Options Manager -- Queued Messages, Rating of Posts, Spell Checker

These options are set from the Conv/Msg tab of the Options Manager interface. These are Discus Pro options that allow queued messages, post ratings, and new message spell checking to be enabled and configured.

Queued Messages

When messages are submitted through the message queue, they must be approved by a moderator in order to be posted into public view. This Discus Pro feature can be configured with the following available options:

Note moderator who approved message: Make a selection here to add a note to the end of an approved message or to store the approving moderator as a message property. This allows you and the visitors to the board to know what moderator approved the post.

Note on the post: If selected, a message will be added to the end of the post indicating the username of the moderator who approved the message. This note will be viewable to everyone who reads the post.

Store internally as property: If selected, the approving moderator will be saved as a property of the message. This property can be viewed by viewing the message properties through Page Manager. Note that this information is stored as a comment tag on the page containing the message, so someone could learn the approving moderator's username by viewing the source of the page.

There are four possible selections -- not saving the information at all, noting the information on the post, storing the information internally as a property, or both noting the information on the post and storing the information internally as a property.

Rating of Posts

The ability to rate posts is a new Discus Pro feature that is available only in select skins (the DiscusWare 'tables2' skin contains the ability to rate posts). If you enable this option, each post can be rated on a scale of 1 to 5. The post's rating will be computed and tabulated in real-time, with the overall rating and number of votes available for display with the post.

Enable Post Ratings: Check this box to enable post ratings on your board. After enabling or disabling ratings, you must regenerate your board through the Appearance Manager. If the skin you have selected does not support post ratings, there will not be a noticable difference in the appearance of your posts on message pages.

Limit each IP to 1 vote every ___ hour(s): If checked, you can limit a particular IP address from voting too many times on the same post. To be effective, you must both check this box and supply a valid time limit.

Spell Checker

The ability to perform spell checking of posts is a Discus Pro feature. Setting up the spell checker requires the following steps:

1. Obtain a word list, which is a list of every correctly spelled word in your language, with one word per line. These files are generally available as dictionary files on the server.

2. Add your word list(s) to the Discus spell checker "vocabulary."

3. Any user or moderator who wishes to use spell checking must enable spell checking in their profile (or you can force spell checking on -- read about forced profile settings on the documentation for the Profiles tab).

To begin using the spell checker, check the "Enable Spell Checker" box and click the "Initialize" button. The Options Manager screen will refresh and the status of your spell checker dictionary should change from "Not Ready" to "Ready (contains 0 words)".

Once you have initialized your dictionary, you must add your word lists to the dictionary. You do this by typing the path to the dictionary file in the text box next to "Add File>>" and then clicking on the "Add File>>" directory.

If you know the full path to your server's dictionary file, enter that path in the box. On some servers, this will be /usr/share/dict/words or /usr/dict/words. Note that if you had the spell checker set up in Discus 3.10 or before, you already found these dictionary file locations and typed them into your discus.conf file.

If you have your own word list to add, you can upload it to your "msg_index" subdirectory of your administration directory (transfer the file in ASCII mode). Then type the file's name (if you uploaded a file named "words" to your "msg_index" directory, enter "words" in the blank).

You will know that your file has been successfully added if you see that the total number of words in your dictionary has increased.