you keep saying the forum folder isn't there - when i can clearly see it and show it to you on filezilla.

Simple it's not - how are you looking ?

Okay so if I type the url into firefox I see what you mean.
It doesn't show the forum folder.
But filezilla does.

So while it's definitely there - the forum software can't see it when it tries to apply templates - but can see it when you edit the files in the invisible folder..

Yeah simple  
okay I'll download, delete and upload from scratch.

There's alot of pissed off slingers out there at the moment you know 

what's happening is that the folder and files are there, 100% guarenteed they are where they should be - BUT invisible to general html - the forum software can see them unless it's trying to read the html template file.

Ie: I can play with the style sheets in that folder and edit the templates in that folder. But they become invisible when it tries read them to apply the html template.

I'm guessing it's some sort of permissions/bin/ascii copying/moving gremlin.

So I'm going to delete the forum template folder and re-upload very carefully.

You're sort of right - in that you can't see the forum folder - even though it's definitely there.

(5 minutes later - create new - empty - Templates/Forum directory)
Ah ha - new forum directory is now visible and accessible through html.
Right - walk the dogs and then put all the crap back and keep fingers crossed.

But I've got faith

you're wrong dude - but helpful with it.

get it into your head that the forum directory was there ALL THE TIME (even when there were two yabbfile folders, all the right files were in the right place). It just wasn't visible via html.

So while your fix should work - your reasoning was partly wrong

I'm emphasizing this because the odds are it'll happen again with somebody else and just repeating: 'the folder is not there' - when the other person can clearly see it and access it and show it to you, isn't quite as useful as you think it is

Bill, what I'm betting happened in your instance - you're doing your editing in Windows which normally has a case-insensitive file-system. In your links to whatever was in the folder you probably had both 'Theater/' and 'theater/'. But when the files and folder were transferred to a *nix system, one of those sets of links stopped working because while Windows usually thinks Theater and theater are the same, *nix knows better.

I get caught with that all the time - I actually have a little program that will rename to lower-case all the (non-YaBB) files I need to upload so they don't 'suddenly' go 404 on me - plus I simply now have the habit of only using lower-case links. (unless it's YaBB. )

Hmm.

well actually it was none of those things - and while I know exactly what happened (just not why), so far there isn't a sensible explanation.

When I deleted the existing Forum folder and created a new one - the new one showed up.
UNTIL I put files into it and changed the chmod to the same as all the other folders and files (755 & 644)
At which point the Forum folder vanished from html again.
Much banging of heads on walls insued.

However, being an afficianado of murphys law I decided to ignore what 'should' be and just create the Fourm folder without any changes to the chmod. And that worked.
I then uploaded the template and css files - again without messing with the chmods. And they remained visible to html.
So currently I've got the folders and files with default chmod and they are visible.

so folders are 775 and files are 664.
If I change them they turn invisible (still there bill, just invisible).

ALL other files and folders including the Templates/Admin folder are standard chmod 755 & 644

And so far it's working. 
Before I moved the Templates/Forum folder had 755 & 644 permissions. Go figure.

So thanks for all your help guys - even if an idea isn't right, it got my brain thinking in the right direction.

You just need to remember with computers - what 'should work' be isn't neccessarily what does work

So just got to get my navigation menu back (and I saw a thread on just that subject on here  ) and I think we'll be back to normal.

Cheers guys - see you when the next problem crops up 

Bill Myers wrote on Jul 4^th, 2013 at 3:23pm:



OOh - now that's a bloody good idea - glad I cam back now

Yeah slinging.org has been around for over 10 years now - so every spider, webbot, spambot and chinese college student knows where we are. We even had to totally remove the registration page (even though there was no link on the forum) as it was getting hit so often we were drawing 3x as much cpu time on the server as we are allowed.

Before I shut down the self registration - during the great spam attack of 2011 - we were getting around 10 spam accounts registered every MINUTE.
basically 5 of us were spending 4-5 hours a day doing nothing but removing spam, and some of it was really really nasty porn images. we're talking animals, things, you name it.

Since removing self registration - 0 spam posts in 20 months.

Thats: ZERO spam accounts.

Takes me a few minutes most days to sign up any new members and the other mods are free to do things like setup faq and index threads, which we never had the time or inclination to do when spam was around.

But a registration button that goes to a email me thread - I like that :

See I said you were helpful

Now if I can only get images and avatars to display I'll be 99.9% there.
But that's a seperate thread

ps: where do i find the 'add a tab feature' ?

I've done it with html through the template before but I like the idea of a set menu option to do it instead.

curious aardvark wrote on Jul 6^th, 2013 at 3:55pm:

Here you go:
xnoddyx wrote on Jul 6^th, 2013 at 4:30pm:

You'll of course want to first create a topic or post to help people register. Then as needed, copy the exact url anchor to use when you create your Register menu tab.

Note: The Add a tab feature has a glitch in the "Add after" section. So skip past that to simply place this new tab of yours in "Front" (YaBB's default).

This is an irritation; not a problem since it is easily solved.

The easy solution is to then use the Edit tabs feature (see "Reorder Tabs:" to the right). Using the > symbol will place the tab where you want it.

Don't sweat getting it right the first time. If a mistake is made, just delete the tab you made, and start over again.

Good luck!

*************************************

curious aardvark wrote on Jul 6^th, 2013 at 3:55pm:

Since January of 2012 we've had 0 spam-bot posts, and ZERO spam accounts even though we have Open registration without approvals. Not only that, we allow Guest Posting.

Keep in mind that we've had many hundreds of thousands of spam-bot registration attempts, all of which have been stopped cold!
We're able to do this because of ggn's anti-spam CAPTCHA hack.

Thankfully, Derek Barnstorm authored this hack into a mod with ggn's proud and happy approval, and lead developer Dandello has included it in YaBB's next version. You can see it in action by going to the General Board of Dandello's test bed forum, and scrolling down near the bottom.