I was about to install TikiWiki to handle a site that needed discussion board (forum), Wiki, and a (future) gallery. TW appeared to offer all of these, but I had some specific questions that I needed answers to. So, I tried signing up with the TW Community discussion forum, in order to post my questions. That was almost two weeks ago. I never received an email confirming my new account. I emailed to site support and got a reply offering to look at the matter. Several emails later, they have not replied again, and I am still unable to sign up (I tried again with a different userID, but received no confirmation). I'm starting to wonder if TikiWiki is a good piece of software, if they can't handle something as simple as a forum signup? Anyone out there with recommendations for or against TW? How is their community support (their version of Lunarforums)? Any ideas why I'm not getting any emails from them? I've looked high and low around my ISP's mail system, and see no evidence that emails are being shuttled off to some spam wasteland.

As long as I'm here, maybe someone can answer the following questions:

1) This is to be a private system for a club that I'm a member of -- the general public should not be able to see ANYTHING or post anywhere. I think permissions can be set to restrict viewing of the Wiki, Forum, or Gallery to logged in registered members. Correct?

2) Is hotlink protection adequate to keep random people from pulling up images on their browsers (not via TikiWiki)? Mind you, there's nothing illegal here, but some pictures from college days might be a bit, uh, embarrassing for the middle aged professionals we are now! You've all heard of MySpace and Facebook and YouTube stuff coming back to haunt people when they grow up? Obviously, we don't want any search engine spiders recording this stuff (robots.txt plus directory permissions plus account needed = enough?).

3) Can I turn off public registration of members (admin manually registers users), or at worst require admin approval -- zap anyone not preapproved? We obviously don't want the general public to be able to sign up.

4) I understand that images are stored under the TW system (on this server), and don't have to be hosted elsewhere. Correct? Can members upload images easily for the Forum, Wiki, and Gallery functions? How about uploading full-size images and having clickable thumbnails -- is this easily done?

5) At first look, upgrades look a bit clumsy -- do I really have to upload, untar, etc. and run scripts? Is there a "single button" upgrade comparable to, say, SMF? The instructions appear to talk about installing a complete newer version of TikiWiki (including copying over the image libraries) and pointing the site to the new version when I'm happy with it. Is that correct? It sounds like a lot of work to do an upgrade!

6) Interactive maps to illustrate past club events sound great. Are they easily done? Is it better to point to a service like MapQuest or Google Maps, or to install our own map server software? Is there a source for inexpensive online road and topo maps?

7) A full-fledged discussion forum is vital. Is the TW forum reasonably comparable to SMF or PHPbb? If BBCode is not supported, how does one do special formatting -- the same as the Wiki formatting instructions? Are they as capable as BBC?

8) What is 'threaded' vs 'flat' forum structure? I'm most familiar with SMF -- would that be considered "flat" or "threaded"? Obviously, we want to keep separate discussion threads cleanly separated from each other -- is it all a matter of how postings are presented?

9) Can only the admin create new categories, boards, child-boards, topics? Much of the forum talk will eventually should be pulled over into Wiki as reference material, so is it easy to purge old forum boards, topics, etc. once this has been done?

10) Can only the original poster (and admin) edit or delete a forum entry, or is it a Wiki-tyle free-for-all? With this small club, I don't think it would be a huge problem having members maliciously editing each other's forum posts, but I'd like to know for sure.

Thanks!