix and suffix will not appear.

• Web-path to Vanilla
  • The web-path to Vanilla should be a complete path to Vanilla just as you would type it into a web browser. Something like this:

http://www.yourdomain.com/vanilla/

• Cookie domain & path
  • The cookie domain is where you want cookies assigned to for Vanilla. Typically the cookie domain will be something like www.yourdomain.com. Cookies can be further defined to a particular path on your website using the “cookie path” setting. (TIP: If you want your Vanilla cookies to apply to all subdomains of your domain, use “.yourdomain.com” as the cookie domain).