Newbie questions in selecting forum software

[MrPhil]

I'm in the process of selecting discussion group/forum software for my site, and have some questions about SMF:

1. Is it easy to disable the "New Poll" button? Even better, I'd like to hide it or make the user answer "Yes" to "Do you really want to add a poll to your new question?" On my current host's SMF-based discussion groups, I see lots of topics with empty or nonsense polls, because people are dumb and press "New Poll" instead of "New Topic".

2. Does SMF offer "digest" capability? Some people will not want to sign on to my site's board to read the latest updates, and would prefer that my site email postings on a daily basis (along with news of new threads and categories). If traffic is too high (the digest becomes too bulky), it might be more often than once a day. I'd like to be able to review postings to remove spam, flamewars, and other undesirable stuff before the digest goes out -- can it be configured to be sent off manually? On the subject of digests, can SMF accept emailed postings (inputs) from registered users?

3. My host limits emails to 600 per hour. Can SMF throttle the rate at which emails are sent? I took a quick look-see at the code, and Sources/subs-post.php's sendmail() function looks like where the action is. If I split up the "to" address array to call sendmail() for each addressee, and put a sleep(6); call in the loop, would this work? If it would shut down the entire SMF system for 6 seconds (or even the PHP processing for my whole site), then I'd have to do something else... maybe build a queue of outbound mail and hit it every 6 seconds to send off the next. Or, I could just email one copy to myself and use a throttleable mailing list like PHPlist to do the job (but I'd rather keep it all in SMF if I can).

4. Is there any filtering available to reject postings (or at least hold them for review)? Spam-type stuff, obscenities, flaming, and other such misuse of the facilities I'd like to catch before it goes public.

5. When typing in or editing a lengthy posting, I'm always a bit nervous about losing my work if some part of the system should go down. Many email programs offer some sort of "save a draft" capability -- does SMF? I see mention of requests for this -- is it in 1.1.2 or upcoming in 2?

6. Is 1.1.2 (and up) PHP 5 and MySQL 5 ready? Does SMF require PHP register globals to be on, or any other obsolete features? My hosting service just went to 1.1.2, and it could be quite a while before they offer 2.0 (they use Fantastico for their script library).

7. I see a tremendous number of languages are supported. Does this mean that users are able to set up their SMF experience to be in their favorite language, rather than being forced to use English? I realize that if they choose to post in Mandarin Chinese or whatever, that most people will not be able to read their posting. Just as long as I can work in English I don't care what others have their SMF to be configured to use, but I will probably require postings to be in English.

Thank you very much for answers to these questions. I apologize if any of this is covered in the manuals or earlier discussions. I did some searches and found nothing.

Phil

[MrPhil]

Well, there's a bug in SMF! I hit what's supposed to be "change font" (the funky "A" button) while modifying the above posting, and it erased everything! Luckily, I had learned long ago to cut and paste long postings to a file to guard against such loss, so I didn't end up putting my fist through my display (that woulda hurt!).

I'll just elaborate on my questions (in my previous posting) in a separate posting:

1. The default heading "New Topic" may be throwing people off. Maybe I'll change mine to "Add New Thread". I can't help it that people are too dumb to figure out that they didn't really want a poll and should back out and try again with some other button (like "New Topic"). So, is there a way to ask the user for confirmation that they really, really want a poll before allowing them to proceed? And after all that, is there any way to check that the poll questions are empty (or default) and automatically turn the posting into a regular (no poll) "New Topic"?

2. Is the database structure well-enough documented that I could write a separate "digest" utility to run through the day's postings and package up an email to a registered user? I would need to add the option somewhere to sign up for digest service (registered users only), and to disallow mailings to AOL and other ISPs with hair-trigger spam blacklisting. There would have to be a "digests" table with user ID and topics (or boards) to follow, which the user could access and modify. I don't know about allowing emails to addresses other than the one they registered with. The digest mailing would include news of new boards and topics, in case the user hasn't signed on for a while and would otherwise miss them.

I suppose it's possible to allow registered users to post via email (Usenet style), but maybe it would be better to make them sign on to do it. Any thoughts on this?

