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mong the most important tasks you will perform with phpBB are the jobs you will handle behind the scenes: maintaining the less-than-glamorous but absolutely necessary routine maintenance schedule and vigilantly keeping the board s defenses against hackers and malicious users up-to-date. This chapter is dedicated to guiding you through these important tasks for keeping your community operating smoothly and safely, so your members can participate with confidence. Generally, a secure phpBB is up-to-date with the latest patches, has tightly assigned permissions, and has a limited number of people with administrative power. phpBB provides many facilities to help ensure the security of your installation. It ultimately is up to you, as the phpBB administrator, to implement a security policy that you believe is best for your forums. My job in this chapter is to empower you with the tools to do just that and give you a few pointers along the way. I ll also introduce you to phpBB s tools for maintaining your board and tuning its performance.

Having smart security strategies in place at the beginning can go a long way toward reducing headaches later. Here, I will suggest a few practices that can help you keep your board s power structure in order, keep tabs on who does what, and keep dictionary-attacking script kiddies at bay. Feel free to adjust these strategies for your own tastes as you see fit.

As your board grows, you will undoubtedly wish to bring members of your community onto your forum staff in varying roles. As you delegate power to members to moderate and, perhaps, administer your forum, keep in mind the following guidelines: Appoint only members you trust to be responsible: It seems like a no-brainer, but if you have any doubts that someone will behave responsibly in a position of power on your forum, he isn t the person to appoint to a staff position. Moderators will have total control over the content in their forums. Additionally, they will be able to view members IP addresses, so it is particularly important to appoint someone you know you can trust with sensitive information.

Appoint members that visit regularly: Your moderators should be around your community on a regular basis so that their assigned forums are properly maintained. I ll leave it to you to define regular basis. Limit moderators to one or two forums at first: It s tempting to create supermoderator positions moderators who control every forum and give every moderator free reign. However, especially in the formative stages of your community when you may or may not know your staff members well, you will want to keep moderators limited to one or two forums. They will not be able to use their powers outside those forums, and that s an important step in securing your forums. Keep supermoderators to a minimum: If you wish to create supermoderator positions, with power over all forums, appoint just enough (one or two is usually plenty, but that can vary depending on traffic) to provide backup to existing moderators. Ideally, you should appoint supermoderators only when your board s traffic increases to the point where you need a couple people to back up the moderators. Use extreme caution when appointing additional administrators: As your board grows and the administrative tasks increase, you won t have a choice but to add another administrator or two. Appoint someone who you can trust and have worked with (preferably a moderator). Administrators should have enough technical savvy to operate the board s controls, know how to fix problems, and know how to avoid problems. Administrators should also know how to put on a good public face, as they will likely be contacted often by new members who may be unfamiliar with the phpBB software. (I consider prior experience with the board software a major plus in an administrator.)