1. Tips And Tricks For Getting The Most Out Of The CPUG Discussion Board

2. Goals For The CPUG Discussion Board It’s a Public Service It’s Really Useful It’s Really Fast It’s Really Free

3. History First, there was www.PhoneBoy.com, with 500 FAQ’s. By 2005, he was tired of running it, so he handed over his content to CPUGwww.PhoneBoy.com These 500 FAQ’s formed the seed for the CPUG discussion board

4. Traffic 21,000 Registered Members 65,000 Unique Visitors per Month 60,000 Pages Served per Day (1.9 Million in August!) Typically 100-200 users online simultaneously during working hours

5. Application Stack (Hardware) 5. 100 MB/s Ethernet Connection to Internet 4. RAID 1 Array 3. 4 GB RAM 2. Two Quad-Core Intel XEON Processors 1. Hosted at Liquid Web, in Lansing, Michigan, USA

6. Application Stack (OS) 10. APC Opcode Cache (256 MB): v. 3.1.6 9. PHP: v. 5.2.17 8. MySQL: v. 5.1.56 7. Apache: v. 2.2.17 6. Linux CentOS 5, 64-Bit: Kernel v. 2.6.18

7. Application Stack (Software) 15. The World’s Best User Group Members 14. Tapatalk and Forum Runner 13. Special Scripts from the Vbulletin User Community 12. vBulletin: v. 4.1.4 PL2 11. cPanel (WHM): v. 11.30.3

8. vBulletin Discussion Board Software It’s very mature and stable It’s very full-featured It’s user-friendly It’s inexpensive (less than 300 USD) It’s very configurable It’s fast It’s the best I’ve found

9. Discussion Board Structure Top Level: Forums These are listed on the home page This list maintained by the Administrator Updated with user suggestions Forums contain threads Middle Level: Threads Created/Started by a user Typically discusses a single topic Bottom Level: Posts User has the option to make this a reply to another post

10. Searching Options 1. Quick Search: Search field at the top right of every page Search provided by this instance of vBulletin Automatically indexed Can search for word lengths of 2-64 characters 2. Advanced Search: There’s a link right below search field at the top right of every page Much more specificity

11. Searching Options 3. Google: It’s so much easier to outsource (for free!) to Google Search for almost anything Check Point related on Google and you’ll be directed to CPUG Use the “site:cpug.org” operator to narrow your focus (this is available on the CPUG home page) Every night our vBulletin discussion board software sends a complete updated map of the site to Google through their API to assist them in indexing We have about 20,000 pages indexed in Google

12. How To Create An Account 1. www.cpug.orgwww.cpug.org 2. Click on discussion board link 3. Click on the Register link 4. Fight against a really hard CAPTCHA 5. You’re done!

13. User Control Panel Click on “My Profile” There’s lots to configure

14. How To Request A New Forum Just e-mail the Administrator at admin@cpug.org admin@cpug.org

15. How To Create A New Thread First login Go to the forum you want Click on “Post New Thread”

16. How To Reply To A Post Go to the post you want Click on “Reply with Quote” The post you’re replying to will be automatically “quoted”.

17. Thread Ratings In each thread, click on “Rate This Thread”. The average rating is shown for each thread

18. User Titles Junior Member: 0 Minimum Posts Member: 30 Minimum Posts Senior Member: 100 Minimum Posts How can we make this better?

19. User Reputations By each username: Green: Positive Greyed Out: Neutral Red: Negative Any registered user can add to or subtract from a user’s reputation, with the option of leaving a comment Each user can see their reputation history in their control panel

20. Subscriptions You can Subscribe to Forums or to Threads Get notifications or Daily or Weekly e-mail summaries Forums: Forum Tools => Subscribe to this Forum Threads: Thread Tools => Subscribe to this Thread

21. FAQ vBulletin Provides a Very Good FAQ to Help Users

22. Tools For Mobile Users Tapatalk Forum Runner

23. Collaboration With Check Point We have 73 registered members with “checkpoint.com” e-mail domains They’re obviously reading the discussions They can get rather unfriendly when someone talks about their negative experiences with Check Point PhoneBoy is the official Check Point representative to CPUG, but we never hear from him anymore They seem to want to monitor us while pretending we don’t exist and ensuring they do nothing to support us.

24. Collaboration With Check Point For eleven years we’ve been inviting Check Point to collaborate with us, but they never call or e-mail back. Sigh. At a meeting two years ago in Israel with the manager of SecureKnowledge, I offered to host the entire SecureKnowledge database on CPUG, for free. He was not amused.

25. Discussion How Can We Make It Better?

26. Q&A