Forum - The forum is the whole installation, and usually contains multiple boards. You should always enter the forum through a link that ends in forum.pl (not forum_show.pl) to let the forum know when you start a new session. Otherwise the forum won't know when to mark posts as new or old.

User - A user is anyone who registers an account in the forum. Registration is usually not required for reading, but only registered users will see statistics about new/read posts. Users can be granted membership status to selected boards, enabling them to see private boards and post in read-only boards.

Board - A board contains topics, which in turn contain the posts. Boards can be set to be visible to registered users or to administrators and board members only. Boards can be anonymous, meaning the user's ID won't be stored with the post (this doesn't guarantee full anonymity from admins, though), and can optionally allow posts by unregistered visitors. Announcement boards can be read-only, so that they only allow posts by admins and members, or reply-only, which means that only admins and members can start new topics, but everybody can reply. Another option for boards is approval moderation. If this option is activated, new posts will be invisible to normal users until an administrator approves them. Score Moderation is explained in more detail below. Users can subscribe to a board, which means they will get all new posts in that board in one daily email.

Topic - A topic, otherwise known as thread, contains all the posts on a specific subtopic, that should be named in the topic's subject. Boards have expiration values that determine after how many days their topics will expire or get locked after their last post has been made. Administrators can also manually lock topics, so that no new messages can be added to them.

Post - A post is a single public message by a user. It can be either a base post, which starts a new topic, or a reply to an existing topic. Posts can be edited and deleted, which might be limited to a certain time frame. Via the [Misc] link, they can be added to personal todo lists and can be reported to the administrators in case of rule violations.

Private Message - In addition to the public posts, private messages may be enabled in a forum. Registered users can send each other these messages without knowing the email addresses of the receivers.

Forum Administrator - A forum administrator can control and edit everything in the forum. A forum can have multiple forum administrators.

Board Administrator - A board administrator is what most other forum applications call the board moderator. A board administrator's powers are limited to the boards he is administrator of. A board administrator can edit, delete and approve posts by normal users, lock and delete topics and add and remove board members. A board can have multiple board administrators.

Score Moderation - If the score moderation system is active for a board, every post in that board has a score. Users with votes can moderate a post up or down, adding or subtracting a point to/of the post's score. All users can set a score threshold in their options. If a post's score is lower than that threshold, the post will be invisible to the user (except for a small hidden-post indicator). Using the 'Reveal' button on the hidden-post indicator, users can temporarily reveal all hidden posts on that page. Forum administrators can set the default number of daily votes new users get, change this value for individual users, and set the starting score individual user's posts get.

Polls - The creator of a topic can add a poll to this topic, if this feature is enabled. Each poll can contain up to 20 options. Registered users can cast one vote for one option per poll. Polls can't be edited, and can only be deleted as long as there haven't been any votes.

File Attachments - Posts may contain file attachments, which can be uploaded and deleted via the post edit page, if the feature is enabled. Attached web-compatible images can be displayed inline at the end of the post, if the 'Embed' option is selected in the attachment form, if the feature is enabled.

Icons

	Yellow icons indicate new posts respectively topics or boards with new posts. In this forum, 'new' means a post has been added since your last visit. Even if you have just read it, it is still a new post, and will only be counted as old on your next visit to the forum.
	Checkmarked icons indicate that the post respectively all posts in a topic or board have been read. Posts are counted as read once their topic had been on screen or if they're older than a set number of days. Since new/old and unread/read are independent concepts in this forum, posts can be new and read as well as old and unread at the same time.
	Icons with dotted outlines indicate topics/posts that are invisible to other users, because they are waiting for approval by an administrator.
	The lock icon indicates the topic has been locked for some reason and no new posts (except by administrators) are allowed.

Markup Tags - For security reasons, mwForum only supports its own set of markup tags, no HTML tags. Markup can be enabled/disabled per board. http:// and ftp://-URLs are automatically displayed as links. Available markup tags:

[b]text[/b]	renders text bold
[i]text[/i]	renders text italic
[tt]text[/tt]	renders text nonproportional
[img]image-URL[/img]	embeds an image via URL, if the feature is enabled

Smileys - The following emoticons are displayed as images, if the feature is enabled: :-) ;-) :-( :-o

Why doesn't logging in work?
You browser must have cookies enabled. mwForum stores your user ID and password via cookies on your computer, so that you only have to type them in once.

I lost my password, can you send it to me?
You can request your password on the login page. It will be sent to your registered email address.

Why this complicated registration via password email?
This forum has several features that can send you emails, e.g. reply and message notifications, password requests and board subscriptions. The forum will require you to specify a valid email address and only send the required password to that address to verify its validity. This is necessary since otherwise a lot of people would type in bogus or broken addresses and try to use the email features anyway, which would result in hundreds of bounced emails/error messages for the forum administrator. Besides, this registration process serves as a double opt-in scheme, which prevents the forum from being abused for email-spamming other people.

Do I have to use the logout feature?
You only need to logout if you are using a computer that is also used by other non-trusted persons. mwForum stores your user ID and password via cookies on your computer, and these are removed on logout. You can also use the 'Limit login duration to browser session duration' feature in your user options to automatically logout when your browser's session ends.

How do I attach images and other files to posts?
If attachments are enabled in this forum, first submit your post without the attachment, after that you can upload it on the post edit page. Posting and attaching is separated this way because uploads can fail for various reasons (incl. size and timeouts), and you probably don't want to lose your post text when that happens.