## Preferences Admin

This sets up all the basic preferences for your site.

Admin mail address:
This is the main email address which will recieve mail under certain circumstances (i.e. contact module, submitted news, etc)

Default mail function:
Some free hosts don't allow the mail() function, if you have problems with mail being sent, then you may wish to change this to email()

Default language:
Default language for your site. If your language is not availiable for something (i.e. module, manual, etc), then it will default back to english.

Module for your start page:
List of currently installed modules which you may want to setup as showing up as your initial startpage.

Default timezone:
If a user doesn't have his timezone configured, then this default timezone will be used to display various times & dates. Server time-zone is auto-detected.

Default theme:
Default theme to be used on your site. You can also force all current users to this theme by checking the "change all users themes" box.

Allow users to select theme?
If users are allowed to choose their own themes. If turned off, then users will not see a theme selection box in their profile. Also as a security measure if turned off, all users themes will automaticly be switched to the current theme in question without you having to use the "change all users themes" checkbox above.

Username for anonymous users:
Default name shown for anonymous users in various sections of the site (i.e. news, forum, etc).

Minimum length of password required:
Passords smaller that this will prompt the user to enter a longer one upon registration.

Allow anonymous users to post comments?
Wether anonymous users are allowed to posts comments or not.

Maximum inbox messages per/user.
Sets how many private messages a user may have before he is not allowed to send any private messages anymore, until he cleans up his inbox. 0=No Limit

Allow HTML tags in user comments?
Wether users may use html tags in their comments or not, see below for limiting html if yes.

Allow users to display external images in posts, comments, & signatures?
Wether users may use <img src & [img tags in their posts.

Image library settings:
Wether users are allowed to use the image library, if they are able to add images to it, and if so, the maximum height/width & size the image may be. 1ko = 1024byte

Allow new users to register on your site?
Turn registration on/off

Verify for manual signups? Requires GD!
If ON, then users will be prompted to enter some verification characters like on major search engines to make sure it's really a manual signup.

Automaticly activate new users on signup?
If you have problems with email, or just want to skip the activation proceess, turn this on.

Notify by mail when a new user is registered?
If someone should be notified by email or not when a new user registers on the site.
Groups to notify: All members belonging to this group will recieve the notification email.

Allow users to delete own account?
If users are allowed to delete their own accounts or not.

Display loading.. image?
If turned on, then the themewaitbox "please wait while..." will load inbetween pages that take a long time to load.

Use gzip compression?
If your php version allows for it, you should probably turn this on, as raw html output will be compressed by php, and not only will it save you server bandwidth, but also pages should load faster for your users.

How strict should the allowed chars for username be?
Character strictness settings for user names. Depending on the setting, various characters like spaces & other will be stripped from the users name upon registration,

Name for user cookies:
You should be able to leave this at it's default. It's just the name of the cookie used for storing the users name.

Name for session cookies:
You should be able to leave this at it's default. It's just the name of the cookie used for storing the users session id.

Maximum duration of session idle time in seconds:
After how much idle time in seconds users are considered to be disconnected and need to login to the site again. Turn this to a high setting if you don't want your users to have to login to your site very often. 1h = 3600 seconds

Note: Sessions are IP based, so if a users IP changes, they will have to login again anyways.

Activate banner ads?
Wether you would like to activate banner rotations on your site or not. See admin/banners for setting up the actual banners.

Debug Mode:
Sets the verbosity level of debugging output.

Errors: Enables PHP & MySql error output. Usefull when debugging your installation or modules.

Timing: Show the page creation time at the bottom of the page.

Info: Shows how many sql queries where executed, how many files where loaded (and size), and the size the raw html that was sent to the user was.

Info & Log: In addition to the previous setting, this also allows you to click on some links and see the names/paths of actual files loaded, and list all sql queries executed since the start of the script.

Visual: Shows queries in the middle of your CMS's page, usefull for debugging modules sometimes. And if you have access to your server (php), you can install Xdebug to get extra info like which class/function generated the sql call.

Note: Info/Full modes are mainly meant for debugging purposes, as php/mysql error reporting is turned on with both of these settings and may reveal various system info (not that it's a big big problem). But unless your installing for the first time, tracking down problems, or coding a modules (or other), you will most likely want to turn this OFF or set it to TIMING.

Time in minutes that site pages are cached, if at all:
If tured on, then all pages accessed by anonymous users are cached for the time given. Pages a FULLY cached, meaning all their html content, not just the theme skeleton, and take up about 1meg per 25pages cached depending on the size of your pages.

On my local server, this type of caching speeds up server performance by 3, on my online server this type of caching is slower. So it seems to depend on if your server has a very fast file system, or if your database connection is faster.

In any case, turning this on should reduce mysql overhead by about 3-500%, but may be slower depending on how fast or not your filesystem is .. try both, or just leave it off if unsure.

Default Comment Display Mode:
How comments should be displayed by default. Flat is like on most forums, one post after the other. Threaded is like in newsgroups, comments are indented and attached to actual replies. Users can override this setting.

Default Comments Display Order:
Order in which to display comments by default, oldest or newest comments first.

Custom avatar settings:
Wether users are allowed to upload their own avatar images or not, and if so, the maximum height/width & size the image may be. 1ko = 1024byte

HTML tags allowed in all posts:
These are html tags which are allowed in posts or not. Any tags not checked here, will be escaped (not stripped) from the final message before being displayed on your site.

Admin/User tags apply depending on if it's a user making a post or an admin etc ... like this a admin for example could post up full-fledged html pages in stories, while a user could only use a handful of tags (if any at all).