You're reading a guide for administering Jive Forums, an application for community-based discussion groups. This guide is divided into the following sections:
Be sure to check out the README.html included at the root of the Jive Forums distribution. That document includes links to important information, including known issues.
This guide assumes you've already installed Forums, so it doesn't describe installation procedures. For those, please refer to the Installation Guide, which is included with the Forums distribution.
You can use the Forums Admin Console to manage system settings, permissions, content (documents, discussions, and blogs), and users.
To view the console, make sure Forums is running, then go to a URL of the following form:
http://<hostname>:<portnumber>/<context>/admin
There are currently two editions of Jive Forums: Silver Edition (for small to midsize deployments) and Gold Edition (for large deployments). This manual covers the features and functions for both the Silver and Gold Editions.
Features unique to the Gold edition include:
When listing tasks, this guide uses a path shorthand convention to indicate where you'd go in the Admin Console to perform the task. This example is followed by an illustration that shows what you'd click in the user interface.
To edit properties for a user, click Users/Groups > User Summary, then click the user's username.
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The first time you navigate to a page in the administration console, you'll be prompted to set up Forums using the setup tool. This tool assumes that you've either already set up a database for use with Forums, or that you're going to use the embedded database. This section briefly describes the setup tool.
The first page of the setup tool prompts you to specify the location of your jiveHome directory:
Note: The setup tool runs only once. If you need to re-run it, open the
jiveHome/jive_startup.xml file, find the
line<setup>true</setup>
, and change the
true
value to false
. Restart your application server, point
your browser at Jive Forums using the URL above and rerun the setup tool.
Installation Checklist — Confirm the system settings that make up the Forums environment.
Datasource Settings — Specify how to connect to the database. You can use the embedded database that is included with the installation or you can choose an external database. If you choose the standard database connection or JNDI datasource, you'll be prompted for required settings after you click Continue. See the Installation Guide for information on supported databases and connection values to use.
Note: The embedded database isn't recommended for production use.
User System — Specify the system the application should use for user and group data. For the Default option, the setup tool will use the user and group database tables from the database. For the LDAP option, you'll be prompted to enter information for your LDAP server (such as host, base distinguished name (DN), and so on). For the Custom option, you'll be prompted to give the names of your implementations of interfaces from the Jive Software API (such as com.jivesoftware.base.UserManager) for user system access.
For more on LDAP integration, see LDAP Information (ldap.html), included with the Jive Forums distribution.
Email Settings — Specify defaults for email sent via the server. Forums can send email when an account is created for a new user, for email notifications, and so on. Specify the "From" name and email address that should be used in these emails, as well as the SMTP host and port that should be used.
You can configure Forums to receive email, such as when a user posts a discussion response via email. To get these emails, Forums needs a client account; specify those details here.
Admin Account — Specify the system administrator's password. Be sure to change the admin email password from the default value, which is "admin".
If you're new to Jive Forums, it's a good idea for you to take a look at this section. It describes how Forums structures content, organizes users and groups, and exposes permissions. You'll find the following sections here:
A community typically corresponds to a group of people with a common set of interests and it usually has a single overall purpose. One community might focus on support, for example, while another might focus on human resources. Still another might provide customers with a place to trade product tips and solutions.
Jive Forums communities are built in a hierarchy to help provide easy, intuitive access to relevant information. The hierarchy looks something like this:
Category — A category is the broadest classification of content in a community. Categories may contain other categories, forums, threads, and messages. You can create as many categories as necessary. For more on creating and managing categories, see Managing Category Setup.
Forum — A forum generally focuses on a single thread or a small group of associated threads, and is narrower in scope than a category. If you define a forum too broadly, message threads within the forum can quickly lose focus and become unwieldy and confusing. For more on managing forums, see Managing Forum Setup. For information on moderating, see Moderating Forum Content.
Thread — Threads are the individual questions or subjects discussed within the scope of a single forum. A thread is defined as an original message and all of its replies. Threads may run only a few messages long, or may include hundreds of messages. By their nature, threads tend to drift. Moderators may need to intervene to keep a thread focused on the subject for which it was created. They can do this by creating new threads when necessary and by moving content (messages and entire threads) from one location to another. For information on moderating, see Moderating Forum Content.
Message — A message refers to a single question, discussion point or reply that is posted to a forum. Messages comprise a subject header, a message body, and sometimes a file attachment or attachments.
Jive Forums uses roles to help you manage the kinds of things that users can do. Through built-in roles such as administrators, moderators, users, and groups, you fine tune responsibilities and level of access for each person in the community.
Administrators and moderators are responsible for setting up and maintaining a Jive Forums community. With broad permissions, system administrators maintain the entire system, including categories, forums, threads, and messages. With subsets of administrative permissions, category administrators, user administrators, and group administrators manage respective subsets of the community.
