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Admin Guide
The administration console is reached from the Admin link in the board menu (visible to administrators and moderators). This page walks through the permission model, the menu, and every admin page.
eveBB has four preset groups, created at install time:
| Group | ID | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Administrators | 1 | Always have full permissions; cannot be banned, batch-deleted, or batch-moved. |
| Moderators | 2 | A group whose moderator flag is on. |
| Guests | 3 | The anonymous visitor account. |
| Members | 4 | Default group for new registrations. |
The preset groups cannot be deleted. Any custom group can also be made a moderator group by enabling "Allow users moderator privileges" in its settings — "Moderators" is just the preset example.
There is no special "first admin": every member of the Administrators group is fully equal. To ban or delete an admin you must first move them out of the Administrators group.
A user is "admin or moderator" (is_admmod) if they are in the Administrators group or their group has the moderator flag. Important: giving a group the moderator flag does not by itself let its members moderate anything — a moderator must also be assigned to specific forums via their profile's admin section (Profile → Admin → "moderator of these forums" checkboxes).
| Page | Administrators | Moderators |
|---|---|---|
| Index, Users, Reports*, Server statistics | ✔ | ✔ |
| Bans | ✔ | only with "Allow moderators to ban users" |
| Options, Permissions, Categories, Forums, User groups, Censoring, Maintenance, Styles, Plugins | ✔ | — |
* The Reports menu item is shown to moderators only when the reporting method includes internal reports. Parts of Server statistics (environment and database details) are admin-only.
The console shows a Moderator menu (Index, Users, Bans, Reports) to everyone with access, and an Admin menu (Options, Permissions, Categories, Forums, User groups, Censoring, Maintenance, Styles, Plugins) to administrators only. Active plugins that provide a settings page get a direct "PluginName Settings" link appended to the admin menu.
The landing page. Shows:
- A welcome list of what you can do from the console.
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Alerts, when relevant:
- A new release is available — links to Maintenance → Check for updates.
- The file install.php still exists, but should be removed — with a one-click Delete it link.
- About eveBB: the running version, a link to check for upgrades, server statistics, and links to the GitHub issue tracker and discussions.
The board's main settings page, organized in groups. All settings are stored in the database (o_* keys in the config table); saving regenerates the config cache. Highlights per group:
- Essentials — board title and description; board logo (upload PNG/JPEG/GIF/WebP; sizing in px or CSS units; position left/centre/right, full-width banner, or full-width crop-to-fill); base URL; default time zone and DST; default language and style.
-
Time and timeouts — time/date formats (PHP
date()syntax), visit timeout, online timeout, redirect time. -
Display — show version number; user info in posts; user post counts; smilies in posts/signatures; clickable links; topic review (posts shown under the reply form); topics/posts per page defaults; indent size; maximum
[quote]nesting depth. - Features — quick reply; visual editor (WYSIWYG on/off); login throttle with max failed attempts and lockout minutes; users online; censoring on/off; signatures; the "posted-in" dot; topic view counts; quick jump; gzip output; search-all-forums for regular users; additional menu items (custom nav links); footer copyright line.
- Syndication — default feed type (None/RSS/Atom) and feed cache duration.
- Reports — reporting method: Internal (Admin → Reports), Email (to the mailing list), or Both; the mailing-list addresses.
- Avatars — enable/disable, upload directory, max width/height/size, and the default avatar (upload your own or reset to the standard one).
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E-mail — admin and webmaster addresses; enable forum/topic subscriptions; SMTP server/username/password and SSL. Leave SMTP blank to use PHP
mail(). - Registration — allow registrations; email-verify registrations; report new registrations; require profile details (real name, date of birth with 13+ age check, country); registration CAPTCHA (needs GD + OpenSSL); forum rules on/off and the rules text; default email privacy for new users.
- Announcements — a banner message shown on every page.
- Maintenance — maintenance mode (board visible to admins only) and its message.
Board-wide toggles (p_* settings), in three groups:
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Posting — allow BBCode; allow the
[img]tag; allow all-caps messages; allow all-caps subjects; require guests to supply an email when posting. -
Signatures — BBCode in signatures;
[img]in signatures; all-caps signatures; maximum signature length and lines. - Registration — allow banned email addresses; allow duplicate email addresses.
Per-group permissions (read board, post, edit, search, flood intervals, ...) live in User groups; per-forum overrides live in Forums.
Add categories (by name), delete them (deleting a category deletes all forums and posts inside it — a confirmation warns you), and edit names and display positions.
