Many of these settings have to do with the SQL server configuration, and
have already been set, if you are using them. There are a few others
though.
Note that lines starting with '%' are comments. Most options are described
in details by the comments in the file.
-
Edit the automatic recompilation flag.
Look for the line
/auto_recompile 2 def
This controls what checks Backtalk does to decide if a script needs to be
recompiled.
It is set to 2 by default, which means that every time Backtalk runs a script,
it first checks the last update times of all source scripts and automatically
triggers a recompilation if any are newer than the compiled script.
This is nice because it means any changes made to the scripts will be
instantly reflected on the web pages, but it does have a small performance
penalty.
If you aren't going to be updating your scripts much or if your processor
is unusually slow, changing it to 1 is a good choice. Then only the date
of the main configuration script config.bt will be checked.
If eventually your system configuration gets stable enough that you aren't
going to be making changes to the config.bt file, and if you want to
make Backtalk run a wee bit faster, you may eventually want to change it to 0,
but this is probably not worth the effort.
-
Edit the system name.
Look for the line
/bbsname (SITE-NAME) defconstant
and change the portion in parenthesis to the name of your conferencing system.
It can have spaces in it. For example, if you conferencing system is to
be called "Star Forum" you might set this to
/bbsname (Star Forum) defconstant
-
Set up your system's logo.
Backtalk allows you to define an image to use as a logo for your conferencing
system.
You can define two different logo images. The standard logo should be about
half a screen wide, maybe 250 to 400 pixels. You can also define a wide
logo, intended to be about as wide as a screen, maybe 600 to 800 pixels wide.
However, none of the standard interfaces actually use this, so unless you are
installing other interfaces, you needn't bother with that.
Create the logo image as a .gif, .jpg or .png file and store it in the
image directory under Backtalk's home directory
(where backtalk.jpg already is).
Look for the lines
/logo imghost(/backtalk.jpg)+ defconstant
/logo.h 125 defconstant % height of logo
/logo.w 285 defconstant % width of logo
and replace the (/backtalk.jpg) part with the name of your logo image
file, replace 125 with the height of your image, and replace
285 with the width of your image.
For example, if your logo is a 200 by 400 pixel GIF file named
`starforum.gif', then you'd change these lines to
/logo imghost(/starforum.gif)+ defconstant
/logo.h 200 defconstant % height of logo
/logo.w 400 defconstant % width of logo
Actually, the image doesn't have to be under the image directory.
You can give arbitrary URLs, by doing something like:
/logo (http://www.mysite.com/picts/starforum.gif) defconstant
If you want the image to be clickable, then find the line that says
%/imageURL (http://localhost) defconstant
uncomment it by deleting the initial percent sign, and change the
`http://localhost' part to the URL that you want people sent to if
they click on your logo image.
-
Who may Create Accounts?
By default, Backtalk is configured to allow random people coming in off the net
to create Backtalk accounts simply by filling out the registration form, and
immediately start using those accounts.
This can be changed by editting the configuration file line that looks like:
/newuseropen 2 defconstant
If you change the newuseropen value to '1', then people will still
be able to create accounts with the same public form, but the accounts will
be created in an "unvalidated" state, and will not be usable until an
administrator has "validated" them (this can be done through the web
interface).
If you change the newuseropen value to '0', then it will no longer
be possible to create accounts using the public newuser form. Accounts
will only be creatable by adminstrators.
-
Should Email Addresses be Validated?
By default, Backtalk does no email address validation. But if you change
value in the
/validatemail 0 defconstant
line to 1 or 2, then Backtalk will automatically send an email message to
users who have filled out the registration form. The message will contain
a URL with an imbedded validation code. When the user's click on that URL,
Backtalk will record the fact that their email address is validated.
If validateemail is set to 1, all it does is record that the email
addresss is validated. It does not change the validation state of the account.
This could be used with a newuseropen setting of 1 or 2.
If validateemail is set to 2, then the account will be automatically
validated when the email addresses is validated.
This only makes sense with a newuseropen setting of 1.