The five administrative roles available in a Jive Forums community can be exercised by one or more people and will have varying levels of permissions associated with them.
Note: You cannot edit the specific set of permissions assigned to these administrative roles. When a user logs in, the Admin Console user interface will indicate which features are available to them based on the scope of their permissions.
Jive Forums is set up so that you can manage users as individuals and as members of groups. By adding users to groups you can apply a set of permissions to all of those users by applying those permissions to the group they're in. To make the most of this, you should understand the four basic user types Forums provides to help you manage permissions.
Jive Forums includes two default user types that you can't delete: Anyone and Registered Users. Once a user registers, you can assign them permissions as a User or as part of a Group. This results in four categories of Forums users who can receive global permissions: Anyone, Registered, User, and Group.
Note: For information on specific tasks, see Managing Users and Groups.
Working with the users and groups you've defined, you apply permissions at three levels:
Note: You can't revoke (set to negative) permissions at the global level. Setting an X in boxes at this level will have no effect.
In other words, you modify the global settings on a per-category and per-forum basis. For example, suppose your Jive Forums community is set up so that at the global level, there is no designated Category Administrator. You could still add a category administrator for a specific category by adding the administrative permission at the category level. Similarly, if you had a user with Category Administrator permissions for a certain category that had numerous subcategories, you could remove that person's permissions for particular subcategories.
Jive Forums checks permissions when a user accesses content, as follows:
You're likely to have greater success with your discussion forums if you plan the general layout of the community in advance. This is especially true if you anticipate your community to be large and active. Jive Forums accommodates communities of all types and sizes. A discussion community is an evolving, organic structure that requires supervision and moderation. However, a little initial planning will save you later work in administration and maintenance.
As you're setting up your discussion forums, creating categories and forums, assigning permissions and designating moderators, give some thought to the following considerations:
You can do most of the other community configuration once you’re up and running, but planning this information in advance will make your initial setup smoother.
A category is the broadest classification of content in a community. Categories can contain other categories and forums. Use categories to provide the basic structure for your community. You should set up this structure before you can create users, groups, or set any global attributes for the community. This means creating and defining the categories, sub-categories, and forums that will make up your Jive Forums community. You can create as many categories as you need.
Jive Forums installs with a single default root category. The root category is special in that you can't delete it and it doesn't show up in the user interface your users use. The first category you create for your community will be a sub-category of the root category.
You can use the Category Summary to view a list of the categories and from that view you can add and delete categories.
To get to the Category Summary, click the Content tab.
Click the names of categories to view a list of their sub-categories and forums. Some of the things you can do here include:
Category properties range from very basic characteristics, such as a category's name and description, to lower level properties.
To edit a category's properties, click Content > Category Summary > category name > Category Properties.
Note: If you change a category name after your community is established and in use, remember to put in some sort of note to users so that they can find the forums associated with that category.
Category administrators have permission to add sub-categories and forums to a category. They can also make other administrative settings for moderation. Moderators can moderate forums in the category. For more on these roles, see Administrator and Moderator Roles.
To set category admins, click Content > Category Summary > category name > Admins/Moderators. To add add administrators and moderators, click the Grant New Permissions tab.
You can use permission settings to specify what users and groups of users can do with forum content in a category. Category permissions apply only to the current category and its forums. Global permissions are applied before category permissions. If the same permissions are defined at both global and category levels, they are applied twice. For more on permissions, see Community Roles.
To set category permissions, click Content > category name > Permissions. To create new permissions, associating permissions with users or groups, click the Grant New Permissions tab.
A forum is a collection of associated threads narrower in scope than a category. Each forum belongs to a single category, although categories can have multiple forums. Forums are usually devoted to a concept that has multiple topics associated with it.
You can create a forum in any category, including the root category, if the category's permission settings allow it.
You can use the Category Summary to view a list of the forums for a category. From that page you can add and delete forums.
To get to the list of forums for a category, click Content > Category Summary > category name.
Some of the things you can do here include:
Forum properties range from very basic characteristics, such as a category's name and description, to lower level properties.
To view forum properties, click Content > Category Summary > category name > forum name.
Forum administrators have permission to make administrative settings for the forums they're administering, including moderation settings. This includes most of the settings accessed under Forum Options. Moderators can moderate the forum. For more on these roles, see Administrator and Moderator Roles.
To set forum admins and moderators, click Content > Category Summary > category name > forum name > Admins/Moderators. To add add administrators and moderators, click the Grant New Permissions tab.
To set moderation level, Content > Category Summary > category name > forum name > Forum Moderation.
Forums are created with default permissions they inherit from the category to which they belong and from global permissions. When you set permissions for a forum, those permissions apply to the current forum only and will override permissions set at the containing category or global level. For more on permissions, see Community Roles.
