When the visitors select the Register link from the top menu, they are presented with the "Registration Agreement Terms". There are three options they can choose from:

When the visitor accepts the phpBB terms, the registration form is displayed. The exact meaning of each of the fields in this registration/profile forms will be described shortly. For now let’s concentrate on the absolutely required fields:

After all the information is filled out, the user clicks Submit. If there are validation errors, like incorrect syntax for e-mail address or password mismatch, information about the error will be displayed at the top of the form. On an error-free and successful registration, a "thank-you" screen is displayed. Depending on how the board is configured (see the Email Address field’s explanation in the table shown in the Editing Your Profile section that follows), the thank-you screen might advise the users to check their e-mail for a confirmation message in order to complete the registration.

Let’s see what a posting looks like, and what different elements it is composed of:

The Author information box consists of author’s nickname, joined-in date, number of posts, and location. It can also contain the avatar image, rank, and rank image, but these are not enabled by default. Ranks and avatars are discussed a bit later.

Post meta information consists of one tiny post graphic, date/time stamp, and post subject. This teeny tiny graphic is so small that most people won’t even notice it, and even if they do, they would think it’s just an ornament. But it’s in fact a functional graphic; it’s an exact link to this post. It’s not very likely that someone would want to go to the post they are reading at the moment, but this can be very useful when you want to give a link to a specific post, as opposed to a link to the topic in general. To get the exact URL of a posting, right-click this miniature graphic and copy the URL that it links to. The graphic can also be different in color, which has a meaning. In the default phpBB template, an orange-colored box denotes that it’s an unread post, whereas a white-gray box means that user has already read this post.

The Actions area contains buttons for the actions available to the user for this posting. The quote button is always there, and it looks like this: Another action button that can be available is the edit button, which looks like this: Whether the edit button is available depends on the user privileges, but in the default phpBB forum configuration, an author can edit his or her postings and a moderator can edit everybody’s postings. The author can also have a delete action, depending on the privileges and the specific posting. The default phpBB configuration allows the author of the post to delete it only if there are no more posts after that. Moderators have access to all action buttons—quote, edit, delete, and the button to view the poster’s IP address.

The Post text area contains the actual text of the message and the signature area contains the user’s signature in his/her profile.

The Top link is just a "Back to the top" link leading to the beginning of the current page.

The Contact author options area at the very least contains a button to access the author’s profile and a button to send the author a private message (PM). This area can also contain other information as entered in the profile: the e-mail address, ICQ number, MSN messenger ID, web address, and so on. The nice thing about the ICQ button is that it will show the ICQ status of the author (online or offline) provided of course that the author is allowing the status to be viewed in the ICQ settings.

A reply is a new posting in an existing discussion topic. It’s initiated by clicking the post reply button located at the top and the bottom of a topic listing. A reply can also be initiated by clicking the Quote action button, mentioned earlier, located in a post’s actions area. In this case, the post body will be pre-filled with the quoted posting.

Here’s the interface for posting a reply:

The only thing the user really needs to worry about on this form is the message body. Everything else is optional. Here are some more details about the posting interface:

Emoticons (mostly known as smilies) are those cute little images that help the users add a touch of personal and informal look to their postings. Clicking one of these graphics on the left will insert its textual representation in the message-body field. For example, if you click you’ll see :D inserted in the textbox, as shown in the preceding screenshot.

The blue text View more Emoticons is actually a link to a new window popup with more smilies to choose from. This link is something people often miss and then start asking you why on earth would you hide from them this Mr. Green icon that everybody else seems to be using all the time. The explanation is that it’s there, but is only accessible through the View more Emoticons popup.

Starting a new topic is very similar to posting a reply in an existing one. It’s initiated by clicking the new topic button. The form is very similar to the one we just saw, except that Subject is a required field, and there are fields to include a poll that will go together with the topic.

Some more topics of interest about the polls:

Users can format postings by using a small set of instructions (BB tags). When posting, you insert these tags here and there in the post body, and when you view a post, the tags are processed to produce the desired formatting. If you know some basic HTML tags, chances are you’ll have a pretty good idea of how the BB tags work and you can start typing them almost right away.

If you don’t know either HTML or BB tags (and most of your visitors won’t know them), don’t worry; you don’t have to learn this whole new secret code by heart. phpBB has an intuitive interface to guide you through this almost as easily as using a word-processing software. Just looking at the formatting toolbar should make most of the options clear.

There are two ways to apply a formatting: you can either type the tags out, or you can select the word or phrase you want to format and then click the appropriate button from the toolbar. Unfortunately, due to different JavaScript support in the different browsers, the second option is not available in some browsers or platforms. But the good news is that about 95% of all Internet users will have access to this feature, because they’ll be using a browser that supports it.

There is always an opening BB tag that shows where to start the formatting and a closing BB tag that shows where the formatting should end. The opening tag is of the form [tag] and the closing of the form [/tag]. Let’s take a look at the bold tag, as it’s probably the tag that’s used the most. If you want to bold the word "fun" in the sentence "Posting is fun", you type (or use the toolbar to produce the same result) "Posting is [b]fun[/b]". These tags might look scary if this is your first acquaintance with them, but are really easy once you get used to them.

