This ranges from meta tags to the use of forumjump, enabling access masks to the display of IM icons.
- Meta Keywords
Enter the meta keywords for all pages. These are used by search engines to index your pages with more relevance.
Meta Keywords are used by some search engines to determine what your pages are about and to rank them. Other search engines such as Google do not take keywords into account.
All keywords you enter here will be put in the keywords meta tag in the header of every page. Separate keywords or phrases with a single comma and no space.
Example: vbulletin,forum,bbs,discussion,jelsoft,bulletin board
- Meta Description
Enter the meta description for all pages. This is used by search engines to index your pages more relevantly.
The Meta Description is used by some search engines to determine what your pages are about and to rank them. Other search engines such as Google do not take the description into account.
Enter a short description of your site here and it will be placed in the meta description tag in the header of every page. Most engines will accept a maximum of 255 characters for the description.
Example: This is a discussion forum powered by vBulletin. To find out about vBulletin, go to http://www.vbulletin.com/ .
- Use Forum Jump Menu
The Forum Jump menu appears by default on most pages and provides a quick jump to any of the forums on your forum as well as several other places (search, private messaging, etc.). While it can have a marginal impact on performance, typically you will only want to disable this if you have an extremely large number of forums as it will generate a large amount of HTML in that case, which will increase the size of pages and bandwidth usage.
Set this option to 'no' if you want to turn it off.
- Number of Pages Visible in Page Navigator
On thread and forum pages, as well as private messaging lists and other places, if there are multiple page number links to be displayed, this setting determines how many are shown on either side of the page currently being viewed. Setting this to 0 will cause all page links to be displayed.
Example: 3
- Enable Access Masks
Access masks allow you to enable or disable access to a particular forum for individual user(s). To use them, you must enable this option. This option also affects whether or not users will be able to see forums they do not have access to on forumhome and forumdisplay. (If this is off, they will see them in forum listings but not be able to enter them. If this is on, they will not see them at all.)
Set this option to 'no' if you want to turn it off.
- Add Template Name in HTML Comments
Setting this to 'yes' will add the template name at the beginning and end of every template rendered on any page. This is useful for debugging and analyzing the HTML code, but turn it off to save bandwidth when running in a production environment.
When modifying templates, it is often helpful to have this setting enabled so you can view the source of a page to determine what template(s) control it. In the course of normal usage, however, you will usually want this disabled as it will increase your page sizes and therefore bandwidth usage.
- Use Login "Strikes" System
Setting this to 'yes' will enable a system that tracks a user's (with a specific IP address) login attempts. After 5 incorrect login attempts the account is locked from that IP address for 15 minutes. This is to prevent bruteforce login attacks.
- Enable Forum Leaders
Forum Leaders is a listing of your important user groups. The display of assigned forum Moderators on this page is controlled with this option while the display of other groups is controlled via the usergroup manager.
- Post Referrer Whitelist
For security purposes, vBulletin only allows data to be submitted via post from within the domain the board is installed on. If you are submitting post requests from a different domain or subdomain, you must add them here.
- Thread/Forum Read Marking Type
This option controls how threads and forums are marked as read. The options are:
1) Inactivity/Cookie Based - once a user has been inactive for a certain amount of time (the value of the cookie timeout option) all threads and forums are considered read. Individual threads are marked as read within a session via cookies. This option is how all versions of vBulletin before 3.5 functioned.
2) Database (no automatic forum marking) - this option uses the database to store thread and forum read times. This allows accurate read markers to be kept indefinitely. However, in order for a forum to be marked read when all threads are read, the user must view the list of threads for that forum. This option is more space and processor intensive than inactivity-based marking.
3) Database (automatic forum marking) - this option is the same as a previous option, but forums are automatically marked as read when the last new thread is read. This is the most usable option for end users, but most processor intensive.Note:Changing this setting to database marking will mark all threads in the time set in the 'Database Read Marking Limit' as unread - Database Read Marking Limit
The amount of time in days to store the topic and forum read times. All topics or forums without posts in this many days will be considered read.
- Disable AJAX Features
This allows you to disable all AJAX Features or problematic AJAX Features only. Some languages, such as Arabic based languages, require this to be set to Disable Problematic AJAX Features in certain server and database configurations
- Enable Inline Moderation Authentication
Inline moderation actions will require a user to authenticate again prior to being performed. The timeout is based on the admin control panel timeout, or one hour if that option is disabled.
If you do not wish moderators and administrators to authenticate when using inline moderation then you can disable this using this setting.
Disable AJAX Features
AJAX uses JavaScript and features of recent browsers to allow additional data to be retrieved without doing a page refresh, such as posting with quick reply or editing a thread title inline.
These features may cause problems with boards not running in English. You may use this setting to disable all AJAX features or just the ones problematic with non-English boards.
Setting this option to yes will show the images for ICQ, AIM, MSN, and Yahoo! Messenger if the user has entered the correct information in his/her profile. These links are shown in various places through out the forum, on posts, who's online, memberlist, profile, etc. When set to no the information will be displayed in their profile in the form of text.
This is only shown in vBulletin Options > vBulletin Options > Style & Language Settings