To set forum permissions, click Content > Category Summary > category name > forum name > Permissions. To create new permissions, associating permissions with users or groups, click the Grant New Permissions tab.
You can rearrange forums, moving data from one to another or moving forums from one category to another. When you merge data from one forum to another, the original forum is deleted. (Merging might take several minutes, depending on the size of the original forum and the number of messages moved.)
To move a forum, click Content > Category Summary > category name, click the Move check box for the forum you want to move, then click the Move button.
Note: The forum ID will remain the same when you move a forum so bookmarks to the forum will not be broken.
To merge a forum, click Content > Category Summary > category name > forum name > Merge Data. Specify merge settings, then click the Merge Data button.
With the NNTP feature you can host your Forums community as a set of newsgroups to outside users. This maintains another view of your community that is identical in content to the internal forum, but delivered in another way. Users can post messages and respond to messages within the community just as they would for other Internet newsgroups.
The NNTP feature exposes all forums as newsgroups. To edit NNTP settings, click the NNTP tab.
From this tab, you can:
You can determine whether attachments are allowed in forum messages. This is a global setting you make that applies to all forums in your community.
Jive Forums supports file attachments based on the MIME standard. Only users with the necessary permissions can attach a file to a message. Before permitting users to attach files, set the global attachment policy, which defines what file types and sizes are permitted.
Administrators define which file types are permitted as attachments. Several common file types are included by default, but you can add others.
To set attachment policies, click Settings > Attachment Settings.
You can configure Jive Forums to periodically archive inactive content. Archiving preserves this content for later reference. You activate archiving globally, then specify archiving for individual forums separately. When you set a forum to be archive, you specify what should be done with its data (mark it, delete it, or move it to another forum).
To enable archiving globally, click Settings > Archiving Settings.
To enable archiving for a forum, click Content > Category Summary > category name > forum name > Archiving Settings.
Jive Forums provides a few ways through which you can exchange data between forums and other data sources and get data out of Forums for making backups.
With gateways, you tell Jive Forums to synchronize data between the forum and an email, newsgroup, or Mbox data source. Contrast this periodic synchronizing with using an NNTP server to display your Jive Forums as newsgroups in real-time, without the need to synchronize.
When you create a gateway, you specify the data source to synchronize with, along with the forum to synchronize. In other words, each gateway is a one-to-one mapping between forum and data source. You can either create a gateway that's automatically used for synchronizing or you can synchronize data in either direction at need. You set gateways globally, but the settings are scoped to specific forums.
You can also choose to use a 24-hour buffer for importing. That means that, at the time of import, the gateway pulls in all data that has come in since the last import, plus all those that came in within the 24-hour period before the last import. If an email has already been imported, it won't be again, but any emails that came in late and were missed the last time the gateway ran will be imported. This redundancy helps insure that you get those emails that were held up at the server for some reason and did not get delivered in a timely manner.
To create a gateway, click Settings > Gateway Settings.
To use a gateway for automatic importing or exporting, you add the gateway, then specify the time interval for importing and/or exporting. To use a gateway for one-time or at-need synchronization, you use the Import Once or Export Once tab.
You can export or import forum data as XML. You can use this feature to export or import data with a third-party system. All data is exported to files in the default import/export directory (jiveHome/data).
To export or import forum data as XML, click System > XML Import & Export.
All data objects are exportable in a single XML file. When you export data, you can choose what kinds of data to export (such as forums, threads, users, permissions, attachments) and which forums to export from, as well as encoding, filename, and location for the exported file.
The XML is exported in a Jive Software XML format; the XML's shape is defined in aschema from Jive Software.
Web services provide the ability for external applications to connect to your instance of Jive Forums. Through this connection, these applications can retrieve forum data for their own use. Note that all users connecting via web services will be also be restricted to the same access rights that they would have accessing and modifying content through the normal web application.
You'll find information about programming web services to access Jive Forums in the Web Services Developer Guide (web-services-developer-guide.html in your Forums distribution).
To manage web services access, click Settings > Web Service Settings.
Through Community Everywhere, users can embed Forums discussion threads directly into existing news articles, blog posts or other applications that would benefit from comments or discussions. Instead of forcing users to leave your other content to create a comment or view a discussion thread, Community Everywhere enables your users to login or create an account and participate in discussions while on the page that contains your content.
For more information about setting up Community Everywhere, be sure to see the community-everywhere.html file located in the documentation director of your Jive Forums distribution.
To manage Community Everywhere settings, click Settings > Community Settings.
Moderation is the ability for someone to review messages before or after they are posted. As a moderator, you can decide whether or not the content is allowed, then edit or delete the content as needed. Moderation is especially useful in communities that deal with contentious subjects; many communities are not moderated.
When the moderation feature is on for a forum, it means that new threads and messages must be reviewed and approved by a moderator before they are posted to the general community. When a new message is posted in a moderated forum, the Forums user interface will tell the user that the message must be approved before being posted.