Note that by default the registration form does not require that email
addresses be entered. If you want to do email address validation, you'll
probably want to edit the lib/userinfo.bt configuration script
to flag the email question as a "required" one.
Obviously none of these options work unless Backtalk has been configured
to send email.
-
Should Unauthenticated Reading be Allowed?
By default, Backtalk is configured to allow users who have not authenticated,
and possibly don't have accounts, to read all open conferences anonymously.
They can't post, and the system won't remember what they have seen, but they
can observe. If you would like to disable unauthenticated reading entirely,
so that only people with accounts may read the conferences, then edit the
line that looks like:
/allowanon 1 defconstant
Just change the 1 to a 0.
-
Should Unauthenticated Posting be Allowed?
By default, Backtalk conferences do not allow users who aren't logged in
to post items or responses.
If you want to enable this, you'll need to set up appropriate
acl files in each of the conferences you want it to work in and
uncomment the anonposter definition in config.bt.
This definition gives the name of the backtalk account that is to be used
as the owner of all anonymous postings. If you uncomment this, you should
create a backtalk account by that name. The full name on that account will
be the default name for all anonymous posters.
So you could set it to something like:
/anonposter (anonymous) defconstant
Then create that account witht that name,
and forget the password (since you'll never
want anyone to actually log into this account).
-
Set Author Powers
Different systems have different ideas of what kinds of editing powers
the person who originally posted an item should have over that item.
These are configured with the settings below:
/author_freeze 1 defconstant
/author_kill 1 defconstant
/author_retire 1 defconstant
/author_retitle 1 defconstant
/author_erase 1 defconstant
/author_hide 1 defconstant
/author_edit 0 defconstant
They are all normally enabled by default.
You can disable them by changing the 1's to 0's.
The author_freeze option, if enabled, allows the original poster of
an item to freeze it, so that no further postings can be made to it by
other users.
The author_kill option, if enabled, allows the original poster of
an item to delete it so long as no responses have yet been made by
other users. If other people have responded to an item, then it cannot
be deleted by the author, even if author_kill is enabled.
The author_retire option, if enabled, allows the original poster of
an item to retire it, so that it is no longer displayed to users who
``read new'' or ``read all'' but can still be seen by people who explicitly
request to see it.
The author_retitle option, if enabled, allows the original poster of
an item to edit the title of the item.
The author_erase option, if enabled, allows the original poster of
a response to erase that response at a later date. (Normally copies of erased
responses are logged.)
The author_hide option, if enabled, allows the original poster of
a response to hide that response at a later date. Hidden responses aren't
displayed unless the reader makes an extra mouse click. Disabling this would
be a bit weird.
The author_edit option, if enabled, allows the original poster of
a response to change the text of that response at a later date.
(A copy of the previous text is logged.)
If attachments are enabled on the system, it also allows addition,
deletion and editing of attachments on previously posted messages.
Some people think this disrupts the flow of the
conversation, but some sites seem to enable it without many problems
ensuing.
It defaults off.
-
Set Fairwitness Powers
Different systems have different ideas of what kinds of editing powers
that conference hosts should have. (Conference hosts are traditionally
called ``fairwitnesses'' in Backtalk. They are users appointed by the
system administrator to oversee one particular conference.)
These are configured with the settings below:
/fw_erase 1 defconstant
/fw_hide 1 defconstant
/fw_retitle 1 defconstant
/fw_edit 0 defconstant
They are all normally enabled by default.
You can disable them by changing the 1's to 0's.
System administrators always have all of these powers.
Fairwitnesses can always freeze, retire, and kill items.
The fw_erase option, if enabled, allows the fairwitnesses to
erase other user's responses to items in their conferences.
The erased text is logged so it can be recovered, but becomes inaccessible
to other users.
The fw_hide option, if enabled, allows the fairwitnesses to
hide other user's responses to items in their conferences.
Hidden responses are not normally displayed to users, but they can see them
with one extra mouse click if they want.
The fw_retitle option, if enabled, allows the fairwitnesses
to edit the titles of items in their conferences. This may be useful if
the author chooses undescriptive titles, or the conversation drifts into
other topics.
