Gosdot

So I just spent the last fifteen minutes trying to hack my way back into my BBpress forums at code.appfrica.net. The problem was that BBPress doesn’t consider admins the ’super users’ of the account. The ‘administrator’ rank just allows you to moderate the forum, not it’s look or anything else. To do that you need to be what’s called a ‘keymaster’. Keymasters can do anything while Administrators can do ‘almost’ anything but that almost is pretty useless when you want to change the look of your forum!

For the sake of others out there who might run into the same problem, here’s how I did it. It’s pretty simple but no one has published anything as straight forward as this, yet (or at least I didn’t find one in my Google searches).

1. Log into your MySQL database via PHP Admin
2. Find the ‘xx_usermeta’ area.
3. Find the username of the account you want want to make the ‘keymaster’.
4. Look for the area that looks like this a:1:{s:13:"administrator";b:1;} and replace it with a:1:{s:9:"keymaster";b:1;}.
5. Log-In to the account to make sure everything worked.
6. Pat yourself on the back buckaroo, you’re done!

If you know hacking, you know that having an account with the username ‘Admin’ can be a security risk. I got locked out of my account after changing my name from ‘Admin’ to something else to make it harder for potential hackers to get into my forums. Then I deleted the account called ‘Admin’ because I thought it was enough that I promoted my new username to administration status. The BBPress manual doesn’t mention the fact if you delete the Admin account, you’re deleting the sole keymaster effectively locking you out of the real administration of the back end of your site!

This technique should fix everything…at least for BBPress 0.9.0.2, the version that I used this on.