Note: A Forums administrator (rather than a moderator) specifies moderation settings, such as whether a category or forum is to be moderated, as well as the kinds of content that must be moderated. See Community Roles for more information.
A moderator is any user of the community with permission to review, accept, and reject forum content. A moderator can be an administrator or simply a trusted user of the general community. Moderators review content through the Admin Console. If a user has moderator permissions only, all other administrative functions are disabled. You are given moderator permissions by an administrator.
You can use the Moderation Summary page to view the list of threads to be moderated. For moderated forums, that page lists threads and messages that are waiting for moderation. The Moderation Summary page lists all forums that contain pending content, the number of pending threads and messages, and when the forum was last updated.
A thread is a collection of messages and replies on a particular subject. Threads may run only a few messages long or may include hundreds of messages. Because thread topics can drift, you might need to intervene as a moderator to keep a thread focused on the subject for which it was created. You can do this by branching a thread, which creates a new thread based on the "off topic" message, and by moving content (messages and entire threads) from one location to another.
To move, or branch, a thread or message, you must first navigate to the thread by clicking Content > Category Summary > category name > forum name > Manage Content.
From here, you can:
Click the thread title to view or edit the original message, and to edit thread properties.
Creating threads through branching. Sometimes you may need to start a new thread from an
established one if the some of the messages begin to go off on a tangent. You do this from
the Forums application rather than through the Forums Admin Console.
To begin moderating messages, click Content > Moderation Summary.
From this page, you can:
If avatars are enabled for forums you're moderating, you can moderate them in much the same way you do content, rejecting or approving them as needed.
To begin moderating avatars, click Content > Avatar Moderation.
As a moderator, you can view stats and create reports for content in your forums.
Reports are summaries of user, group, forum, and message activity. Reports are essential when gathering metrics and for projecting future traffic patterns and system load. You can configure reports on various metrics within the Jive Forums system and create lists of reports to run at certain intervals.
To get started with stats and reports, click the Reports tab.
From the pages of this tab you can:
You can also delete a generated report, but you must delete it from your JiveHome directory.
For a complete list of your edition's reports, refer to the Reports List on the Configure Reports screen.
When you're managing users and groups, you're essentially overseeing whether and how users interact with the Jive Forums system.
From the Forums perspective, users are individuals who interact with your forum community. They might be reading or posting messages, administering or moderating forums, and so on. Strictly speaking, it's not necessary for a user to be in the system with a user account in order to read and post messages; the default Anyone account is designed to handle these anonymous users if you allow them (by default the Anyone account allows only reading messages, not posting them).
To view a list of registered users, click Users/Groups > User Summary.
User groups are, not surprisingly, groups of users who have accounts in the system. By creating groups and adding users to them, you can associated permissions with a potentially large number of users without having to specify those permissions on a user-by-user basis. It often makes sense to create user groups based on shared area of interest, permission level, product knowledge, and so on. The Registered Users account, like the Anyone account, is a default account; it is designed to group users who have an account on the system.
To view a list of registered groups, click Users/Groups > Group Summary.
You use user and group accounts primarily to manage access to Jive Forums features. By asking users to create accounts (rather than post anonymously), you can ask for information about the user such as their email address and display profile information such as a status level. And when the user has an account on the system, their login credentials give you a way to manage what they can do in your community and what features they have access to. For example, only a user with an account can administer or moderate forums.
Unless you're allowing all users to access the system anonymously, you'll be administering user and group accounts. As described below, you can configuring Jive Forums to let users register themselves, but you'll create groups yourself (although you can also designate group administrators to manage their membership).
You can provide access to users in three ways:
This is enabled by default (click User Interface > Features > New Account Creation Enabled to view the setting). You specify details for how users create their own accounts by clicking Settings > Registration Settings. There, you'll find these options:
By disabling the self-registration feature and not allowing anonymous access, you're can create a situation in which users must contact you in order to receive an account. This assumes, of course, that they know how to do so (such as through an email address in your user interface).
To disable self-registration, click User Interface > Features, then scroll to New Account Creation Enabled and click Disabled.
To deny anonymous user access, click Settings > Global Permissions, and then clear all of the check boxes for the Anyone user type.
To create a new user account, click Users/Groups > Create User.
To delete a user, click Users/Groups > User Summary, then click the Delete icon for the user you want to remove.
Note: Deleting a user does not delete the user's messages from the forum. When the user is deleted, any messages they posted will be marked as guest posts.
You generally create a group account when you want to group users because they will have the same set of permissions. When you create a group, you might also want to designate a group administrator who can manage the group's membership (this could be a member of the group itself). Adding a user to a group does not affect their personal permission settings. Deleting a group does not affect group users' individual accounts.
