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!

I am using TikiWiki on Lunarpages since January.

First, the good thing, it is a masterpiece
of functionalities and as far as concerns the admin menu for permissions
So there is probably far more than you were asking for.
Far far better, so far, compared with Mediawiki etc.,
Tikiwiki is only equalized by Typo3,
...   if you have three weeks to teach yourself Typo3.
Tikiwiki is complete "out of the box".

Installing Tikiwiki / current version on Lunarpages / current servers, shared hosting - 
PHP 5.x - results in various config. problems. Took a while to master it... .

There remained 1 problem with Tikiwiki v.1.9.9. from Dec. 2007 for user registration. -
just what you experienced January 2008 - their site uses their own software.
Unfortunately, I installed just this version on lunarpages - with just this registration problem.
Work-around: The admin user has manually_!!! to assign a new password to EACH-!!! new user.

I wanted to upgrade these days to Tikiwiki 1.9.11. - now o.k., I think
Upgrades of Tikiwiki are done by overwriting the old version - 1000s of files.
I did not find a way to do this "complete tree" overwrite directly on the lunarpages server
(file manager : its copy function  apparenty is unable to do THIS,
and for shared hosting /basic hosting plan,  I have no shell access.)

I tried a complete upload with gFTP (Red Hat Linux,v. FC6).
gFTP did the job for a blank target directory .... 3 hours ...
but became frozen und behaved strange when the job was to overwrite.

So  now and here is the next help request: Upload Problem: 
Is there some way on lunarpages to overwrite a file tree with thousands of files when the only available powerful LINUX FTP program does not like the job?
(The job could not be done from a local MS-Win PC.)
I will still look up the option set of unzip, might be that this might supply the work-around...

Some better advice available?