The Forum module helps you empower your site with functions to create forums which can be used to organize communities, discuss articles, form the loyal site audience or other purposes.
Automated Registration Prevention (CAPTCHA)
The Forum module supports the essential feature aimed to prevent unauthorised registrations - CAPTCHA (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart). For each forum, you can specify whether unregistered visitors can leave messages, or the protection has to be used. The CAPTCHA form looks like follows:
This method ensures that the forum forms will not be abused by robots that are not capable to recognise text on images.
Features
Using the Forum module, the administrator can:
- create an unlimited number of forums;
- classify forums by subject (forum groups);
- assign the access permissions to visitors and administrators;
- create moderated and post-moderated forums;
- set the following forum parameters:
- replace new line with <br> (for HTML);
- allow links, tags B / U / I, images, lists, quotes, code, fonts, or general HTML;
- allow smileys;
- allow file uploads (options: none, images, files with certain extensions, any files);
- ask unregistered users for the e-mail address;
- set sort mode: sort by date of the last message, subject, number of replies, starting date, author;
- sort in both ascending and descending orders ;
- select sites that will avail of a forum and set the message path template;
- set an event type to be used for registering new messages in the Statistics module;
- customize user rank names (guest, partner, trusted, expert, novice etc.);
- configure scoring system to depend on the number of user messages; variable scores depending on the user activity;
- use forum user rating system allowing forum users to award others depending on their rank; number of the awarded scores can be set by the administrator;
- automatically give a user rank upon getting a certain number of scores;
- customize icons and smileys for use in forum messages;
- choose between two forum designs;
- customize the forum design using module functions and classes while maintaining compatibility with software updates;
- create private communities allowing authorized users only;
- add forum management buttons to the site toolbar for quicker access;
- allow forum moderators to subscribe to the desired messages only;
- use API's to integrate the forum into the custom business logics of the site;
- integrate forums with information blocks to discuss articles, news, products etc.
Forum smileys | 
Forum Settings |
Moderators can:
- move threads between forums;
- close and open forum threads;
- pin threads on top;
- delete threads;
- hide / unhide messages;
- edit messages;
- delete messages;
- send messages to the technical support;
- obtain the detailed information about a visitor, IP addresses; track visitor's paths using the Statistics module and deny user's access both in the profile and at the IP address level;.
Creating a new forum thread
Forum users can:
- create new threads;
- post messages and reply to messages;
- subscribe to forum messages and new threads;
- create signature to automatically add to each new message;
- edit their messages (unless message has replies);
- upload files (types of allowed files are defined by the administrator);
- edit profiles;
- select avatars;
- view online users;
- send private messages to users via the e-mail;
- view today's birthday list.
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