It includes many custom templates for a personal and professional design of the message boards.
SMF is written in the popular language PHP and uses a MySQL database.
It is designed to provide all the features needed from a bulletin board while having an absolute minimal impact on the resources of the server.
Here are some key features of "Simple Machines Forum":
General Features:
· Admin dashboard
· Comprehensive template system.
· Advanced permission and user management.
· Supports multiple languages at once.
· Open and well-documented source code.
· Tracking of new and old unread topics, not just from the last visit.
· Designed for optimal performance and scalability.
· Multi-media output. (XHTML, XML, RSS, WAP)
· Multi-language support from a large community.
· Package manager that automatically installs or uninstalls mods (also known as hacks.)
Security:
· All actions seamlessly require a session based authorization code.
· Administrative actions require the user's password (and do not rely solely on cookies.)
· Major actions are time and IP locked, preventing 'hammering'.
· The number of login attempts from a certain IP can be limited and time locked.
Forum Settings:
· Ability to display page creation time and query count per page.
· Put a board into maintenance mode, allowing only admins to login.
· Word censoring, either full word or partial.
· Ability to break up long words.
· Boards and Categories
· Group boards into collapsible categories.
· Set categories as non-collapsible.
· Reorder boards within categories, or reorder categories.
· Create child boards under other boards. (sub boards)
· Assign moderators to boards.
· Allow certain membergroups to access a board, including guests only.
· Configure permissions for each membergroup on the board level.
· Ability to indicate new posts to child boards but nothing new in parent.
· Member Registration;
· Require registration before forum entrance.
· Require a user to agree to terms before they register.
· Disable member registration completely (allowing only moderators to register people).
· Require email authentication by sending an authentication link.
· Require a moderator to approve registration.
· Register new members from the admin center.
· Member Navigation and Authentication
· Several security checks during navigation.
· Password reminder option, by email with confirmation. (doesn't automatically reset the password.)
· Both cookie and session based authentication (works without cookies.)
· Cookies can be set local to a path, global to all subdomains, or normally.
· Adjustable expiration time for authentication cookies.
· Member Tracking and Tracing
· Sortable and searchable public memberlist (accessible by a permission.)
· Powerful sortable and searchable admin memberlist.
· Show all (error) messages and IPs made by a member. (track user)
· Show all (error) messages from an IP address or range. (track IP)
· See who's doing what (accessible by permission.)
Statistics:
· Several board statistics (accessible by permission.)
· Tracking of member's online time in seconds.
· Tracking of topics, messages, new members, and hits per day.
· Individual member statistics accessible from their profile.
· News and Announcements
· Ability to create announcement boards (members receive a notification of topics automatically.)
· Member option to disable receiving announcements.
· Email or private message to the members by membergroup.
· Show a news ticker or news fader.
· Communication
· Ability to choose sendmail or SMTP (with or without authentication.)
· Ability to send a topic to a friend.
· Ability to view a "printer friendly" version of topics.
Membergroups:
· Create membergroups to group members on permissions, access rights, and/or appearance.
· Assign several membergroups to a single member, with one membergroup as the primary group.
· Define membergroups that are auto-assigned based on the amount of posts a user has.
· Determine the maximum number of personal messages a membergroup is allowed to have by group.
· Assign graphical symbol(s) to a membergroup by primary group.
· Determine which membergroups are allowed to access a board.
Banning:
· Ban members based on their username, email address, IP address or hostname.
· Support of wildcards for email address, IP address, and hostname.
· Include a ban reason (viewable for the banned user).
· Include a ban note (only viewable by the admins).
· Chose between full ban, 'no post' ban, or registration ban.
· Include an expiration time for bans.
Requirements:
· PHP 4.1.0 or higher
· MySQL 3.23.4 or higher
· 512 kilobytes of storage space in the database
· two and a half megabytes of storage space on the web server
· Apache or IIS
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· A few critical security issues have been identified in the two maintained versions and are fixed with this update.
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