Under the “Account” tab, you should have a number of options available in your control panel. This documentation will only cover items that appear in the control panel by default. Any options added by extensions should be documented in that extension’s documentation.
The personal information form is just that: a place where you can define personal information about yourself. Along with some standard information like your name and email address, we also allow you to specify the location of an icon and a profile picture. These images are meant to be hosted by you on your own server. If you do not have images for these fields, just leave them blank.
Finally, at the bottom of the form, we have a set of inputs where you can enter just about anything about yourself. The idea is to create a bunch of label / values like Birthday and September 16, or height and 6′ 4″. This way you can define just about anything about yourself that people might like to know.
It is highly recommended that users change their passwords regularly. Some important rules to follow when creating a new password:
The forum preferences form allows you to define how Vanilla appears and functions for you. Any changes made on this form take place immediately, and you do NOT need to press a save button. When you make a change on this form, a status message should appear on your screen to notify you when the changes have been completed. On the default “Vanilla” style, this status message will appear in the top-right corner of the site.
If you forget your password, you can reset it by clicking on the “Forgot your password?” link on the sign-in page. You will be prompted to enter your username. Password reset instructions will then be emailed to the email address associated with that username. Using this form DOES NOT change your password. If you are the owner of that email address, you will receive an automated message from the application that will contain a link back to the server where you can change your password.
Please note that some email programs try to auto-link hyperlinks that they find in email messages. Sometimes these programs mess up the links, and this can cause our password retrieval system to break. So, please be sure to copy and paste the entire link from your password retrieval email message into your web browser.
A whisper is a private message that can only be seen by two people. Only you and the recipient of the whisper can see the whisper. It won’t affect the paging or comment counting of discussions. It’s a way for you to say something secretly to another member in the middle of a discussion.
You can whisper a comment to someone from within a public discussion or create a private discussion by entering a whisper recipient when starting a discussion. Private discussions are completely hidden from public view. Only you and the recipient can see the discussion.
If you click on the search tab, you might notice the little “Advanced” button to the left of the search inputs. If you click this button, you’ll see an expanded version of the three different types of searches. If you tinker around with these inputs and run a few different searches, you’ll see some interesting things show up in the search input when you’re viewing results. For example: under the “Discussion topic search” heading, enter your username into the “where the author was” input and click search. When the results come up, the search input will contain:
your_username:
Where your_username is actually your username, of course. The results will contain all discussions that you started ordered by the most recently active discussions first.
If you take it a step further and select a category from the category dropdown AND enter your username in the “where the author was” input, you’ll see something like this in the search input when you run the search:
cats:Random;your_username:
This time the search results will contain all discussions that you started in the “Random” category.
Take it even further and enter “test” in the “find discussion topics containing” input and you’ll see something like this:
cats:Random;your_username:test
This time the search results will contain all discussions that you started in the “Random” category where the word “test” appears in the discussion topic.
When it came to doing searches, we wanted to add a little bit of extra functionality into them; kind of like google does. This type of functionality allows you to easily run fancy searches once you’ve learned all of the little tricks. Another example: Say your friend “Charlie” was talking about “boats” yesterday, and the forum has gotten really busy since then. Rather than looking through page after page trying to find the discussion, you can just go to the search tab and enter the following into the search input and run it:
Charlie:boats
That’s not the only way that searches work for you. We’ve also made the searches a little more intelligent than your average forum search. We’ve made it so that you can enter complete phrases into the search input and enclose them in quotes to find exactly what you’re looking for. We’ve also made it smart enough to recognize operators like “and” and “or”. So let’s say Charlie didn’t write “boats” in his discussion topic, but you think he might have said “I love sailing” and also said “boats” somewhere in a comment. This time you can go to the search tab, select the “Comments” radio button and enter this into the search input:
Charlie:"I love sailing" and boats
The search will find any comments where charlie wrote the word “boats” and wrote “I love sailing”.