miniBB Community Forum: Posting Rules

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

Allowed is everything which doesn't fit the borders.

The software works. It's proven for years and run on different forums by its authors. It may contain bugs and miss some things. But all other stuff works.

Taking a free software and trying to install yourself means you are qualified enough to do that. Only the right configuration, and/or developing/coding skills matter. Taking more level of customization means you know what you do. And miniBB developers are no in response for it, that is stated in the COPYING license file you get amongst the package.

If you are unable to set up or customize miniBB with your own powers, order it.

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 posting such question to public means you violate the rule.

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, it may appear so.

If you sure there is 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.

As our practice shows, 90% of all errors and questions like "why it's not working" come because of a stupid mistake as it is called by some people after discovering the reason.

"Released under Open Source License" here means our free solutions and packages come for free for those who know what to do with them. It doesn't mean we provide everything around if for free.

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. If you still experience a problem, and it's not described in the topics already posted, do not create a new related topic, but post your question in the older subjectively related topic.

Respect other people, and discuss the problems in the language the wide crowd may understand. This rule affects both the 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.

We may consider to analyze and reply your question in the language other than English, only if we find it important.

Create the message, which may be comfortably read by everybody in a quick time. 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 the problem could be solved, specify what exactly it is. A precisely formed question is the half of an answer.

Specify the 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" may be ignored, or deleted without investigation.

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.

Be Helpful.

If you have posted a question, but found an answer earlier than getting a reply, please provide a quick solution to your problem. That will give all other users an idea what happened. When asking for help, be ready to provide it back.

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 specific question, please post it under our Specific forum.