Followers of the MyBB Community Forums will have noted that my presence on the forums has been limited in the past two weeks. Readers of my blog will also note that I haven’t posted here in a very very very long time, and since I am on vacation I have a bit of time to leave a note here :).

Where am I? Hint: I am plotting evil strategies for MyBB to take over the world with Peter. (Just kidding, but I am relatively near where Peter’s studying)

When? Now!

Who? Me!

Why? Err…to have fun?

What am I doing? Visiting family, doing normal vacation stuff.

Unfortunately I don’t have a steady internet connection over here. This vacation coupled with my study in the past few months means I haven’t been able to work on MyBB much. But fortunately Chris, Tikitiki, Justin and the other staff have been working hard on maintaining the MyBB 1.2.x series and also developing 1.4.0 (I can’t wait to see all the features they have added in the past 20 days; too bad I can’t show you everything we’ve got so far, but some of the major new features have been blogged already ). After the 20th I’ll be back at home and I’ll be working on MyBB once again, but I need to get up to speed to what the team’s been doing for the past few months since so much has changed in MyBB since the 1.2.x series. I’m happy to see that many suggestions from the community (and also some of mine yay!) have been implemented already. This reinforces one of our goals which is to make the software something that the community wants to use, not just for our own benefit.

Anyway that’s all from here.  My next blog post will probably from home sweet home

All administrators of MyBB probably know of the MyBB License one way or another. However, it has come to my attention that there are some people who just can’t get their head around one statement in the license. It happens to be this one:

The MyBB Group has several copyright notices and “powered by” lines embedded within the product. You must not remove, alter or hinder the visibility of any of these statements (including but not limited to the copyright notice at the top of files and the copyright/powered by lines found in publicly visible “templates”).

Is the text too difficult to understand? Personally I think we have made this as clear and as inambiguous as possible. Would you not agree? To me, it is quite easy to understand from this quotation that I am not allowed to remove any copyright notice and “powered by” statements which have been already written into the files distributed in the MyBB package. I don’t see any other way of interpreting it.

Is the license too difficult to find? The license is distributed in the Documentation folder of the full MyBB package. It is also displayed when the forum is installed. By installing a forum, the administrator has to at least see one, if not both instances where the license is displayed during the installation of a forum.

Are you that ashamed of running MyBB? I have seen MyBB forums changing the “powered by” line to other software such as vBulletin. I mean, if you like vBulletin, or IPB, or the other software that much, why not use that instead? Why mask MyBB as another software? Is there something wrong with using MyBB? If so, I’d suggest you voice your feedback on the MyBB Community Forums. We respect all feedback, and we take in your suggestions when we’re developing the next version of MyBB. We want to make MyBB something that you and your users want to use. This isn’t just for our own benefit.

I spent an hour tonight surfing the web looking for violators, and with a simple web search, I was able to find around 40 within the time I spent. And that was only for one search. I’m sure there are hundreds of forums out there who have removed the MyBB copyright and/or “powered by” lines.

To the MyBB forum owners who have removed the copyright and/or “powered by” lines, it isn’t a matter of if your forum will be found, it’s when. We enforce our License to the fullest extent possible, including legal action if required. How would it feel if you spent hours working on something to have it taken by another person who claims it is theirs? Not too happy I’d assume. We aren’t either.

Support us, and we will support you. It’s only two lines with links to the official MyBB homepage at the bottom of your forum. Is that too much to ask really?

If you really despise the copyright lines that much, please consider purchasing the privilege of removing the copyright on one board with a small payment to Chris Boulton. Please contact him for more details about this.

PS: Thanks to everybody (the majority of MyBB administrators) who is adhering to the License and thus supporting us

Although this feature may not be used by many, it is now possible to give usergroups permissions in the Admin CP (only if the usergroup has “Can Access Admin CP” permission).

When you edit the permissions, the permissions listed are the same as the ones found in the existing individual user admin permissions.

How do these affect my admins, you ask? Well now let’s say you want your moderators to access the Admin CP to moderate posts and attachments, but you don’t want to set the individual yes/no permissions for all 20 of them. Now you can set the usergroup permissions to all ‘no’ except for the Moderate Posts/Threads/Attachments permission, and all the users in that usergroup will have those permissions.

Basically, if a user’s individual admin permissions are set, those will be used. If they are not set, then if the user’s usergroup has admin permission set, those will be used. In turn, if they are not set, then the user will use the default admin permissions.

Hopefully it’s not confusing for everyone.

Another of my Admin CP addons: The Translation Manager. This is also known as the “Language Packs” section, “Language Editor”, and other variations). It allows administrators with the new permission “Can Manage Languages” to edit each individual language variable in each language file, and also the properties of the language. Below is a screenshot of the main page:

There are two menus for each language. One menu allows you to choose the method of editing the language variables. The other menu allows you to perform operations on the language pack as a whole. Currently the only operation is editing the properties of the language pack, as shown below:

However, the editing of language variables is the best part of this utility. You can either edit languages by itself, or “with another language.” This allows translators (and anyone else) to compare two language packs, for example, the English translation with the translator’s language pack. First, a file must be chosen to be edited:

Below are two screenshots of the editor itself: one in single-mode, and one in dual-mode (comparing English to my test language pack).

I hope this feature will benefit both translators and administrators when editing language files. This makes it easy for any administrator to change the format of the emails, the registration agreement, and any other text in MyBB. Very flexible eh?

A technical note: The language folders and files must be CHMODed so that the web-server can write to it. If the files are not editable, a notice will be shown and administrators will not be able to save their changes.

Custom Moderator Tools are one of the new sections in the Admin Control Panel in MyBB 1.2. Also known as ‘multi-moderation’, this feature allows you to add ‘tools’ to the standard moderator options that allow you to do many moderator actions at the same time. For example, for our beta boards, we have a tool to mark fixed bug threads with a [F] and move it into the appropriate “Fixed Bugs” forum, and also add a reply stating that the bug was fixed. The tools allow moderators to do many actions in one, saving time and effort.

In the Admin CP, administrators can either add a “Post” tool or a “Thread” tool. As you may be able to guess, the Post tool is shown in the Inline Post Moderation options at the bottom of each thread. The “Thread” tools are shown at the bottom of the Inline Thread Moderation options at the bottom of each forum, and also at the bottom of each thread in the Moderation Options menu. As you can see from the screenshots below, there are many options that you may choose to include for each type of tool.

And the custom tools are displayed in an option-group clearly separated at the bottom of the moderator menus:

And yes this feature was the guess-the-feature in one of my previous blog posts.

It took me a while to convert all the moderator actions into a class first so that the custom moderation tools could easily execute them, but I think the work is worth it in the long run, as we can now mark bug threads and suggestion threads on the Community Boards with ease and I’m sure many administrators and moderators out there will find it quite useful on their board as well.