The fw_edit option, if enabled, allows the fairwitnesses
to edit the content of items and responses posted by other users.
The original content is logged.
We think letting someone change someone else's words is a horrible idea,
so this option defaults off, and we strongly discourage turning it on.
-
Disable Editing Frozen Items?
By default, Backtalk allows you to do operations like erasing, hiding or
editing responses on a frozen item
without thawing the item first, if you have the power to thaw the item.
These are implemented by briefly thawing the item and then quickly refreezing
it. This might open a brief window in which a frozen item might appear
unfrozen to other users. If this worries you, you can disable this behavior,
so that operations cannot be performed on frozen items.
-
Hide User's Names and Personal Info?
Some systems, notably those with users who are minors, don't want to publish
their user's names and personal information on the web. Backtalk can be
configured to identify users only by their login IDs, not by their full names
and to suppress display of other personal information. There are two kinds
of names whose visibility is controlled by the anonymity setting:
the user's "real" name saved in the user database, and the name or
alias that the user attaches to postings he makes.
The different anonymity levels are:
| Anonymity | Who can see full names: | Who can see response names:
|
|---|
| 0 | everyone. | everyone.
|
| 1 | authenticated users only. | authenticated users only.
|
| 2 | admins only. | current conf fairwitness only.
|
| 3 | admins only. | admins only.
|
Level 0 is the default. You can set other levels by doing something like:
/anonymity 1 defconstant
-
Allow HTML Postings by Default?
With Backtalk fairwitnesses (conference hosts) can decide if HTML is to be
allowed in postings to their conferences. The dflt_html switch
sets the default value for conferences where the fairwitness has not set the
option.
It is initially set to 1. Set it to 0 to disable HTML by default.
Note that only a safe subset of HTML is allowed, and if you are sharing
conferences with Yapp or Picospan, Backtalk automatically filters the HTML
out of the versions of the postings that they will display.
-
External Links in New Windows?
Messages posted to Backtalk by users often contain URLs of other sites on the
web. Backtalk will generally make most of these clickable. By default,
Backtalk will create the links in such a way that clicking on them causes
the linked page to come up in a new window, instead of replacing the Backtalk
screen in the original window. If you'd prefer more normal link behavior,
set linktonew to zero and the pages will be loaded into the same
page instead.
-
Show server's motd file?
If you want the web interface to display your system's /etc/motd file,
then you should uncomment the line:
%/show_motd 1 defconstant
by removing the percent sign from the front.
This is most often used on installations with real Unix logins.
If this is not defined, then Backtalk will instead display the
motd.html file found in the bbs directory. This is specific to
Backtalk and can contain HTML tags.
-
Display user's .plan files?
If you want to store user's personal information in their .plan files instead
of in their .backtalk files, then
you should uncomment the line:
%/useplan 1 defconstant
by removing the percent sign from the front.
This is most often used on installations with real Unix logins.
-
Acknowledge a Text Interface?
If you are setting up Backtalk to share conferences with Picospan or Yapp,
you should define the text_interface constant to the name of that
system, either:
/text_interface (Picospan) defconstant
or:
/text_interface (Yapp) defconstant
or:
/text_interface (Fronttalk) defconstant
Otherwise, just leave it commented out:
%/text_interface (Picospan) defconstant
This will cause Backtalk to display a plain text version of their posts as
well as an HTML version when they preview it.
-
Use public.txt as the Conference List?
If you are setting up Backtalk to share conferences with Picospan or Yapp,
then the usual place to store the list of conferences is in a text file
named "public.txt". Backtalk strongly prefers to use a more rigidly formatted
file named "confmenu", but if you want to be compatible with Picospan, you
should uncomment the line:
%/usepublic_txt 1 defconstant
by removing the percent sign from the front. There is no universal standard
for the format of the public.txt file. To enable Backtalk to be
able to parse yours, you need to supply a pair of regular expressions, as
decribed in config.bt. Or just use the default Grex-style format,
making sure your file matches the format described in the
Administrative Guide for
Conference Creation.