To create a group account, click Users/Groups > Create Group, enter a name and description, then click Create Group. Click Add Members
To delete a group account, click Users/Groups > Group Summary, then click the
Delete icon for the group you want to remove.
You can get information about a user's activity in the system.
To edit settings for a user, click Users/Groups > User Summary, then click the Edit icon for the user. You can also search for the user by clicking Users/Groups > User Search.
From this page, you can view or edit characteristics for a user, including changing their password, viewing messages they've posted, and viewing the email notifications they've requested. Note that you can't change a user's login name; instead, you must delete the user and then recreate the user under a different login name. Extended properties include any relevant information not included in the basic properties, such as a user's area of expertise, department number, location, or any other metadata you want to add.
You can block a user's access to your forum community. For example, if a user becomes abusive in their messages (or moderating them is too time-consuming), you might want to ensure that they can't post any more. You can ban a user through their login credentials or their IP address (IP tracking must be enabled for the latter).
To ban a user, click Settings > Ban Settings. On the Ban Settings page, you can set the specifics of the ban.
Avatars are small icons through which users can identify themselves in forums. If you enable avatars, users can choose an avatar icon in their Forum control panel. You can add and delete avatar images and you can control avatar image size. You can also allow users to upload their own avatars (though you might want to consider moderating them).
To configure avatar settings, click Settings > Avatar Settings.
You can have Jive Forums keep track of users' IP addresses. When this setting is enabled, Jive Forums records a user's IP address when a message is posted. This setting is ideal for tracking abusive users and adds an extra layer of security, especially when anonymous guest logins are permitted.
IP addresses are stored as an extended property for messages. To view these, click Content > Category Summary > category name > forum name > thread title > edit icon, then click Edit Extended Properties. The Edit Message Properties page will display the IP address for the user who posted the message.
To track IP addresses, click User Interface > Features, then scroll to Track IPs and click On.
By enabling password resets, you're allowing users to request their own new passwords. This is a common and convenient feature for users who forget their password. When a user requests a password change, Jive Forums sends a form email with a link to a page where the user can reset the password. A unique token is sent along as part of the link to identify the user's request. If this feature is disabled, users must contact an administrator to change passwords.
To manage password resetting, click Settings > Password Reset.
On the chance that you don't want to read (and potentially edit) every message your users want to post, Jive Forums provides a few features through which you can have automated management over how the system handles content. You can also configure other content-related features to provide the best experience for your users. Content includes forum messages, of course, but also avatars, polls, and private messages. These features are in addition to any hands-on moderating you might do.
In particular, you can:
Filters and interceptors provide ways for you to keep an eye on message traffic and to potentially take certain actions in certain instances. For example, you might want to watch for profanity in messages or watch for messages from a particular IP address.
Jive Forums comes with pre-installed filters and interceptors, but you can add your own.
A new filter or interceptor class must reside in your application server’s class
path. You specify the fully-qualified class name on a page where you configure filters or
interceptors. Once the system locates it, the filter or interceptor will appear in the
list of available interceptors.
Filters are designed to look at message content for particular characteristics and reformat the content according to certain rules. For example, one popular filter converts email addresses into a form that spammers can't use. The HTML filter removes potentially malicious HTML and scripting, and the Newline filter converts linefeeds to HTML newlines for proper display in a browser.
You can apply filters both globally and to individual forums; global filters are applied before forum filters. If the same filter is defined at both global and forum levels, the filter is applied twice.
To configure filters for use globally, click Content > Message Filters (under Global Settings).
On this page you can turn filters on or off. You can also tailor each to your needs by editing its specific settings.
The system always applies filters in the order they appear in the list, top down. They can be used to filter message subjects, bodies, and properties.
To configure filters for use with all forums in a category, click Content > Category Summary > category name, then click Message Filters. By default, categories and forums use the global filter stack. Click Copy Global Filters to display the list of filters, where you can customize each for use in this category.
To configure filters for use with specific forums, click Content > Category Summary > category name > forum name, then click Message Filters (under Forum Options). As with filters applied at the category level, you might need to copy global filters before you can separately configure filters.
Interceptors, well, "intercept" messages and perform specified actions. For example, an interceptor might limit the rate at which messages can be posted or scan attachments for viruses. An interceptor can either pass the messaged unmodified, modify the message, or reject it. The list of current interceptors in a forum's Message Interceptors screen shows you which interceptors are currently enabled.
An interceptor is different from a filter in that an interceptor accepts, modifies, or rejects an incoming message before it enters the community, based on specified criteria. Like filters, interceptors apply both globally and to individual forums.
To configure interceptors for use globally, click Settings > Global Interceptors.
On this page you can choose to install from the list of available interceptors. Click each available interceptor to see descriptive information about it. Once you install the interceptor, you'll be able to edit its properties by clicking its Edit icon.