4. I see there's a "censored words" setting. If I read it correctly, it merely replaces offensive words (in a list) with my euphemism or whatever replacement text. Is there any mechanism to hold a suspicious posting for my examination? For users with a history of "colorful" writing, can I have all their postings come to me first (until they're banned or they mend their ways!)

Something related: on my hosting service's SMF forum, a few users have avatars or signatures with fairly offensive images. I've taken to banning them with Firefox's "Adblock" so I don't have to look at them. For my own board, if I deem an image or signature beyond the pale, I suppose I could update the user's profile and remove the avatar or signature, and email the user telling them what I did. If they persist in putting up the same offensive image or text, is there a setting to ban avatars or signatures from that user? Something short of banning the user altogether? I don't consider myself a prude or anything, but some of this stuff should not be seen by children.

8. How about a "Help with BBcode" link or button to assist users in handling BBcode? How about an "Add link to another topic" (or board) button, to do the bulk of the [ url ] tag (short of adding the topic number itself, although that would be the "icing on the cake").

9. Reading through the "DOCS" section, I found many, many typos, misspellings, and other errors. I tried posting an offer there to do cleanup, but it insists that I am a "Guest" and need to log in first! (another bug?) So, I'll do it here: is there any mechanism for reporting glitches in the documentation? I'd be happy to correct the text itself and submit it to TPTB, if the raw text files are available anywhere.

Phil

[MrPhil]

bump.

Is anybody out there? Would I get better response posting in another board? I thought SMF had an active user community, but I guess not! Even a terse "look at add-on XXXX for question 4" would be better than silence. If I'm not going to get answers to these questions, I'm going to have to start looking at other forum software...

[metallica48423]

i would say its perhaps in the wrong board.  I will move it to General Discussion and Feedback and see if it gets more attention there.

[metallica48423]

Reading through the "DOCS" section, I found many, many typos, misspellings, and other errors. I tried posting an offer there to do cleanup, but it insists that I am a "Guest" and need to log in first! (another bug?) So, I'll do it here: is there any mechanism for reporting glitches in the documentation? I'd be happy to correct the text itself and submit it to TPTB, if the raw text files are available anywhere.

The Doc Site runs off a seperate database, as it is actually an SMF forum with a wiki-like theme.  It was to avoid creating a massive amount of new boards here and make navigation that much harder.  So it is no glitch or Bug   Even us team members have seperate doc site accesses.  You are welcome to create a topic in this board (general discussion and feedback) regarding the errors and one of the doc team can take a look at it.

4. I see there's a "censored words" setting. If I read it correctly, it merely replaces offensive words (in a list) with my euphemism or whatever replacement text. Is there any mechanism to hold a suspicious posting for my examination? For users with a history of "colorful" writing, can I have all their postings come to me first (until they're banned or they mend their ways!)

Post moderation is a feature of the next version of SMF, as of right now there is no mod or functionality in SMF that offers post moderation.  It is actually already in testing here in the hosts and hosting board.  It is still being developed, however.  No feature is 100% certain though this has been announced in the official topic announcing 2.0.

8. How about a "Help with BBcode" link or button to assist users in handling BBcode? How about an "Add link to another topic" (or board) button, to do the bulk of the [ url ] tag (short of adding the topic number itself, although that would be the "icing on the cake").

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=help;page=post#bbcref
Each SMF board has a 'help' area that explains how to use SMF from the member point of view.  That link links to THIS board's BBCode reference, but each board has it.

2. Is the database structure well-enough documented that I could write a separate "digest" utility to run through the day's postings and package up an email to a registered user? I would need to add the option somewhere to sign up for digest service (registered users only), and to disallow mailings to AOL and other ISPs with hair-trigger spam blacklisting. There would have to be a "digests" table with user ID and topics (or boards) to follow, which the user could access and modify. I don't know about allowing emails to addresses other than the one they registered with. The digest mailing would include news of new boards and topics, in case the user hasn't signed on for a while and would otherwise miss them.

I'm not sure how exactly this would work, but there's a  function in 2.0 at this point that sends moderators emails about posts pending approval.  So, it may be possible to modify that function to work except for with regular topics.

Of course, there is always the view all topics since last visit and view unread replies to your posts functions, which offer a list of just that (look in the right side of the user area here

I may post more as i come up with decent answers, i urge others, team members especially, to post as well, however.