By default, esoTalk's "fatal error" messages aren't very helpful — and often, not even hitting your computer seems to help. Thankfully, you can flick on esoTalk's "debug" switch to find out what exactly is going wrong and get some direction on what to do next.
To enable these more verbose error messages, add the following line to config/config.php:
$config["esoTalk.debug"] = true;
The esoTalk Support Forum is a good place to start to see whether anyone else has encountered the same error as you — and if not, you can start a conversation with the error details to get some help.
Some common problems and their solutions are listed below.
If you keep getting Page Not Found errors whenever you try to navigate somewhere on your forum, double-check that friendly URLs are set up correctly.
Make sure that your server is configured correctly to be able to send mail. If you don't know how to do that, try enabling and configuring the SMTP plugin included with esoTalk.
If you're getting a white screen and nothing else, it's likely that PHP is encountering a fatal error before esoTalk has a chance to set up its error-handling mechanism. To investigate what's going on, set display_errors to On and error_reporting to E_ALL in your php.ini file. Alternatively, you can add the following to the top of index.php:
ini_set('display_errors', 'On');
error_reporting(E_ALL);