I want to start a new community and for my idea to be successful, I absolutely *must* have the following controls:

-> Registration moderation: new users can not register without being approved by a moderator. This appears to exists as a new user moderation queue in UBB. Awesome. That's a big part of the battle.

-> Avatar moderation: I must have the ability to moderate avatars in a queue. Now, this is where I'm stuck with UBB. I have read the documentation, I have run searches in this forum looking for this feature, and all I can come up with is that moderators can control the height/width of an avatar, or force users to link off-site, or force users to use pre-defined avatars. (Caricatures, I suppose?)

But I want the users to be able to upload an avatar. I just need my moderators to approve it before it shows up in the forums.

Can this be done?

I would also *like* the following features:

-> Allow signatures but allow only certain UBB tags.

-> Enforce maximum height, width, and filesize restrictions for images in posts: regardless of their source. I don't want my forums to degenerate into the kind of crap I see on some forums I visit, where people make "cool" logos and put them in their signature and force the rest of us to scroll our screens horizontally. Or cater to people who refuse to resize images.

Now I could probably live with a lot of different ways to handle the max sizes on images, like, would the picture get automatically resized, or would it turn into a thumbnail that pops open a new window/tab for full size, etc.


Now on my absolutes list (user mod, avatar mod)-- those are not negotiable for me to purchase a forum. The desires list (reduced feature signatures / max image sizes) I might work around by simply having a number of moderators edit posts for users that can't manage to keep their images sized properly.

But seriously,

I do not want to get in the business of writing custom forum code, nor do I want to hire someone to do it, or have the support problem of modified code.

Is there any way to do this stuff using UBB?

Darn it.

I need one more thing.

I want display names to be real names. Except that will cause an obvious conflict when people have the same real name. So is there a way to log in using a unique name (like an email address) but yet display a non-unique username? I know that the non-unique display name may cause some confusion,

but,

the real names thing is critical.

Also one more thing. I may choose to allow "location" to be displayed such as city/state to help with the duplicate username confusion-- if so, will I be able to approve location in a moderator queue, or, do I have to moderate after the fact-- after someone reports a person/post as having incorrect or inappropriate location data?

You can try the demo version to confirm what you are looking for at Demo
Also at the bottom of that page is a script to allow you to test your server.

Moderating avatars and location isn't something that can be done with the stock code. However, you can limit the max width/height of avatars and anything over that will be scaled down to that size.

Login names and Display names have to be unique, so there's no real way to allow for users to have the same display name if there names are exactly the same.

Signature limiting is still an issue that needs to be addressed. There really is nothing currently in place to keep people from posting obnoxiously large images in their sigs.

Thanks for the info. I'm not sure yet how I'll try to handle these problems, UBB or otherwise...

I hope the avatar upload and moderation comes around in the stock UBB in the future.