Hello

I have noticed that several forums that is using My Little Forum has very old versions of the software. With very old, I mean 5 - 10 years since last update of the software.

I also found a bunch of active forums with very old versions, down to beta versions of 2.0.

A simple solution would be to have a text file with the version number, like "2.4.2" at the web server:
http://mylittleforum.net/version.txt

What's the benefit of it? One has to request this file to check it's content. The forum owners of the outdated installations never (or at least seldom) checked the project page for updates since the installation of their forum. I don't expect them to do this in the future with a new file/URL.

And when a forum administrator log in to the forum, the forum checks the compares the version of the forum with the file http://mylittleforum.net/version.txt and displays that for the administrator.

We have such a check since version 2.4. An admin of a more or less up-to-date version will be informed about the new version or, if that failes, has a direct link for the check in the menu page of the admin area. But, to be honest, wether our nor your solution reaches the admins of outdated versions.

They will at any time hit the trap of an incompatible PHP version. Either they will actualise their installation, in this case they have then a version with actualisation notices, or they change the forum software to another product or they disable their forums at this point.

I reflected about contacting all admins of forums I'm not convinced if it is a good idea to urge them.

It's not very often an administrator needs to go to the admin page of the forum, and then they do that, the administrators need to manually check the current version of the forum.

The check for the latest version is part of the "daily actions" that in most cases take action during the night (if the forum is visited at this time). Only if the three methods (CURL library, file_get_contents(), fsockopen()) failes, the admin has to execute the check manually.

This obviously doesn't work very well then not even My Little Forums own forum is up to date.

This case is different from the others. Alex is the original author of the software and the domain owner of mylittleforum.net. He is the only one, who is able to upgrade the forum software on this domain. And at the moment he is not reachable (for whatever reason). Even when Milo and me force the development at the moment, we have no administrative access to the project domain.

That said …

I understand that it requires more administration of the developers to keep this file up to date, but it would be very useful for administrators.

… I have to confirm that it is useful without any doubt. But (IMHO) on the other hand the idea of the file on the webspace is useless in this form because of the restrictions for assess, the additional administration effort and it is not necessary in the future because of the solution we have for versions from 2.4.0 on.

Tschö, Auge