To access: Click the Forums icon on the Admin Panel
or Access http://example.org/tiki-admin.php?page=forums

From this panel you can control which forum will be used as the Home forum, if rankings will be used or not for the forums and the default ordering for forums in the forum listing.

Globally

From the admin groups screen you can set up the global permissions for the forums:

- to view a post, you need tiki_p_forum_read
- to post a topic, you need tiki_p_forum_post_topic
- to post a post (answer to a topic), you need tiki_p_forum_post
- to edit a topic or a post, you need tiki_p_forum_post and to be the author
- to remove a topic or a post, you need tiki_p_admin_forum

Of course a tiki_p_admin_forum or tiki_p_admin can do whatever he wants

Setting Individual permissions for a forum

From the admin forums screen you can click on the perms link to set up individual permissions for a forum.

Setting individual permissions can be used to have private forums, to control who can post new topics in some special forums, to give admin privileges to a group of user only for some forums, etc. As usual when individual permissions are set for a forum global permissions don't apply.

Another option available from the Admin forums page is that of Import forums. The purpose of this tool is to migrate forum contents from another site into your Tiki forums. Currently, only importation of another Tiki forum is supported. It is recommended that you back-up your database before performing this import.

Currently, the only import method supported is to import a forum from the contents of an SQL text dump of a database. The only SQL file dump currently tested was from a MySQL database.

Upon selecting the Import forums option, you will be prompted to provide information on the identity and location of the source SQL file. For the importer to work properly, the SQL file must exist in either tikiroot/temp/filename.sql or tikiroot/img/wiki_up.

Fill in the necessary information and click Get Forum List. This will then verify that the file can be located and tell you either way: if not found, you may go back to the first screen, otherwise proceed. If allowed to proceed, the tool will parse the SQL file you specified and pull a list of forums it found for you to select from. It will also pull a list of forums from your Tiki site and present them for you to select a destination:

You may only select one source forum and one destination forum. Basically, you can only migrate one forum at a time. This is mainly for performance reasons. The larger the SQL file, the longer the migration will take and the more memory it takes up. To migrate more than one forum at a time would tax most Tiki install environments.

Once you have selected your source and destination forums, click on Import Forum.

Length of time to import a forum

Again, depending on the size of the SQL file, this may take a few minutes to process. Some installations may encounter an error when you first run the tool because php.ini has the following set:

This parameter means the longest a php script can run is 30 seconds. Through trial and error, for importing forums from an SQL file in the neighborhood of 10Mb, use a max_execution_time of 100. Recently, the Workflow site imported 300 posts from a dump of the tikiwiki.org site; the SQL file for that was 1.3Gb, and execution took less than 180 seconds. If you have the ability to temporarily configure this setting, I would recommend:

then finish your imports, and reset it back to 30.

What gets imported?

Once the import is complete, you will be advised how many actual posts were imported into the new forum.

The importing of forum posts actually appends the old posts to the current comments table, so each post gets a new thread id. Each thread is then recalculated so that replies in the same thread are still associated with each other.

Datestamps are retained, so posts imported will show up with their original post date, and will not appear as new posts.

Usernames are retained as the sender of the post, however the user account doesn't necessarily have to exist on the new server.

Most other data associated with the post record that appears in the comments table is also retained.

What does not get imported?

Attachments are not imported. If there was an attachment to a post, there may be an empty reference to the attachment, but the actual attachment does not get imported.

Posts that were made but are awaiting on moderator approval will not be imported.

If a forum was reported, that gets ignored in the import.

The admin forums screen shows a list of available forums and a form to create/edit a new forum. Following is a breadown of each option:

Once a forum is created you can see it displayed in the listing at the bottom of the Admin forum page:

The edit link can be used to edit the forum while the perms link can be used to set-up individual permissions for the forum.

To set it up:

• Create or Edit a forum and enable: "Posts can be rated"
• While editing the forum, choose whether to show the "User information display > Topic Rating" by each user (Tiki13+)
• Set the rating options at "Admin Home" > Ratings" > "Comments" > "Simple wiki comment ratings" > "Wiki rating options:" (1, 2, 3, 4, 5; or less/more options than those)

Ensure that you granted to your desired group/s the permission to vote, and view the rating results.

• forums > tiki_p_forum_vote
• tiki > tiki_p_ratings_view_results

Example of the thread list in a forum, showing results for the first message of every thread (thread topic), with detailed results and rating smileys both enabled.

Click to expand

If we visit one of those threads of that forum, we can see that the rating shown in the threads list corresponds to the rating of the thread topic (first message of the thread). Replies to that topic can also be rated by users.

Click to expand

Since Tiki13, there is a new forum setting to allow the optional display of the Rating by each user to that forum thread topic in each reply.

Useful to ease the task to reach consensus on deliberations (in forum threads) by identifying in a more clear way the position (topic rating) of each person on that topic at each moment on the discussion.

Click to expand

The user/s defined as moderator/s (see the forum options "moderator user" or "moderator group" above) have some extra set of actions that can be performed on the forum topics, or on forum posts when approval is required before listing posts (see "Moderation queue" below).

Icon	Description
	move selected topics (to another forum)
	unlock selected topics
	lock selected topics
	delete selected topics
	merge selected topics

Moderation queue

A forum moderation queue can be defined through the forum option "Approval type":

• By selecting "All posted", no approval is required.
• When selecting "Queue anynomous posts", only posts from non forum members will be queued for approval.
• Finally when opting for "Queue all posts" any new posts in the forum will not be displayed until it has been approved.

Therefore, when the queue is set, forum moderators will have to approve those forum posts before they are publicly readable in the forum.

• Forum and Mailing List Synchronization
• Forum Details

See all related links on the forum page.