- Add forum to category — creates a "New forum" and opens its edit page.
- Per forum: name, description (HTML allowed), category, sort topics by (last post / topic start / subject), display position, and — for empty forums only — a redirect URL (turns the forum into a link elsewhere).
- Group permissions for this forum — a grid of Read forum / Post replies / Post topics per group (Administrators excluded; they can do everything). Values start from each group's own defaults; cells that differ are highlighted, and only differences are stored. Revert to default clears all overrides.
- Deleting a forum removes all its topics, posts, per-forum permissions, and subscriptions.
- Add group — new groups are based on an existing group's permissions.
- Default group — where new registrations land (Members by default). Admin, guest, and moderator groups can't be the default.
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Edit group — group title; user title (the rank text shown under usernames); auto-promotion (move members to another group once they reach a post count); the permission flags:
- General: read board, view user information, post replies, post topics, edit own posts, delete own posts, delete own topics, post links, set own user title, use search, search user list, send e-mails.
- Flood intervals in seconds (0 = off): between posts, searches, e-mails, reports.
- Moderator flags (custom/non-admin groups): allow users moderator privileges, and — only meaningful when that master flag is on — edit user profiles, rename users, change passwords, promote users, ban users.
- Delete group — custom groups only; if the group has members you choose where to move them. The four preset groups and the current default group can't be deleted.
Administrators' own permissions are fixed at "everything" and are not editable.
Available to admins and moderators.
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User search — by username, email, title, real name, website, messaging handles, location, signature, or admin note (wildcards
*supported); by post count; by last-post / last-visit / registration date ranges; filtered by group (including unverified users); sortable. - IP search — find all users who have posted from a given IP.
- Result rows link to View IP stats (all IPs a user has posted from, with counts and last-seen times) and Show posts.
- Bulk actions on selected users: Ban (admins, or moderators with the ban flag — admins and moderators themselves can't be banned), Delete (admins only, optionally deleting all their posts), and Change group (admins only).
Available to admins and to moderators whose group has "Allow moderators to ban users".
- Add ban — start from a username (or from the "ban" link in a profile). The advanced form lets you set: username, IP address(es) or ranges (space-separated), an email address or domain, a message shown to the banned visitor, and an expiry date (blank = until manually removed). Admins and members of moderator groups cannot be banned.
- Ban search — filter existing bans by username/IP/email/message/expiry; edit or remove each ban.
Bans match on username, IP, and email independently; a banned visitor sees your ban message wherever they go.
Maintain a list of censored words and their replacements. Wildcards (*) are accepted; matching is case-insensitive; censoring also applies to usernames (new users can't register a name containing a censored word). The master on/off switch is in Options → Features.
Post reports filed by users (when the reporting method includes Internal). Each report shows who reported what, where, when, and why, with a Mark as read button. The last ten handled reports remain visible below.
Server load average and the current number of users online. Administrators additionally see the environment (OS, PHP version, detected opcode cache — OPcache or APCu) and database details (server version; for MySQL also total rows and data size).
Admin-only. Four tools:
- eveBB updates — shows the running version; Check for updates queries the releases API and reports the newest release with its release notes.
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Install update — appears when a newer release was found: a one-click Update to X button that downloads the release, verifies its SHA-256 checksum, and installs it while preserving
config.php, avatars, and the cache directory. See Upgrading from FluxBB for details and requirements. - Rebuild search index — regenerates the full-text index in batches (default 300 posts per cycle, auto-refreshing to avoid timeouts). Use after restoring from backup or when search results look wrong. Enable maintenance mode first on a busy board.
- Prune old posts — permanently delete topics with no posts newer than N days, optionally including sticky topics, in one forum or all forums.
Admin-only style manager. Upload a style as a .zip (containing a single folder with a style.json manifest and the stylesheet), set any installed style as the board default, or delete non-default styles. Styles copied into style/ over FTP appear here automatically. See the Styling Guide for the on-disk format.
Admin-only plugin manager for manifest plugins. Upload a plugin .zip (single folder with a plugin.json manifest), then Activate / Deactivate it; active plugins with a settings file get a Settings page (also linked from the admin menu); inactive plugins can be deleted. Only upload plugins you trust — an active plugin runs with full forum privileges. See Plugin Development.
For compatibility with classic FluxBB admin plugins: single .php files dropped into plugins/ named AP_Name.php (admins only) or AMP_Name.php (admins and moderators), opened via admin_loader.php?plugin=AP_Name.php. This mechanism is separate from the manifest plugin system and ships with no bundled examples. See Plugin Development.