To configure interceptors for use with a particular forum, click Content > Category Summary > category name > forum name, then click Message Interceptors (under Forum Options).
Note: Some interceptors are available only in the Jive Forums Gold edition. For example, the interceptor that lets you limit users' posting rates is not available with the Silver edition. For more information about which features are available with which Jive Forums editions, refer to the Jive Forums Feature Comparison Chart available on the Jive Software Forums website.
You can have Jive Forums scan message attachments for viruses. You can specify the scanner URI, along with the email addresses of those who should be notified if a virus is found. You can also notify the posting user by email if a virus is found in their attachment.
For more information on configuring virus scanning, be sure to see the Virus Scanning guide (virus-scanner.html) included with the Jive Forums distribution.
Important! If you opt to use virus scanning, you must install the Virus Scan interceptor. If you enable virus scanning without the Virus Scan interceptor installed, messages will not be scanned for viruses. If you install the Virus Scan interceptor without also enabling virus scanning, messages will get hung up in the scan queue. To install the virus scan interceptor, click Settings > Global Interceptors, then click Virus Scanner (under Available Interceptors) and click Install.
To configure virus scanning, click Settings > Virus Scan Settings.
Note: Virus scanning is available only in the Jive Forums Gold edition.
You can specify the main dictionary to be used globally for checking spelling in messages. Jive Forums features several expandable language dictionaries used to check message text for correct spelling. The dictionaries are English (US/UK), French (France/Canada), German, Italian, and Spanish. The main dictionary is accessed to whenever a user requests a spell check. The default main dictionary is United States English.
You can also add a dictionary of technical terms as well as create a custom dictionary for adding private names, initials, acronyms, and nonstandard terminology. The technical dictionary includes commonly used Internet and software terms and acronyms, such as HTML, bitstreams, blog, ASP, bluetooth, scalability, and so on. You might want to Include this dictionary to prevent the spell checker from flagging these terms as misspellings.
Tip: To edit the technical dictionary's contents, refer to the Knowledge Base article available at the Jive Software Support website: in the Search Support Center field, type "custom dictionary" and then click Go. Select the article "Customizing the Spelling Dictionary."
The custom dictionary is for nonstandard terms that are not included in the main dictionary, such as private names, initials, acronyms, and so on. Keep in mind that the custom dictionary is global and is not customizable on a per-user basis. Any words you add will affect all users.
To configure spell check, click Settings > Spell Check Settings.
You can configure the Jive Forums search engine to ensure that searches are efficient and useful.
Jive Forums includes the powerful Jakarta Lucene search engine. The all-Java engine optimizes performance and query speed by processing new messages and then storing the data in a database index. This index must be updated on a regular basis, otherwise recent content will not be included in search queries. If you've enabled auto-indexing, the index is periodically updated with the latest content. Messages won't appear in search results until they're added to the index, so be sure to choose an indexing interval that is appropriate for the pace of your community.
Note: The Search Attachments option is only available in the Gold edition of Jive Forums.
To configure the search engine, click Settings > Search Settings.
On this page you can enable or disable search of content and user data. If you have another search technology installed on your website that you want to use, you can disable the default Jive Forums search engine.
As you configure the search ending with settings available on the Search Settings tab, keep in mind the particular needs of your community:
Polls are a voting mechanism through which you can get user preferences. The polls feature allows you to set up a voting poll in the global system, a category, forum, thread, or message, to gauge user response.
Note: Only global-, category-, and forum-level polls are supported in the default user interface.
To configure polls, click Settings > Poll Settings.
You can set up Jive Forums to allow private messages between users. These messages are not posted to forums, but operate like a posted email exchange between Jive Forums users through the Forums interface. Private messages are not displayed to any user except the one to whom they are addressed. Private message permissions can be set only at the global level.
To configure private messaging, click Settings > General Settings (under Private Messages).
You can view information about your Jive Forums installation by using the pages listed on the System tab. This information is especially helpful when you are seeking product support or maintenance.
This section describes some of these pages in more detail.
Jive Forums maximizes performance by caching frequently used data in memory. Application performance improves as more data is cached. Less cache is better for systems that host multiple applications or have less available RAM. Disabling cache is not recommended.
To configure caching, click System > Cache Settings.
A cache's effectiveness is an indicator of how well the cache is working. When a cache is full, Jive Forums must swap data out of that cache segment. If that data is later requested, it must reload the data from the database, decreasing overall performance.
High effectiveness means data is being read from the cache more often than from the database. To achieve maximum performance, you should carefully tune cache settings over time and monitor their effectiveness. While a low effectiveness rating may indicate a cache segment is too small, an oversized cache does not always increase performance.
If your system isn't working efficiently, you can change the amount of memory allotted for each cache segment. You can also set the expiration rate for each cache.
