The committee's guide

For the people who run a community's board day to day: the club secretary, the committee, the person who "looks after the website". Everything here happens in a browser, in the board's admin panel. Nothing here needs a terminal, and the one section that would is the last one — it tells you what to hand to whoever set the board up.

Two jobs have guides of their own: keeping threads civil is The moderator's guide, and taking the subs is The treasurer's guide. The full operator handbook is Running a board — this guide covers the day-to-day subset and links there for the detail.

The admin panel

The panel lives at /admin. Opening it asks for your password a second time, even though you are already signed in. That is not a bug: the panel keeps a session of its own, separate from your board session, so a browser left signed in to the board is not also signed in to the panel. The panel session lapses after 30 minutes idle, and after 8 hours regardless.

Inside it, anything destructive — deleting a group, rewriting the permissions of forums you are not looking at — asks for your password again if it is more than fifteen minutes since you last confirmed it. Expect the prompt; it is the panel being careful, not broken.

The panel opens on an Overview: what is waiting for you, the board's totals, and the latest administrative activity. The sections this guide uses:

Who can open the panel at all is one permission, granted per group, and it is the one right the administrator shortcuts never bypass. In practice: members of the Administrators group have it, and nobody else does until you decide otherwise.

Shaping the board

Creating a forum

Admin → Forums (/admin/forums) shows the tree, with an Add forum form beneath it. A new row asks three things:

• Kind — a category (a heading that holds forums), a forum (holds threads), or a link (redirects elsewhere).
• Inside — which category or forum it sits under, or the top level.
• Title.

Click into a forum afterwards for the rest: a description, the slug that appears in its links, and its options — open for posting, allow new threads, replies, polls and attachments, require a thread prefix, and whether new threads or replies are held for approval.

Arranging the tree

The tree screen is where the order is decided. Drag a row by its handle: up and down to reorder, sideways to change how deep it sits. Each row also carries four arrow buttons that do the same thing without a mouse.

Three things to know before you drag:

• A forum takes its subforums with it. They move as a block.
• What lands somewhere new inherits its permissions from where it landed — so moving a busy forum under a private category hides the whole subtree. The screen says so under the tree.
• Reordering among the same siblings never asks for your password; moving a forum under a different parent does, because it changes who can see what.

The detail is in Running a board § The forum tree.

A private committee forum

Most boards want one forum only the committee can read. The shape of it:

1. Make a Committee group. Admin → Groups → Create group. The form asks which group to copy permissions from — copy Registered, so committee members start as ordinary members plus whatever you add.
2. Put people in it. On each person's screen under Admin → Users, tick the group under Additional groups. An additional group only ever adds rights; it takes nothing away.
3. Make the forum, then open its Permissions screen. Permissions are set per group, per forum: for this forum, deny viewing to the ordinary member groups (and Guests), and grant it to Committee.

Two things worth knowing before you touch the permissions screen:

Administrators see the forum whatever the matrix says — the bypass exists so a board can always be repaired, and every use of it is recorded in the admin log.

A related trick: a forum where members can post but only see their own threads — applications, welfare matters, anything written to the committee rather than to the room — is one permission, described in Running a board § A "your threads only" forum.

Making the board look like the club

Everything in this section changes on the running board, from the panel, with nothing redeployed.

The name

The board's name — in the header, in every page title, and on outgoing mail — is Board name under /admin/settings?group=board. There is nowhere else it is written down, so changing it there changes it everywhere.

The logo

Admin → Themes (/admin/themes) takes a logo to show in place of the name, as two uploads: light and dark — one image that reads on a white page usually disappears on a black one. Upload only the light one and it is used everywhere. PNG, JPEG, WebP or SVG, up to 512 KiB.

With no logo, the header shows the board's name in text — which is where every board starts and where most stay. The logo's alt text, for screen readers, is Logo alt text under the board settings; left empty it becomes the board's name.

The tab icon, home-screen icon and shared links

There is nothing to upload here. The browser-tab icon (favicon), the icon a phone saves when someone adds the board to their home screen, and the picture that appears when a board link is pasted into a chat or posted to a social network are all drawn from what you have already set — the board name, the default theme's colours, and the logo when there is one.

• The tab icon is a small square with the board's initials in the theme's primary colour. It follows the reader's light or dark mode.
• The home-screen icon — the board installs as a progressive web app — centres the light logo, or the initials when no logo is set, on the theme background.
• The link preview (Open Graph and X/Twitter card) shows the logo, the board name and its description on the theme background.

Change the name, upload a logo, or set a new default theme and all three follow at once; there is no separate step and no cache to clear. A logo is drawn into these pictures only when it is a PNG or JPEG within the upload limit — an SVG or WebP logo still shows in the header, and the generated icons and preview fall back to the board's initials and name.

Colours, fonts and themes

The same Admin → Themes screen holds, per theme:

• On or off — an enabled theme appears in the appearance control at the foot of every page, and any member can pick it for themselves.
• The default — what a visitor who has chosen nothing sees.
• Token values — colours, corner radius, spacing and fonts, each with separate light and dark values, with a sample that repaints as you change them.
• Export and import — a look can be saved as a file and moved to another board.

