Groupboard Admin Frequently Asked Questions

1. How do I access my admin page?

Log in using your admin password. If your board does not ask for a password when you log in, create an html page with the same html code but add the following tag:

<param name=need_password value=true>

2. I've forgotten my admin password. What do I do?

Click here to have your password emailed back to you.

3. What is the HTML code for my board?

Click here to generate the HTML code and URLs for accessing your board.

4. Where are the admin functions?

If you are using the non-javascript user interface (the one without the graphical icons), press the FLOAT button, and they should appear in the ADMIN menu at the top of the window. If you are using the javascript user interface, there will be buttons in the web page for each admin function, such as Board Info, Disable Drawing, Ban List, etc. If you don't see these buttons, go to the urlgen page to get the url for your admin page (see item 3).

5. How do I upload a background picture?

There are two ways of uploading background pictures. If the picture is on your local machine, you can upload it by using the Upload Background page.

Alternatively, if the picture is already on a website, you can upload it as follows:

Note that if you want the image to be permanently set as the background for your board, you need to use the BACKGROUND_PIC parameter. See the main admin help pages for more details.

6. How do I change the passwords for my board?

Go into your admin page and select "board info" from the admin menu.

7. My board doesn't have a user password, but the password prompt still comes up.

You need to set NEED_PASSWORD to FALSE in your html code.

8. How do I pass in the username and password for a user?

Use the SET_NAME parameter to set the user's name, and the PASSWORD parameter to set the password. If you are running Groupboard on your own server, you can use these parameters along with a password file to have multiple user logins with different passwords. If you want to prevent people changing their name in the chat window, you should set the ALLOW_CHANGE_NAME parameter to FALSE as well.

9. How do I reduce the grey/white space around the board?

Adjust the WIDTH and HEIGHT tags in the html code until the board just fits in the space. Note that you should test your page on Netscape and Internet Explorer, as they tend to require different amounts of space for the window.

10. How do I use firewall tunnelling with my board?

The Groupboard will automatically try to connect using firewall tunnelling if it can't open a normal socket connection. You can create a board which always uses firewall tunnelling by using the following tag:

<param name=use_tunnel value=true>

11. The firewall tunnelling version still doesn't work.

You can try adding the following tag:

<param name=tunnel_port value=80>

This forces the Groupboard to tunnel using port 80 rather than the default tunnelling port of 6666. This should (in theory) make it work with any combination of firewall and proxy server. Note that tunnelling through port 80 is not currently supported in the standalone server version of the Groupboard.

12. How do I make the Groupboard pop up when a button is pressed?

Set the WIDTH and HEIGHT tags to zero, set the ALWAYS_FLOAT param to TRUE, set the DONT_START param, and call the startup() function using javascript when the link is clicked on:

<a href="javascript:document.gb.startup();">Click here for chat!</a>
<applet name=gb code="groupboard.class" width=0 height=0 archive=groupboard.jar
codebase="http://www.groupboard.com/java">
<param name=board_id value=xxx>
<param name=always_float value=true>
<param name=dont_start value=true>
</applet>

13. How do I increase the size of the Whiteboard?

You need to buy the registered version of the Groupboard in order to increase the whiteboard size. Click here to upgrade. Then, you need to add the following tags:

<param name=board_width value=x>
<param name=board_height value=y>

(where x and y are the width and height of the whiteboard). You will also need to increase the overall applet WIDTH and HEIGHT parameters to accomodate the larger whiteboard. In general you should increase WIDTH by the same amount as BOARD_WIDTH, and HEIGHT by the same amount as BOARD_HEIGHT. See the html code for the main Groupboard demo for an example.

14. How do I get translated versions of the Groupboard?

At the moment we have French, Danish, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, German, Japanese, Hebrew and Arabic versions of the Groupboard, which you can use by changing the CODEBASE parameter in your html. To use the French version, set the codebase to:

http://www.groupboard.com/java.french

To use the Danish version, set the codebase to:

http://www.groupboard.com/java.danish

To use the Spanish version, set the codebase to:

http://www.groupboard.com/java.spanish

To use the Portuguese version, set the codebase to:

http://www.groupboard.com/java.port

To use the Norwegian version, set the codebase to:

http://www.groupboard.com/java.nor

To use the German version, set the codebase to:

http://www.groupboard.com/java.german

To use the Japanese version, set the codebase to:

http://www.groupboard.com/java.jp

To use the Arabic version, set the codebase to:

http://www.groupboard.com/java.arabic

To use the Hebrew version, set the codebase to:

http://www.groupboard.com/java.hebrew

15. Why does my own IP address come up "UNKNOWN" in the drawing log?

The IP addresses of the other users are sent from the server. The java client does not know its own IP address, so it comes up unknown.

16. How do I enter Unicode characters (e.g. Chinese/Japanese/Arabic/Hebrew)?

You need to set the USE_UTF html parameter in your html code. We also need to make a change to the options file for your board on the server, so please email us if you want to use Unicode input on your board.

17. Can I edit my Groupboard HTML code or move it to a different web page?

Yes - you are free to change the Groupboard HTML code and put it into different web pages. If you want, you can have a number of different HTML pages, each with different versions of your Groupboard (e.g. one multi-user, one single-user, etc.) See the Admin Documentation for details of the various HTML tags that you can set.

18. How do I get a single-user board where each user gets their own copy of the whiteboard?

In your html code, just set the MULTI_USER param to FALSE.




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