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- Can I change my username or the username of a member on my forum?
- Can I change my Forum Name?
- How do I reset a password?
- How do I delete my forum or user account?
- How can I use my own Domain Name on my forum?
- How do I remove the ads from my forum?
- How can I put my own ads on my forum?
- What are the premium services offered on Lefora?
- Can I import my old forum?
- Does Lefora Support other Languages?
- How do I create a poll?
- How much storage space do I have for files on my forum?
- Can I add ranks or roles to my members?
- As an admin, can I edit other member's posts?
- How do I embed my forum onto my website?
- How do I add custom Flash Widgets to my forum's sidebar?
- How do I add a chatbox or chatroom (or shoutbox or chat)?
- How can I control if my members first goto the Headlines page or the Forum page?
- What's the difference between the Headlines and Forum page?
- Can my admins have a private category to discuss admin-only topics?
- Why can't my sig include an image?
- Can I use colored fonts in the posts?
- How do I put a paypal widget on my forum for member donations?
- What is the difference between Admins & Mods?
- Remove vs. Banning a member?
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Usernames cannot be changed. If a change in username is a must, ask the member to sign up for a new account with a different email address (as an email address can only have one account). The older user can leave the forum if they wish.
You can change your forum's displayed name (the one in the header), via your Admin Panel. You cannot change your forum's URL shortname (as in support.lefora.com). However, there are options for you, such as using a Custom Domain name (one that you own). This is a premium service.
That's simple, and there's no admin action need (like other forums.) For the member who forgot their password, they just need to click 'Login', then click the 'Forgot Password' link. A member will be presented with a form to enter their email address. A password reset link will be emailed to the member. NOTE: Sometimes, especially yahoo.com emails, have the reset password email go to SPAM, be sure to look into SPAM folder from "Password Reset" <no-reply@leforamail.com>
Alternatively, members can visit http://support.lefora.com/password/ to have a password reset email sent to them.
We get this question ever so often from somebody who's created a test forum and doesn't need it anymore
If you would like to delete your forum, follow these steps:
- When logged into your forum, click 'Forum Admin' on the userbar
- Click the 'Settings' tab
- At the bottom of the 'Setup' tab is a button to Delete your forum. (Note you may see a button that says 'Abandon' on active forums, this allows somebody from the community to step up and admin the forum. As other members may have posted in the forum, we give them the right to claim the forum first.)
- When logged in, click 'Edit Profile' on the userbar.
- Click the 'Close Account' tab. Read the information there carefully and confirm your password to close your account.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: If you delete your forum or your user account, you will NOT be able to recover any data you had on your forum. If you delete your forum, you will not be able to re-register that forum name on lefora. If you delete your user account, you will not be able to use the same username on Lefora in the future.
We call that Custom Domain Name Hosting, it's part of our Lefora Pro package, and we're running a Custom Domain promotion that allows you to get this specific service for free.
Since Lefora is free to you (you get free hosting, free forum software, spam protection, automatic free backups, custom themes, and dozens of other free features) ads are how we support our services. However, if your interested in removing the ads from your forum, you can upgrade to 'Lefora Pro' via the Upgrades tab on your Admin Panel.
This may be a premium service we'll be using in the future. If you would like to work with us in Beta as we rollout this feature, please contact us. During the beta this will be $30/month, please email upgrades@lefora.com and include your forum url and username.
If you would like premium services on your forum, you can upgrade to 'Lefora Pro' from you admin panel which has the following features:
- No Ads on your forum for any of your members
- Custom Domain Hosting
- More than double the storage (5GB) space and 5x the monthly bandwidth (50GB)
- Tech support over Email
- Daily offsite backups hosted and maintained by Lefora
We do have additional premium services such as our User Authentication API (Single Sign-on). If you already have a website with a membership/user system that allows people to login, we may be able to hook into your system, so your members do not need to log in twice. Email us at upgrades@lefora.com and include your forum url and username.
If you're running phpbb, punbb, or IPB, we may be able to Import your existing forum for free. Forums must have at least 100 topics to be imported. Just importforum@lefora.com with a link to your old forum and we'll let you know if we can import it.
Yes we do. As an admin, you can set many of the titles displayed around the forum to any language you want through the admin panel (such as the forum name, description, categories, widget titles, etc.) We're working on translating other parts of the site, such as the admin panel, if you would like to help please email helptranslate@lefora.com.
How do I create a poll?
First start a new topic, then click 'Create a Poll' above the topic input fields. We'll be making this easier to find in the future.
