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>

(or, if using the gb.cgi or ds.cgi script, just add "&admin=true" to the URL)

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

Go to the forgotten password page to have your password emailed back to you.

3. What is the HTML code for my board?

Go to the HTML generator page to generate the HTML code and URLs for accessing your board.

4. How do I access the admin features?

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 (i.e. the gb.cgi or ds.cgi script), 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 customize my Groupboard or move it to a different web page?

If you are using the gb.cgi or ds.cgi script, you can add various parameters to the URL to customize your board. The simplest way of doing this is to go to the URL generator page. You will then be given a new link to access your Groupboard, as well as 1 line of iframe HTML code to embed your Groupboard into a web-page. For further customization, you can copy the entire Groupboard HTML code from the gb.cgi or ds.cgi script into your web-page and then use the Groupboard API to customize the applet and optionally script it from javascript. Note, however, that if you are using the free 5 user board, you can only access your board using the iframe or the gb.cgi script - you cannot copy the HTML code out of the iframe or script into your own web page.

6. How do I upload a background picture to the whiteboard?

There are two ways of uploading background pictures. If the picture is on your computer, you can upload it by using the Upload Background page (or just click the 'Upload background' button in the web page if using the gb.cgi or ds.cgi script).

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

First, the image must already exist on a web server. If your image is on your local disk, you must first upload it to your web page.
Next, log onto your admin board and click "set background".
Type in the URL of the image (on your web server) into the box and press UPLOAD. Note that if your picture has non alphanumeric characters (such as "&"), it may not upload.
The next time you press "set background", your image should be there (but give it a couple of minutes to download first).

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.

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

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

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

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

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>

(If using the gb.cgi or ds.cgi script, just add "&use_tunnel=true" to the URL).

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

You can try adding the following tag:


<param name=tunnel_port value=80>

(If using the gb.cgi or ds.cgi script, this option is added by default). This forces 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.

13. How do I make 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>

14. How do I increase the size of the whiteboard?

If you are using the gb.cgi or ds.cgi script, you simply need to specify the board_width and board_height parameters, e.g. "&board_width=800&board_height=600". If you have copied the HTML code to your own webpage, you can use the following HTML parameters to set the size:


<param name=board_width value=x>


<param name=board_height value=y>

(where x and y are the width and height of the whiteboard). If you are not using the gb.cgi or ds.cgi script, 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.

15. How do I get translated versions of Groupboard?

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


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

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

If using the gb.cgi or ds.cgi script, use the java_version parameter (e.g. "&java_version=java.hebrew").

16. 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 when you yourself draw.

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

You need to set the USE_UTF HTML parameter to TRUE in your HTML code (or, if using the gb.cgi or ds.cgi script, just add "&use_utf=true" to the URL).

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 (or if using the gb.cgi script, just add "&singleuser=true" to the URL).

Home | Contact | Privacy

GroupBoard.com