You know that you can apply this formatting by typing the sentence, selecting the word "fun", and then clicking the B icon. There is another way of using the toolbar to do this:

Unlike the selection method for formatting (described previously), the scenario above will work in almost any browser that knows at least something about JavaScript. After step 2 above, the B icon will get an asterisk, indicating that there is an opened [b] tag that’s not yet closed. On completion of step 4, the asterisk will disappear.

Images can be inserted into your postings by using the [img] tag, assuming that the image is available on the Internet, i.e. you know its web address that starts with something like http://. You can also put web links into the postings, using the [url] tag, although phpBB is smart enough to guess when you have a web link in your posting and will automatically display it as a clickable link.

You can consult the phpBB user guide for more detailed information on the BB tags, but let’s first see an example to get a pretty good idea of how the tags work.

If you look at the screenshot earlier, which shows the formatting toolbar, you’ll notice that it looks like three distinct lines (or rows), containing respectively:

Time For Action—Formatting a Post

1. 1. You already know how to use the bold and italics formatting tags, but this time let’s also add underlining. Use your preferred method (the toolbar or the keyboard or simply type the tags yourself) in order to produce the following BB code: Posting is [b][i][u]fun[/u][/i][/b]!.

2. 2. The next thing is the quoting. Normally you would use the Quote action button when replying, but it doesn’t hurt to know how to do it manually:

I can quote other posters like this:
[quote="The Dude"]For my name is The Dude...[/quote]

1. 3. Now we take a look at the [code] tag, which is mostly used when people paste programming code into their postings, but can be used for other purposes like better aligning in a table-like manner, because it uses a fixed-width font. Type:

I can write "phpBB" using binary:
[code]01110000 01101000 01110000 01000010 01000010[/code]

1. 4. Next, the listings. Listings use the [list] tag to mark the beginning and the end of a listing, and use the asterisk [*] for a listing item. The listing start tag can take parameters like 1 or A. Try this:

And I can list stuff like this:
[list][*]one[*]two[/list]
or even enumerate, like this
[list=1][*]first[*]second[/list]

1. 5. Then add an image using the [img] tag and the web address of a known image, as follows:

I can use images:
[img]http://www.packtpub.com/images/Packt.png[/img]

1. 6. Now links. Links are inserted using the [url] tag, where there are two possible scenarios. Try them both as shown here:

Links: [url]http://www.packtpub.com[/url], fancy links: [url=http://www.packtpub.com]Packt Publishing[/url]

1. 7. And finally, the [color] and the [size] tags. Their start tags take parameters like [color=black], [color=blue], [size=7], etc. Try the following to get a better idea:

and [color=red]different [/color][color=green]colors [/color]and [size=18]font [/size][size=9]sizes[/size]!

What Just Happened

Click the Preview or Submit button, and you’ll see what you just did. It should look like the following screenshot.

Congratulations! You’ve just formatted a posting using almost all of phpBB’s formatting capabilities!

Users are allowed to edit their own postings. Again this is the default phpBB configuration and can be changed from the Administration Panel. Users edit their postings by using the Edit link located in the actions area.

After a posting has been edited, a small print message appears at the bottom of the posting, advising other users that this posting has been altered. The message goes like:

This message always appears, with only one exception. It will not appear if the posting was edited before another user has posted in the same topic.

Users are allowed to delete their own postings but only if it’s the last posting in the discussion topic. As soon as a reply is posted (even by the same user) the deletion of a posting is no longer possible.

Postings are deleted by using the delete action icon located in the post’s actions area.

If users want to know more about the other members of the community, they can obtain a member listing. Clicking the Memberlist top navigation link will bring up a list of all registered users. There are sorting options at the top of this listing. If, for example, you want to get a spicier listing like "Hmm, who’s posting the most?", you can sort on the basis of the number of posts. You can select Total posts as Select sort method and Descending as your Order. This will show you the top posting members.

Well, in our example board, there’s nothing spicy in the list of just the Administrator and The Dude, but it can get much more interesting as your community grows. Here’s how this type of Memberlist report looks like when executed on phpBB.com’s community.

This is an advanced phpBB feature that allows the creation of groups of users based on some criteria. Groups are defined by an administrator and are assigned a group moderator. By default, no groups exist. Users can apply to join a usergroup and, depending on the configuration (there might or might not be a need for the group moderator to approve the users), are approved.

This section of the board homepage was already mentioned. Interestingly, there is a sort of a hidden feature here—something that is not obvious enough for most people to notice. It’s the fact that the Who is Online heading is actually a link. (The same is true for the title of a forum category.)

Clicking Who is Online will bring a special "spy" screen, which is publicly available. This sneaky feature allows everybody to see what others are doing at the moment.

This can potentially become a long list of all currently logged-in users as well as the guests currently browsing the site.