If you want your poll to be displayed on the sidebar, you'll have to go into your Forum Admin Panel, and click the 'Sidebar' tab under 'Appearance'. Then drag a Poll widget from the left to the right. Click 'Edit' on the poll widget, and select a poll from the drop down (like the one you just created). Click OK, then be sure to 'Save' your changes by clicking the Save button in the bottom right.
If you already have a Poll Widget on your sidebar, you may need to return to your admin panel to Edit the widget and make sure the correct Poll is selected.
On May 5, 2009, we changed our Ad Supported forums from quote: "Pretty much unlimited, though we'll probably have to put a free/premium cap on it at some point" to 2GB storage and 10GB of monthly bandwidth which is much more than we've seen on other free forum hosting providers.
In the future, as we're working on a feature that will allow you to rank or assign roles to your members. We plan on making this a sophisticated system that will take into account thumbs up and thumbs down, so it's more then just number of posts or time on site.
In order to preserve speech and preserve integrity of a discussion, an admin cannot edit another member's post on Lefora. However, the admin can delete the post (or mark it as spam if applicable). It remains our policy that you cannot edit another users post as the post belongs to the user, if it's inappropriate it can be hidden by your members with thumbs down, or deleted by admins. If it's incorrect information a simple post below with the correct information will do. In any situation talk to the original poster, rather than changing their words without permission.
We find it actually helps keep the forums running smoothly, there's no edit wars, there's no opportunity to get angry at someone changing the meaning of your original message, and if the forum members make full use of the thumbing down feature then there's even less work for admins to do to remove inappropriate posts.
In the future, we'll probably add post updating options available to the member who authored the post and the admin.
We support the millions of custom flash widgets that currently exist for myspace, blogs, and other sites. We do not support javascript widgets as this would pose a security threat.
To add a flash widget to your sidebar, click 'Forum Admin' -> 'Apperance' -> 'Sidebar'. Then add a 'Custom HTML' widget to your sidebar, click 'Edit' and paste in the flash embed code you get from another site, such as www.widgetbox.com. Some favorite widgets?
- Chat Box from www.chatango.com
- Music Player from www.imeem.com
- Tip Jar from www.tipjoy.com
- Calendar from www.yourminis.com/minis/yourminis/yourminis/mini:calendar
Here's a Step-by-step Guide.
What is a widget? (basically, it's a phrase to refer to little piece of computer code that allow you to embed videos, photos, chatboxes, music players, etc. from one site into another site.
Your forum's Headline page is sorta like the headlines of a newspaper. It features hot content for the day, from new posts, to new members, to recently embedded media. This is a unique feature on lefora like no other forum. Many other forum admins on other software must work hard to manually make this page for their own forum. Lefora does this for you automatically.
We realize that if you're very active in your forum, the Headlines page doesn't offer much value to you. The Headlines page is geared towards potential new members thinking of joining your forum or who want to get an overview of your forum. This is why we do something special - we redirect non-members and members to different places. Let's look at an example on the support forum.
If you visit support.lefora.com, and you're a member of the forum, you'll be re-directed to support.lefora.com/forum. If you're a non-member, you'll be redirected to support.lefora.com/headlines. Then once you join, you'll be treated as a member.
So all members of your forum are redirected to the "Forums" tab, all non-members are redirected to the "Headlines" tab.
Now, some admins ask us why they are always redirected to the Headlines tab even though they are a member. This is most likely due to the fact that you set a bookmark in your webbrowser for something like myforum.lefora.com/headlines. You simply need to remove the /headlines from your bookmark, and you'll be fine. When sending out links to your forum, remember to drop the /headlines or /forum, and just include your domain (i.e. shortname.lefora.com).
Lefora offers a number of features over traditional forums, one of them is our unified login system. This lets you use your lefora username across any lefora forum, so you don't need to log in again. This is called Lefora Single-Login.
If you want a private area for admins to discuss forum topics, we recommend making a Private forum, say 'forumname-admins.lefora.com' and asking only your admins to join. You can customize that forum however ever you want, including adding the chatango.com chatbox, so that only admins with access to the forum can chat alongside topics in real-time.
We may have more options around Private Categories in the future, but we recommend Private Admin-only Forums for now.
There are a number of aesthetic choices we make on Lefora in order to help provide for interesting and active forums. One of them is limiting the sig to 140 characters and not allowing for images. It helps avoid the issue where a thread has a lot of short replies but tons of sig images - the thread loads slower then normal and can be hard to read. We realize not everybody might agree with this aesthetic, but it's an option we choose.
As this has been a feature requested frequently on lefora, we will be adding this option for admins to turn on/off in their forum in the future. We hadn't made it an option from the start, because we like to keep the admin panel simple with its options so that it's easy to use, yet powerful (this is one of things we hear lots of positive feedback on).
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