Configure phpBB forum subscription by administrator via phpMyAdmin

As a lot of phpBB administrators found out that phpBB does not provide tools for administrators to set forum subscription for users. The intention of the phpBB is definitely a good one. However, in practice, as some of the administrators will agree that some administrator control can help grow the community.

The ethic behind the phpBB design apparently is based on the idea of no-spam. Forum user should have the ultimate say on what topic or forum he or she would like to subscribe, which most of us with common senses would have agreed. However, with my observation of the behavior of today's web surfers, there are quite few of them are lived in a very fast pest live and would not pay much attention to a lot of messages like: The user agreement, The user guide, or any community rules.

Rules and laws of a community all work around human behaviors. The design of computer software and social media should also work around human behavior. As long as the citizen and the forum user have the ultimate control, the system did not violate their right. In the case of the phpBB, the user does have some kind of ultimate control by routing forum notices to their junk mail box even though that really isn't an appropriate solution.

With regarding to the previous discussion, personally, I believe phpBB could made the following changes:

1. Allow users to remove themselves from the forum and delete their email information from the system.
2. An option for user to explicitly disable the forum to send email to them.
3. Give administrator the right to set forum subscription settings.
4. Allow administrators to force one forum subscription.

The item 4 above isn't as intrusion as it is sound since users are allowed to remove themselves from the system in case administrators abuse the privilege of serving their users.

Having the discussion out of the way, here is a way to set forum subscriptions to users by forum administrator by adding entries into the database table. The table that controls the forum subscription is forum_watch. By adding entries to that table, you force the user to subscribe to a forum.

The user_id is stored in the user table and the forum_id is stored in the forum table.

phpbb relative url howto - bbcode

Forum can host a lot of information and, from time to time, same or similar topics can be asked again and again. It is, therefore, not unusual, that forums contain links to pointed to one of its other threads - just like links in web pages that pointed to pages in the same web site.

Lot of times, relative URLs are used for these links for various reasons. For one, if the site is to be moved from a developing host to the production server, with the relative URL, none of those links need to be updated. From time to time, we also see companies got purchased and need to moved to a new domain and, hence the new URL. All of these justify the use of relative URL in web pages.

For the phpBB, up to version 3.0, the [url=][/url] BBCode does not support the use of relative URL. To overcome that, one solution is to create a customized BBCode called, say, [rel=][/rel].

Customized BBCode can be defined through the phpBB's administrator panel. Log into the forum as an administrator and click the 'Administration Control Panel' at the bottom. Re-confirm the administrator password. Click the 'POSTING' tab at the top menu bar and click the BBCodes link under the MESSAGE title in the left side bar. Click Add a new BBCode and enter the following information. In BBCode usage textbox, enter '[rel={LOCAL_URL}]{TEXT1}[/rel]' and, in HTML replacement textbox, enter <a href="{LOCAL_URL}">{TEXT1}</a>. Click the submit button.

If you would like to save the typing even more you could use <a href="/phpBB/{LOCAL_URL}">{TEXT1}</a> instead. In this case, all you need is the the URL part that run off your phpBB root directory.