Installing a MOD on PHPBB for User Management

24 August 2006

My Penguin Tutor Linux Forums are built using phpBB. I have had a few users signed up that have not posted, but have included a URL in their profile. This look as though they are just trying to get a link from my web site to their own site to help improve their Google rating.

I have already prevented theses from gaining advantage by blocking the user profiles from the search engines using an entry in the robots.txt file. I did look at deleting these users from within phpBB, but the way that the administration panel is setup means that these have to be done by first going in to each profile and then manually deleting the users.

There is a section of the phpBB web site dedicated to mods: http://www.phpbb.com/mods/. These are like plug-ins, but as phpBB does not offer a very flexible plug-in option, they instead require changes in the actual phpBB code.
The one I installed is Admin Userlist phpBB Mod, which adds another menu item on the administration panel which gives the ability to manage multiple users at the same time.

The mod is relatively easy to install, although as they involve changes to the actual phpBB code they do have an element of risk associated with them, so always backup the phpBB files before applying a mod. In this case it's a case of copying a couple of files into the style directories and editing one of the admin panel files. All the details are included in the install file in the mod zip file.

This is a useful feature and I hope this or something similar eventually gets incorporated into future versions of phpBB. For now it provides an easy to install mod that can make it easier to manage the phpBB forums.