Forum and Discussion List Software by phpBB: Inactive User

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Administering one of my sites today, I had an occasion to change some parameters for a particular user on a phpBB forum.

The forum was already installed, but it was locked for this user. Essentially, his privileges were not extensive enough to allow him to post a new thread to the forum and he was labeled an “inactive” user.

Once I signed in as administrator to the forum (twice!), I went down the left-hand column to User Admin/Permissions. At the new screen I clicked on “Find a username” to find his username. A pop-up window allowed me to enter his partial username to find the actual spelling of it. Inputting the correct spelling of his username into the Permissions form and clicking on Lookup User brought up this page:

User admin screen from phpBB forum for setting permissions.

From this screen I could change the user’s level from user to administrator, and for each forum I could change the moderator status from “Not Moderator” to “Is Moderator”. By clicking Submit the user would be able to do pretty much anything on the forums.

Unfortunately, this user still could not sign in. I reset his password and he still could not sign in with the new password, even though he refreshed his browser. The limiting point here was that he was still considered inactive. I thought that was because he never made any posts yet, but not so.

Going to the User Admin/Management page in the Admin area, I found a group of “Special admin-only fields” under which was listed the term “User is Active” and the No choice selected. Once I changed the No to a Yes, and submitted the changes, my user could sign in and make a post to the forum.