Hello Team,
Would you consider including a 'maintenance mode' feature in future releases? By 'maintenance mode', I am referring to an option to allow miniBB admin to shut down most operations of the discussion board while maintenance is being performed.
I do not know what other miniBB admins do when they need to take their board offline temporarily, but I try to redirect the forum's home page to a page explaining what is going on. Sadly, however, I do not know how to redirect requests to other forum-related pages to the explanation page. If visitors follow a link to a specific topic in my forum, they get a 404 error. So, I think an option to 'switch to maintenance mode' would be very handy and nice to have.
Thanks for your time.
- mb

maybe you could just change the index.php file to whatever you want...

?action= things wouldn't be interpreted and that's it !

When we do upgrades on our site, I do the following:

*) Create index.php1, and paste there something like:

<?php
echo 'Site is temporary unavailable. Please, come again in a few minutes.';
?>

*) Rename index.php to index.php2

*) Rename index.php1 to index.php

;)

*) Set $indexphp='index2.php' in setup_options.php (and set it back to 'index.php' when you're ready).

After roll this back and that's all.

So, sorry... no on/off button ;)

Since miniBB's operation are all based on index.php, I guess, we don't need some "maintenance" mode or something at all.

P.S. Yeah, zorglub posted the same time as me and the same thing as me :)

Ah, the solution is remarkably simple! Why didn't I think of it before? The problem is not nearly as complicated as I imagined; I did not realise miniBB's operations are all based on index.php.
Many thanks for your very helpful reply, zorglub. And thanks, Team, for making miniBB so easy to switch to 'maintenance mode'! :-D
Cheers,
mb

or redirect anyone trying to visit http://www.yourdomain.com/forum/* to whatever u want. This way any one going to any file in that folder is redirected. Its more secure.

Ok, thanks!

h4tt3n