Many years ago I tried installing a MyBB bulletin board for an employee organization, then I did another as a community bulletin board that never really took off. I was looking into having a family bulletin board just to exchange information about the upcoming cruise and tried a Google Group, but the interface on that was surprisingly clunky. There are also bulletin board services you can use to easily set up a bulletin board, but I don’t know if they put ads all over, so I decided to do a phpBB installation, which is the most popular free bulletin board software.
My web host is HostGator and they have a “one-click” installer for a number of common web packages, including phpBB, so I did that. It wasn’t really one click, but it was pretty easy. I set up a subdomain first so that I would have a place to put it, then ran the installation and it emailed me the admin password. The only problem was it installed an older version (3.0.12) of the software and for some reason the home page didn’t work right away, but I think that’s because I didn’t wait for the email. So one of the first things to do was update the software to 3.2.5, which was probably just as hard or harder than installing it by myself without one-click. Whatever, at least HostGator was able to set up the database for me. It was a good exercise to see how updating the software works and it really isn’t that bad, though it’s not as easy as WordPress where you just push a button. Easier than updating my wikis.
Then it defaults to British English, so I wanted to change that to American English. So you have to install a language pack, which I did, but I’m not sure if I did that entirely correctly. I need to go back and check on that since I also enabled an extension, and I’m not sure that was necessary.
I wanted the board to be private (visible to registered users only) and I didn’t want bots or hackers registering. So first I set all registrations had to be activated by me before they could get in. Second, to make it invisible except for the sign up page, I had to change the permissions for guests and bots to none. There was some kind of extension that would do this, but the permissions seemed to do what I want.
I also had to set up some forums. There are posts and they are collected in forums. Then forums are collected in categories. So I renamed the default category and forum to what I wanted, but unfortunately this didn’t teach me how to add categories and forums on my own. But I figured that out (it is more cumbersome than I thought since each forum can have separate settings and passwords).
Next I wanted something that made it look personal and I had seen some with banner images across the top, so I found a way to do that with an extension called Custom Site Logo. That extension adds a control panel so that I can now change those settings or change the picture pretty easily.
It probably took about 2 hours. Then once I got it all of that working I still tweaked a few settings and added some new topics to discuss.
The next day I added a SSL certificate to the site for additional security. Now the URL starts with https:// instead of http:// Even with that change (to .htaccess in the top subdomain directory) Chrome didn’t show the site as secure. It turns out that because the URL for the banner image was an absolute link using http:// that the banner image made part of the site seem not secure. So in the extension control panel I changed the banner image URL to https:// and now I got the padlock for a secure site.
It seems like the board is useful and as we get close to the trip, activity is picking up. They have released two updates since I first got it running, so I decided to try to do an upgrade today. Their instruction would have you do some of the extracting and file manipulations on your own computer and then upload tons of files, but it is easier to set up a temporary directory on the server and do things that way. They recommend reinstalling the language pack for American English, so I did that, which involves putting files in three different places. But it all seems to have worked. The only thing that I didn’t do quite right was move the .htaccess file over, which I did once I realized it wasn’t automatically redirecting to https://