Phorum 3 FAQ

 1. What files do I customize to change Phorum to fit my site.

    header.inc
    footer.inc
   
    You can have multiples of these.  Simply name the files 
    header_tablename.inc where tablename is the table name you gave the admin
    when creating the forum. Table names were selected because they are more
    compatible with file naming conventions.
   
 2. What permissions does Phorum need from the database?
 
    Select, Insert, Update, Delete, Alter Tables,
    Create & Drop Tables.

    
 3. I keep getting an error about Headers or Cookies.
 
    You most likely have a newline after ?> at the end of a file.

 4. Can I enable <a> tags and <img> tags in Phorum.
 
    Yes.  You need to edit post.php3 and remove the // comments from the
    following lines:
    
      //$body=eregi_replace("<(/*a *[^>]*)>", "{phopen}\\1{phclose}", $body);
      //$body=eregi_replace("<(img *[^>]*)>", "{phopen}\\1{phclose}", $body);
    
    That will allow anchor and image tags to be used in Phorum posts.
    
 5. I am getting an error when posting about the mail function.
 
    See "Known Issues" in readme.txt.
    
 6. When I add a forum it does not appear sorted in the drop down.
 
    It is sorted.  For more see "Known Issues" in readme.txt.

 7. When I post a new message, I get "Error getting nextval".
 
    Check your DB connection using the admin.  If that reports no connection,
    check your database values in the Master Settings.  If they appear correct,
    check that you have given the correct permissions in your database.   

 8. What is $cutoff?

    It was discovered that some queries were selecting the whole table.  In our
    case, 98,000 rows.  MySQL did not like this at all.  So, in lieu of a better
    solution, we put in this cutoff to limit the rows it selects.  You see, a
    limit clause in a query does not limit the rows selected, only the rows
    returned.  Therefore a query like:

    select * from table where id<1000200 limit 10

    returns 10 rows, but to get those 10 it would select every row with an id
    less than 1000200.  In this case it could be 1000199 rows.  So we made it
    now look like:

    select * from table where id<1000200 and id>(1000200-$cutoff) limit 10

    Now the max you will have selected is $cutoff.  I picked 800 because it will
    be fine 99.9% of the time.

    If someone wanted to display more than 800 messages on a page, they would
    need to up this.