phpBB

When running a forum over time, alot of topics become "outdated". You want to keep them for historical reasons, but you are not really interested in people reviving them by replying to them.

The answer to this problem is the Auto Lock MOD which I have made to solve this exact problem.

After it is installed it is very easy to set up auto-locking. First you have to enable auto-locking on the board in general. This is done on the Configuration page:

You have to enable Auto-locking in the configuration for posts to become automatically locked.

Then you have to set up auto-locking for each forum you want to automatically lock posts that have not been posted to in a certain time-frame:

Then you have to set up the parameters for locking on a per-forum basis. You find these settings when you edit a perticular forum.

Download

You can donwload the MOD here

Installation

You can follow the instructions in the auto-lock-1.0.0em.txt file to install the MOD. The MOD is tested with EasyMOD so for your own convenience you should use that. Read how to use EasyMOD to install a MOD here.

I got a request from richey on the phpBB boards to add common replies to private messages as well as forum messages.

Version 1.0.4 of my Common Replies MOD adds this functionality.

You can download it here.

I have been customizing the excellent free forum system phpBB for almost two years. The modular design and the template system makes phpBB a very pleasent experience from a programming point of view.

Although I have been making many different customizations for phpBB, I had yet to make an officially released MOD. So a couple of weeks back I decided that I would rework one of my current customizations into an actual MOD. The result is this MOD.

The list of the common replies that you have defined, will be available at the bottom of each page, when you are viewing a topic.

The background for making this MOD is that when a community grows with several indiviuals every day, there are bound to be silly questions, wrong behavior, and, misplaced posts. Instead of getting a cramp from writing the same replies over and over, I have made this customization for phpBB.

This list of the common replies are also available from the posting page.

The basic idea is that you will have a list of common replies readily available when you are both reading posts and when you are replying to a post.

It is possible for members of a group to set up their own customized common replies if it is set up by the administrator.

The common replies are tied to the phpBB group system. You can define a list of common replies that will be available to the members of the group (i.e. moderators) and you can also allow the group members to define their own custom common replies.

Common replies are tied to a phpBB group. You can make different lists of common replies for each group, and the different messages will be available only to the members of those groups. If they are members of more groups they will be able to use all the different lists.

Furthermore it is possible to set up footers for both BBCode-enabled messages and for plain text messages.

You can define any number of common replies per group, and you can also decide what order they will appear in, so that the most common ones are at the top.

Both the allowed number of custom common replies and the footers are set up under the group that you want this functionality available to. To set up the list of common replies tied to the group, click the Canned Messages link the administration interface.

For each common message you set up the title, the actual message, if BBCode should be enabled and what moderator action will be performed after the message is posted.

For each group you can set up footers for both BBCode messages and for plain text message, and also the number of custom common replies that are allowed for the members of this group.

Download

You can download the MOD here.

Installation

You can follow the instructions in the common-replies-1.0.0em.txt file to install the MOD. The MOD is tested with EasyMOD so for your own convenience you should use that. Read how to use EasyMOD to install a MOD here.

Demo

If you would like to see a live demo of the system, it is available here. Username/password: demo/demo.