Important: Never set the total cache size to more than half of the total memory (heap) allocated to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The default Java heap is 64MB on most systems.
Scroll to the bottom of the Cache Settings page to view the Cache Features and Cache Tools sections. You can manage the cache with the features in these sections:
Short-term query cache — By default, Jive Forums purges the data in its query cache as many times per second as users post new content. This can degrade performance in sites with heavy traffic. You can improve performance by configuring Jive Forums to purge the query cache once every five or ten seconds. However, new content will take longer to become available to users.
Note: Short-term query caching is only available with the Jive Forums Gold edition.
Clustering — Jive Forums supports grouping multiple application servers together in a cluster for increased scalability and fault tolerance. To improve performance, you may wish to enable clustered caching as well. Once enabled, it may take 30 seconds or so for clustered caching to become effective.
Cache warm-up task — This loads the cache with the forum content users are most likely to access. This is useful when you first start the server or after flushing the cache. Although cache warm-up runs in the background, the process may degrade database performance temporarily. Jive Software recommends running cache warm-up when most users are offline.
If you use the short-term query cache, it's important that the system time across cluster nodes match closely (within one second); otherwise, the cache will not work correctly. You should set the system time on each cluster node to match other cluster nodes' settings as closely as possible.
Note: Clustering is only available with Jive Forums Gold edition.
The Java memory monitor — memory performance indicator includes a memory meter displaying the total available JVM memory and the percentage of memory in use. It is normal for this value to fluctuate from time to time. The JVM will "garbage" collect unused objects from time to time, which causes the fluctuations.You can configure email settings for the community. At a minimum, each community should identify an SMTP address.
To configure system email, click System > Email Settings.
System properties specify fine-grained system characteristics. You can edit the properties listed or add your own property/value pairs. (Note that system property names and values are case sensitive.)
To configure system properties, click System > System Properties.
The System Tasks screen displays the current state of the Jive Forums task engine and shows any scheduled system tasks and the number of resources allocated to these tasks. You can also use this screen to add your own custom system tasks.
To configure system tasks, click System > System Information > System Tasks.
Locale settings determine how content text, dates, and timestamps are formatted.
To configure locale settings, click Settings > Locale Settings.
You can start maintenance mode immediately or set it to start and stop at specific times. You can also configure how users should be alerted when the system is in maintenance mode.
To configure maintenance mode, click Settings > Maintenance Settings.
You can enable or disable automatic archiving. With archiving enabled, you can specify the number of hours between each archiving task.
To configure archiving, click Settings > Archiving Settings.
Users are able to insert their XMPP JID and/or AOL screen name to display presence within the Jive Forums environment. These fields are located at the bottom of the users' profile page.
To configure chat and IM settings, click Settings > IM Settings.
By default, group chat and IM presence are not enabled. In order to enable XMPP connectivity, you must set up the server. The following assumes you're using the open source Openfire XMPP server.
You can customize the default theme that creates the look and feel of your Jive Forums community by controlling how messages and screens appear.
To configure default look and feel settings, click User Interface > Edit Default.
You can customize:
Themes provide a way for a single Jive Forums instance to display multiple look-and-feel configurations and locales. Various themes can be customized and deployed without compiling or even restarting the forums instance. These themes can then be mapped to categories, forums, and even URL patterns in the Admin Console. Simply reload the page and the new, customized theme will be displayed. Whether you want to distinguish various forums by providing unique themes to each, or want one forum in English and another in Chinese, theme support can solve these challenging problems gracefully and with ease.
To configure themes, click User Interface > Custom Themes.
You'll find information on developing themes in the forums-themes-dev-guide.html file included with the Jive Forums distribution.
Note: While adding a new theme requires you to restart the server, a modification will be picked up without a restarted.
User features are functions that are available to users through the Forums interface. These features allow users some self-management and the ability to customize how they view forums.
RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is a way make forum data available so that users can be notified when the data changes, such as when new posts are made. If you enable RSS, a user can choose to set up syndication of forum content to a personal homepage, a blog, or other website. They can also read the contents of the RSS data (known as a feed) in an "RSS aggregator," a tool that presents the data and links back to its source.
For more information about RSS features in Jive Forums, refer to the rss.html file located in the documentation directory in your Jive Forums product distribution.
To manage RSS settings, click User Interface > RSS Feeds.
With read tracking enabled, users can track which threads and messages they've read. Because read tracking information is stored in the database, the feature can cause high database load on busy sites. As a result, consider disabling read tracking for very large forum deployments.
To enable or disable read tracking, click Settings > Read Tracking
Settings.
Status levels give you a way to rank users based on scores or group membership. Users accrue status points as they participate in forums. Scores are calculated on users according to a specific algorithm. A standard algorithm is to use the number of messages a user has posted as the basis for the ranking. A status level indicates a range of scores for a user. For example, you can designate users with scores of 0-10 be ranked as "Beginners" and users with scores of 400-500 be "Golds".