-
Do you have Many Users on a Slow Machine?
If your system has a somewhat slow computer, and you expect to have
many thousands of users, you should probably turn on the many_users
switch. This tells the scripts to avoid doing things like loading the full
list of users into memory and sorting it before displaying it, which are
nice on a small installation, but impractical on a large one.
To set this flag, edit the line:
/many_users 0 defconstant
Change the default 0 value to 1 if you expect to have too many users.
-
Do you have Shy users?
If you have anonymous reading but some of your users don't want their responses
read by unregistered users, then Backtalk supports a "shyfile" facility
where particular user's responses are hidden from unregistered readers.
If you want to use this, uncomment the line
%/shyfile (/usr/local/backtalk/etc/shylist) defconstant
by removing the percent sign from the front,
and change the path name in the parenthesis to the place where you want to
have your shylist saved.
-
What is the URL of the Account Registration Form?
This is the page you would like people who want an account directed to.
By default it points to the standard Backtalk account creation form, which is
probably fine for most sites. If you are using a non-Backtalk tool to
create accounts, edit this to point to it.
-
What is the URL of the User Bio Page?
If you are using a non-Backtalk program to create accounts, then it is
possible that user profile information is stored away in some database
that Backtalk doesn't understand. You'll want to use an external program
to find and edit user profiles. To do this, uncomment the definition of
the extern_bio flag and edit the script/lib/biolink.bt
file.
Note that this option does not (yet) work with the pistachio interface,
although abalone, bubblegum and papaya understand it.
-
May Robots Index the Conferences?
Not all clicks on your web site will come from human beings running web
browsers. There are lots of computer programs called "robots" or "web
spiders" wandering around the web collecting information. Search sites
like "Google" have robots continually updating their indexes by searching
the web. Spammers have robots that search the web for email addresses to
add to their mailing lists.
Occasional poorly designed robots will hammer a site
with many requests in a short period of time.
Most robots are well-behaved and useful. If you don't mind robots indexing
your site, you need do nothing. Skip to the next section. However,
if you don't all of your site to appear in things like the Google index,
then read on.
There are two standard methods for requesting that robots not index your
site. One involves placing a "robots.txt" file in your document root
directory. For instance, we used the following "robots.txt" file
on Grex to prevent robots from indexing Backtalk or any other program installed
in the system CGI directory:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
For more information see sites like
Robotstxt.org.
The other method is to generate special headers on each page that tell whether
or not it is OK to index that page.
Backtalk's interfaces are able to generate such headers,
if you set the confrobots and biorobots switches.
If biorobots is set to 1, then all user bio pages and lists of user
id's will be generated with a header saying robots should not index them.
If confrobots is set to 2, then all item pages, lists of items in
a conference, and lists of conferences will have exclusion headers.
If confrobots is set to 1, then each conference fairwitness can set
whether or not robots are allowed in his conference (the default is not to
allow them). The list of conferences will always be indexable.
Obviously, there is no guarantee that all
robots will respect the "robots.txt" file or the headers, but all
the respectable ones do. If you don't want any indexing, I recommend doing
both the "robots.txt" and the headers. If you want partial indexing
the headers alone are your best bet.
-
What Languages Does Your Spell Checker Support?
If you are using aspell or ispell for spell checking you should provide a list
of the different dictionaries you have.
Ispell comes with standard dictionaries for american and
british english. Many others exist. You might give them in the
languages constant. For example,
/languages (american,british,russian,polish) defconstant
The default language is whatever you get when you run aspell or
ispell without designating a language.
Older versions of Ispell seem to have dictionary names similar to ispell
dictionaries. Newer aspell dictionary names are usually
combinations of language and country codes. For example,
/languages (en_US,en_GB,en_CA) defconstant
Aspell isn't distributed with any dictionaries, so installations vary a bit
in what dictionaries they actually have. For aspell versions after 0.50,
the command 'aspell dump dicts' should give you a list of all
the installed dictionaries.
-
Enable Syndication?
With the optional 'cinnamon' interface installed, Backtalk is able to generate
RSS and/or Atom syndication feeds.