Most controls here are freely reversible. Reset and Import are the exceptions — each replaces every stored override in one press — so both ask for your password again.

If your club has a crest and two colours, the shipped clubhouse theme is built for exactly that: set the club colour and the trim colour on the theme screen and everything else stays neutral. With no logo uploaded it draws a crest from the board's name. See Running a board § A board in a club's colours.

Telling people things

Announcements

Admin → Content → Announcements puts a dated notice above the forums. An announcement is not a pinned thread: nobody can reply to one, it disappears on its own end date, and removing it removes nothing anybody wrote — which is what makes it safe to delete when it is stale.

Each one has a title, a Markdown message (rendered the same way a post is), a From date, an optional Until date (blank never expires), and a place: the whole board, or one forum — a forum's announcement is shown to whoever can see that forum, so an announcement on the committee forum reaches only the committee. Dates are entered in UTC, and the screen says so. The list shows each announcement's state at a glance: showing now, scheduled, expired, or switched off.

The navigation menu

Admin → Content → Navigation is the menu across the top of every page. A new board starts with six items — Home, New posts, Unanswered, My posts, Search and Who's online — and they are ordinary rows: rename one, move it, hide it, or delete it, and add links of your own beside them. A link can point at a page on the board or at any web address — the club's main site, the fixtures list.

Each item can be shown to everyone, only signed-out visitors, only signed-in members, or only staff — and, more narrowly, only to members of groups you tick. Items can be nested one level deep into sub-menus by dragging. The detail, including what each field does, is in Running a board § The navigation menu.

Mass mail

Admin → Users → Mass mail (/admin/users/mail) sends an e-mail to everybody, or to one group — the Committee group from earlier, say. Either way it reaches only accounts that are active, not closed, and have a verified address, and the screen shows the size of each audience beside it, so the figure next to a group is how many messages choosing it will queue. See Running a board § Who a mass mail reaches.

Mass mail is queued and delivered in the background, so it needs the board's mail working and its background worker running — if a mass mail sits unsent, that is one for the technical person, and Running a board § Mail is their page.

Closing for maintenance

Board offline, under /admin/settings?group=board, replaces every board page with a message of your choosing until you switch it back. Signing in and the admin panel stay reachable, so you can always turn it off again. See Running a board § Taking the board offline.

Welcoming and managing members

Registration

/admin/settings?group=registration holds the two settings that decide how people join:

• Allow new registrations — off closes the board to new members: the Register link goes, and the registration page says the board is not taking new members. Existing members sign in as before, so it is the switch to reach for during a spam wave, or for a board that is meant to be invitation-only. See Running a board § Closing registration.
• Activation method — what a new account must do before it can sign in: nothing, follow an e-mailed confirmation link, wait for an administrator's approval, or both.

Registration questions and the other anti-spam controls live at Admin → Anti-spam.

An account stuck at "awaiting activation" — the member who never received their link — can be activated by hand: find them under Admin → Users and change the state on their screen.

Roles are group memberships

A member's rights come from the groups they are in. Every board starts with the same seeded groups — Guests, Registered, Administrators, Super Moderators, Moderators, Awaiting Activation, Banned — and you add your own beside them, like the Committee group above. Each member has one primary group and any number of additional ones, and both are edited on the member's screen under Admin → Users.

Making somebody a moderator of one forum does not need a group at all: open the forum under Admin → Forums and appoint them there, ticking exactly the rights they should hold — edit, delete, approve, move, and so on, optionally cascading to the forums beneath. What each checkbox grants is spelled out in Running a board § What an appointment grants.

Promotions that members earn — a "Veteran" group at 500 posts — can be automated under Admin → Groups → Promotions; the screen previews exactly who a rule would move before you enable it. See Running a board § Promotions.

When somebody leaves the committee

Accounts belong to people; roles are group memberships. That one sentence is most of a clean handover:

• Never share an account or a password. Each committee member acts from their own account, because the admin log records who did what, and a shared login makes that record worthless.
• When somebody leaves, take the roles off their account: remove them from the Committee group (and any staff group) on their member screen, and remove any forum appointments on the forum screens. Their account, their posts and their name stay theirs — they have simply become an ordinary member again.
• When somebody joins, add their own existing account to the groups and appointments the role carries. There is nothing to hand over but the group memberships.

Keep more than one administrator. If the only administrator's account is ever lost, recovery is possible but needs the technical person — it is done from the server, not from the panel.

When to hand it to somebody technical

Some jobs are about the machine the board runs on rather than the board, and they need the terminal. Hand these to whoever set the board up, with the page they need:

One of these is worth chasing rather than filing: backups. A board accumulates years of a community's writing, and the backup is the only way back from a bad day. Ask the person who runs the server two questions — is the database and the uploads folder being backed up somewhere off the machine, and has a restore ever been rehearsed. If either answer is no, point them at the page above.