The last things you need to know about are the topic facilities. These control who can add a topic, how long a topic will stay on the ship, deleting a topic, and changing a topic.

Turning the topic restrictions on or off is for COs only. If restrictions are on, it stops the general crewmembers from adding their own topics, and allows only the CO, XO and GM to add topics. Only the CO should change the topic restrictions. If the restrictions are off, anyone can add a topic.

Removing a topic can help keep the ship's topic list from becoming too cluttered. The problem here is you can only delete topics that contain no notes. So you have to wait until post archives are downloaded and a topic is empty before you can delete it.

Alternatively, a CO, XO, and GM may prefer just to rename the unneeded topics rather than deleting one and adding another. This is very useful if an archive has not been run, because topics do not need to be empty to be changed. The only downside is it makes navigating the archives a bit difficult.

A topic's 'immortality' refers to how long it will stay on the ship. When an archive purge is run, all topics on a ship which are empty are removed automatically. Some topics, such as the Bridge, should be made permanent (perm) as they are inherent to the ship. All topics denoted as (perm) will not be purged. All topics denoted (norm) are subject to purging if they are empty. This is for CO use only.

That covers all the functions of the Admin Menu. However, there are a couple of other administrative duties that deserve to be examined a little closer. We'll do that in the next lesson.