For more information on how to configure these, see the RSS documentation.
One warning though: enabling syndication can add a lot of server load.
Normal web pages get hit only when users look at the pages, but RSS feed
pages get polled regularly by every person who subscribes to that feed.
This can add to a lot of traffic and a lot of load on your server.
-
Set up a Favicon?
Many browsers (Internet Explorer 5, Mozilla, Firefox and Konqueror)
like to request an tiny icon image called 'favicon.ico' from web sites.
This may be displayed in location bar, in tabs, or in the bookmark list.
Normally backtalk responds to all such requests with an empty document.
If you have a custom .ico file for your site that you would like sent,
set the favicon variable to to the full path of that file.
Visit www.favicon.com for more info
on favicons and how to make them.
-
Enable Posting Logs?
Backtalk can optionally keep a log file that contains a one line description
of each item or response posted. The main use of these is to support showing
lists of "most recent postings" in the interfaces that support them. There
is little use in enabling these logs if you are also running Picospan or an
older version of Yapp that does not generate such logs, because messages posted
through those systems won't be logged.
Warning: Post logs currently include postings from all conferences,
including private conferences. This may enable other users to see item
titles and participant names from private conferences. If this is a problem,
don't enable post logs. In the future we'll probably figure out a way to
enable/disable them on a per-conference basis.
If you are running Backtalk in a stand-alone configuration, then enabling
a Backtalk-format postlog file might be nice. Uncomment the lines defining
post_log_file and bt_post_log.
If you are running Backtalk with a newer Yapp installation that maintains
a posting log in /usr/bbs/resplog, then you might want the
Yapp-compatible format. Uncomment the three lines, and edit the URL to the
URL for the cgi-bin directory for web Yapp on your system. Using this format
should be avoided unless you are actually sharing conferences with Yapp.
Other formats can be supported if you edit lib/postlog.bt and
lib/readpostlog.bt.
To actually get listings of recent items on the web pages, you may have to
edit the pistachio and abalone config.bt files as described below.
-
Use web Yapp Compatible Response Formatting?
If you are sharing the conference between Backtalk and web Yapp, then something
needs to be done to deal with the fact that Yapp treats all responses as HTML
(appending a <BR> to each line), while Backtalk treats some as
plain text and others as HTML (with appending <BR>). If run
in the default configuration, this can make Backtalk postings look bad in
Yapp, and Yapp postings look bad in Backtalk.
To fix this problem, set the yapp_formats constant to 3. This will
change the way Backtalk posts its messages and interprets messages so that
most postings will look pretty much alike in both programs. The stuff this
does is a somewhat horrible kludge and should be avoided if you are not
using Backtalk with web Yapp. It is not needed if you are using Backtalk with
command-line Yapp, but not web Yapp.
-
Configure Session Settings.
If you built Backtalk with the --login=cookies option, then you may
want to alter the settings that control how sessions.
One setting controls
how long a user can go without sending a request before we expire his session,
forcing him to re-login before his next request will work. You don't want this
too long, as it increases the chance of someone else being able to access a
user's account if they leaves their computer without logging out. You don't
want this too low, otherwise people have to re-login every time they enter
a longer post.
You can also alter the page that the user is sent to when they log out.
-
Does your Server Use an HTTP Proxy?
Sometimes Backtalk actually sends HTTP requests instead of serving them.
This is currently mostly used with the 'tobacco' interface which does
Trackbacks and Pingbacks. If you are using this, and if your server is
configured so that outgoing HTTP requests need to be sent through a proxy,
then set the http_proxy variable. For example:
/http_proxy (proxy.mysite.com:80) defconstant
Here the part after the colon is the port number, and can be omitted if it
is port 80.
-
Ignore Debug Settings for Now.
The saverep and secure settings can be extremely useful
for debugging Backtalk. However, changing them from the default configuration
can also open substantial security holes. So until you want to be able
to rerun Backtalk queries under a debugger like 'gdb' just leave
these alone, and if you do ever change them, be sure to change the back
when you are done debugging.