what can I expect when adding mods?

[crawman]

I'm taking over a forum for a friend of mine and while I have a little MySQL DB experience (wordpress mostly), I've never dealt with simple machines. I went over alot of the support docs (great resource by the way!) and I just had a question about what I can expect when applying mods.

I know that not every mod application is going to go perfect (and I've already started my backups!) but what are some typical things that go wrong with a mod install? Are we talking blank white screen or maybe an issue with logging in?

The forum I am running is 1.1.13 and it has the default theme so I wont have to apply the mod to any custom themes.

Thanks for any info and I hope to contribute as I spend more time working with SMF.

[mashby]

If you are running the default theme, you should be fine unless of course you are adding mods that affect an area that other installed mods have already affected. Good news is that you'll see which parts of the mod installation might go wrong before you apply it. Hopefully you have FTP access to your site.

What mods might there already be on the site? And what mods are you looking to install?

[crawman]

Thanks for the reply.

One of the issues they are having currently is that spammers are registering and I have been reading that the avatar verification mod might help. They also dont have recaptcha running (just the default character generator) so I was thinking both of those might be helpful in battling the spammers.

Sometime down the road I'll be adding the ad mod to the forum.

I do have ftp access to the site.

Thanks again

[mashby]

Have you seen this area of the Mod site? Spam Prevention...some good ones in there for 1.1.13:
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?action=search;type=19

[redone]

Installing on the default theme is very easy, not much usually goes wrong. Custom themes can be more difficult.

Sometimes the mods do not uninstall as cleanly as say Wordpress, cannot remember the last time I broke a Wordpress install. You can always use the modification site here to parse you the code to modify if all else fails.

Overall keep regular backups and test out somewhere else before messing with your live forum. Other than that you should be good.

~RedOne

[crawman]

Thanks for the tips!