Forum - The forum is the whole installation, and usually contains
multiple boards.
Board - A board contains topics, which in turn contain the posts.
Boards can be private, so they are only visible to admins and members. Boards
can be read-only, so they only allow posts by admins and members. Another
option for boards is approval moderation. If this option is activated, new posts
will be invisible to normal users until an admin approves them.
Topic - A topic, otherwise known as thread, contains all the posts on
a specific subtopic in threaded form, displayed by indentation. Each topic has a
subject. Boards have an expiration value that determines after how many days its
topics will expire after their last post has been made. An important topic can
be set to 'protected', so that it never expires. Admins can lock a topic, so
that no new posts can me made to it.
Post - A post is a single public message by a user. It can be either a
first post, which starts a new topic, or a reply to an existing topic.
User - A user is anyone who registers an account in the forum.
Everyone needs to register to write in the forum, anonymous posting is not
possible. However, there is no need for an account just for reading. Users can
be granted membership status to selected boards, enabling them to see private
boards and post in read-only boards.
Forum Administrator - A forum admin can control and edit everything in
the forum. A forum can have multiple forum admins.
Board Administrator - A board admin is what most other forum
applications call the board moderator. A board can have multiple board admins. A
board admin's powers are limited to the board he is admin of. A board admin can
edit, delete and approve posts by normal users, mark topics as protected or
locked, and delete topics.
Score Moderation - If the score moderation system is active for a
board, every post in that board has a score. Users with votes can moderate a
post up or down, adding or substracting a point to/of the post's score. All
users can set a score threshold in their profile. If a post's score is lower
than that threshold, the post will be invisible to the user (except for a small
hidden-post-indicator). Using the 'Reveal'-button on the hidden-post-indicator,
users can temporarily reveal all hidden posts on that page. Forum admins can set
the default number of votes new users get, change this value for individual
users, and set the starting score individual user's posts have.
Markup Tags - There are two types of markup tags that can be used in
posts: HTML tags and mwForum's own markup tags. Both can be enabled/disabled for
each board, though HTML tags will be typically disabled for all user-writable
boards, since it's too easy for users to break the whole webpage integrity by
using wrong HTML tags. Currently implemented markup tags:
[b]text[/b] = renders text bold
[i]text[/i] = renders text italic
[tt]text[/tt] = renders text nonproportional
[img]image-URL[/img] = embeds an image (tag can be disabled)
