Support Toolkit

Support Toolkit The Support Toolkit (STK) was developed by the phpBB.com Support Team in cooperation with EXreaction. The STK provides a second "Administration Control Panel" that can be used to recover various part of a corrupted phpBB 3.0.x installation or to solve commonly encountered problems with the software.

Login

The STK was designed with a secondary login system which allows you to login if you are no longer able to login through phpBB3.

If you are locked out of your board, the STK can generate a new password file (25 characters) for you to use. You must download this file and upload it into the stk/ directory on your server. Once the file is uploaded you can login using the secondary login (as long as you are not logged into phpBB3 already). The generated password file expires 6 hours after creation and you will need to generate a new password to use this login method again.

Translations

The Support Toolkit is currently available in numerous languages to ease use for foreign users. Translations for the current release may be downloaded here. To use a translation, simply place it in the stk/language directory.

Tools

The STK ships with a set of tools pre-installed. In the latest version the pre-installed tools are:

Support tools

This category contains tools that perform support related tasks.

  • Auto Cookies: Allows you to change the cookie settings.
  • Database Cleaner: Allows you to reset certain parts of your phpBB board's database to its original setup (removes all database modifications).
  • Fix Left/Right ID's: Repairs the tree structure of the forums and modules.
  • Flash checker: A tool that validates all flash BBCodes for vulnerabilities that were possible in phpBB prior to version 3.0.8. Check the phpBB 3.0.8 release announcement for more information about the issue.
  • MySQL upgrader: A tool capable of updating the schema when MySQL has been upgraded. See KB article for more information.
  • Orphaned posts: Finds topics that contain no posts and posts that are no longer associated with a topic.
  • Re-cache moderators: Allows you to repopulate the moderator cache table in the database.
  • Reclean Usernames: Resets the username_clean entries in the users table.
  • Recreate Module Management: Recreates the Module Management modules in the ACP in case they were removed (the modules that allow you to add/change/remove other modules).
  • Remove duplicate permissions: Removes duplicate permissions which can break the auth system.
  • Reset report flags: Make sure that all posts, topics and PMs are correctly marked as reported.
  • Reset Styles: Allows you to set the board and user defaults to a specific style.
  • Sanitise Anonymous user: Reset the anonymous user to its correct state.
  • Update email hash: Recalculate all email hashes.

Admin tools

This category contains tools that can help an administrator maintain his board.

  • Profile List: An advanced memberlist which allows you to easily filter users.
  • Purge Cache: Purge the board's cache.
  • Purge Sessions: Deletes all user sessions.
  • Reparse BBCode: Reparses the BBCode for the board's posts.
  • Resynchronise attachments: This tool will make sure that all attachments stored in the database actually have a file on the server.
  • Resynchronise avatars: This tool will make sure that all avatars used on the board actually exist on the server.
  • Run SQL Query: Allows you to run an SQL query on your database and view the results.

User/Group tools

This category contains tools that perform user or user group related tasks.

  • Add user: Allows you to easily add new users to the board.
  • Change password: Allows you to change a password for a user.
  • Manage board founders: Allows you to quickly manage the users with founder privileges.
  • Merge users: Allows you to merge two forum users into one account.
  • Restore deleted users: Lets you select a "guest" poster from your board, and creates an user account from it with all posts attached.
  • Resynchronise user groups: Make sure that all users are in the correct default groups (Registered Users, Registered COPPA Users and Newly Registered Users).

Critical repair

The Support Toolkit includes a critical repair system. This system contains a set of tests that are used to make sure that the Support Toolkit can run. This toolkit is run automatically but can ask for a confirmation or user input. The critical repair set contains the following tests:

  • BOM Sniffer: This is a tool that validates all phpBB files for any content outside the php tags.
  • Rebuild config.php: If the phpBB config file is missing the STK will show you a screen that you can use to re-create the config file.
  • Reset style: If the STK sees that there is no style set it will try to install a style that is available on the file system.

Support Request Template Generator

This tool generates a support template for use in the support forums. It automatically gathers basic information about your setup.