You can also base status levels on the group to which a user belongs. This supersedes the point ranking system because all a user has to do to attain the rank is be a member of the group. This is useful if you want community participants to be recognized by their function. For example, members of the Developers group could be given the rank "Developers." You can associate an icon with this group that will appear next to the user's name in forum postings so that other users will be able to instantly recognize this person as a member of that group.
You can enable or disable status levels. You can also choose the type of status level system you want.
To configure status level settings, click Settings > Status Level Settings.
A watch enables a user to track certain categories, forums, or threads, and receive a notification by email if any content in that category, forum or thread is added, moved, or removed. Configure global email (SMTP) settings before enabling watches.
If you chose to enable watches, you can change the default watch settings.
To configure watches, click Settings > Watch Settings.
Each watch level (thread, forum, category, user) has its own email template. Jive Forums dynamically replaces several tokens in the email template with actual values when placed in the body of an email to a user.
You can specify whether users should be able to edit the messages they post after they post them.
To configure message editing, click Settings > Editing Policy.
You can customize other features of the user experience by click User Interface > Features. The following settings are available on that page:
Note: If users have chosen in their user preferences to hide their full name, then their full names will not be displayed.
Jive Forums (Gold edition) supports clustered deployments. In a clustered community, several application servers work together to distribute heavy traffic evenly. This increases scalability and provides fault tolerance if one or more servers fail. Clusters configure themselves, have no single point of failure, and provide near-linear scalability when additional servers are added.
Clustering support in Jive Forums is described in Clustering Information (clustering.html), included with the Jive Forums distribution.
To enable clustering, click System > Cache Settings. Scroll to the end of the page, where you'll find the Clustering setting. Click Enabled for that setting, then click Save Settings.
Jive Forums text sets are stored in files, called resource bundles, that contain key/value pairs. The default skin uses the keys to load the text based on the configured locale settings (English values are used for English locales, French values for French locales, and so on). Key/value pairs in the U.S. English resource bundle might look like the following:
skin.yes=Yes
skin.no=No
skin.topic=Topic
skin.message=Message
The German resource bundle contains the same keys with different values:
skin.yes=Ja
skin.no=Nein
skin.topic=Thema
skin.message=Beitrag
Extract jive_forums_i18n.properties from the jiveforums.jar file in the Jive
Forums distribution. Use the jar
tool (part of the standard Java
distribution) to extract the file:
jar -xf jiveforums.jar jive_forums_i18n.properties
Next, rename the file to reflect the locale. For example, the German resource bundle is named jive_forums_i18n_de.properties because "de" is the language code for German. A list of language codes is available at: http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/related/iso639.txt.
Many languages feature special characters not found in the English ASCII character set,
such as the German ä, ũ, and ß.
Compose the character set in a text editor that supports special characters.
The native2ascii
tool, built in to Java, then converts
international characters to the ASCII format.
Here's how you use the native2ascii
tool (the my_translation.properties file
is the input file; the jive_forums_i18n_YY.properties file is the output file):
native2ascii -encoding XXX my_translation.properties jive_forums_i18n_YY.properties
The -encoding XXX parameter is optional. If the value is unspecified, Java uses the default encoding value from System property file.encoding. If specified, the encoding (XXX) must come from the first column of the supported encodings table athttp://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/guide/intl/encoding.doc.html.
Save a translated resource bundle (such as jive_forums_i18n_de.properties) to the jiveHome/WEB-INF/classes directory. If Jive Forums is not installed as a webapp, the properties file must reside in the application server's classpath.
There are five places a locale can be configured. There is the default locale for the forums instance, configurable in the Admin Console. All pages that do not have another locale set will default to this value. Also, users can set their preferred locale in the user settings page. If this locale is set, it will be displayed to the user instead of the default locale. For additional customization, forums and categories can be bound to a specific locale. All pages associated with the forum or category will display its locale, overriding the user's locale and the default locale. Forums and categories will inherit the locale from their parent objects, by default. The final place a locale can be set is on a specific theme.
You can use log information kept by Jive Forums if you need to troubleshoot your Forums installation. Jive Forums keeps four logs of system errors and information. These logs are stored as plain (ASCII) text files and are viewable from the Jive Forums Admin Console (or in the directory jiveHome\logs\):
To view logs in the console, click System > Logs.
The log viewer presents all logs in a sortable, tabulated format. The log file output is sortable from newest to oldest and vice-versa. The viewer can display all items in the log, or only the most recent 500, 250, 100, and 50 items. The refresh pull-down menu specifies a time cycle by which the viewer rescans the file.
Database query statistics are useful when monitoring or debugging database performance issues. Avoid leaving the query statistics gathering function enabled at all times, however, because it will impact performance.