!!! BEFORE POSTING A NEW MESSAGE OR TOPIC - STUDY OUR RULES BELOW !!!

We have the following rules applied to new messages on our forums, listed below. If your posting on forums is not compliant with these rules, miniBB team may ignore it, or remove without explanation.

If you don't read the rules, don't wonder we don't listen to you.

No free support about your own installation problem available. Taking a free software and trying to install yourself means you are qualified enough to do that. We're installing a lot of miniBB software around within minutes having no problems with it, but knowing - only right configuration, and/or developing/coding skills matter. Problems may come, if you are a 'newbie', 'beginner' or just the person who doesn't know where to start. Unfortunately we can't be teachers or trainers 'cause we are just coders. There is only a small difference between the wordings learn and earn, but we are preferring the second at this stage. We have learned enough to earn; if you want to do the same, come here when you are ready, but don't ask us to learn instead of you, it's impolite.

miniBB should be installed only by the person, who is familiar with the basic server hosting issues like installation of the database, modifying text files, configuring the permissions etc. It's all a very easy process, but if you are unable to set up or customize miniBB yourself, order it from miniBB team.

Be sure your question may be useful or interesting for others. If the question is related to the specific problem of your own site/project, and it contains the words "my, mine, my own, how do I, I want" in its title or message, it is called "custom". We are providing only basic help about custom modifications, if it doesn't exceed our regular response time. Overall, we are providing only paid support on any kind of custom work. That means, if you give questions related to:

- CSS and layout of your site
- forums integration into your site
- add-ons not working on your site (despite they all are working on minibb compiled testing forums if you repeat your problem there)
- other custom questions related exclusively to your site or project

then we will not provide any solutions for free, and your question may be optionally removed without reply.

As it's said "Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today; teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime" - so we are nor giving a fish, nor giving fishing lessons. We are only selling them. But we are still giving a fishing rod for free.

Be sure your posting about the error or bug is not custom. If you can not repeat your error on our miniBB.com forums, or full demo test forums, the error is on your side, and we have no plans to investigate it. Remember: 90% of all errors and questions like "why it's not working" come because of a stupid mistake as it is called by some peole after discovering the reason.

"Released under Open Source License" here means our free solutions and packages really come for free for those who know what to do with them. If you sure there is really a mistake in our code, point us to the point of solution of that mistake, or to the steps of repeating the same mistake. Just sayings like "this code is not working" can't be considered serious on our board and may be deleted without further investigation.

Please, do not steal miniBB's team and programmers bread and do not ask other coders to implement custom solutions for you for free. It's very impolite to do on our board.

Don't ask about what's already answered. Before posting any message and/or creating new topic about some feature of miniBB, read our manual. It describes almost everything you may know about miniBB. Search our forums - if you repeat the question, it will be deleted without notice.

For example, questions like:

- How to make forums for registered users only
- Login troubles to admin panel
- Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by ... etc.

are discussed dozen times already. If you still experience a problem, and it's not described in the stuff already posted, do not create new related topic, but post your question in the old, same-subject topic. Otherwise, we may delete it without explanation.

Respect other people, and discuss the problems in the language others may understand. This rule affects both language you use, and the level of your writing skills. We require that all messages here must be written in English, and they should look recognized.

Create the message, which WILL BE read by many others. Your single message should fit the screen of 1024x768 standard resolution. Do not post the wide code listings or large messages, even if they give extra detailed explanation about your problem. If it takes more than a minute to read your message, we doubt that everybody from our team will study it in whole and give a reply.

Describing a problem/error/bug, be as more precise as you can, and be sure what it is about. Before problem could be solved, specify what exactly it is. A precisely formed question is the half of an answer.

Specify browser, operational system, server, PHP/mySQL version and other technical information needed; step-by-step instructions to repeat the problem. If it's possible for you to create a screenshot, use our forums' File Storage for saving it there, and providing link to it in your message. Providing exact URL to your project, where we can investigate the error, will help miniBB team a lot.

Creating new topic, specify very precise and descriptive topic title. Generic unmeaningful titles like "Please help me", "I need help", "Help me ASAP", "Some questions" are ignored and/or deleted without studying.

Create the message, which corresponds to the topic's subject. If the topic is about subject A, but your message is about subject B, it may be removed without reply and even without moving to the related topic.

Additionally:

If you have posted a question, but found an answer yourself in the time while nobody replied you, please be polite to provide a solution yourself in short, at least.

If your topic or question has been deleted without explanation, search our forums, manual and site - and you should find an answer! Please, keep our time - it's very expensive - and we will keep yours.

If you don't know, how to find where to edit piece of code, read our related quide on how you can locate the necessary file.

If you still feel you need an urgent help regarding your question, please post it under our Specific forum.

P.S. THE TRUE. As we know from our own forums, most of the questions incompatible with our forum rules, are given by the most unexperienced users. Mostly only extra noobs may think there is an error in miniBB script itself, but not only on their side. Only beginners are posting about every problem they come up to. They are not investigating why the error came, and even do not try to do so, but they want we do this instead of them.

It's open source, guys, and we are not the wizards to investigate your own problem just thinking instead of you. If you can not repeat the error on miniBB test forums, or minibb.com forums, it only means the error is yours. It may depend on your very own customization, configuration, server conditions and hundreds of reasons, which are not worth investigating in the general software, and which are impossible to determine without custom debugging. Don't hope somebody will investigate it for free, except yourself.

Amongst beginners people just playing with the board's software, are giving a lot of duplicated, custom, unrelated to the free support questions. We're not interested in giving them a response. We're interested in serious customers, who will install our software and use it for more long time than one day, one week or one month. Please, be a reliable person and do not overload our busy team with short-term related stuff.

Try to learn and think, if you are not able to pay our professional services. We all have learned from scratch the same way. Thank you for understanding in advance.