Dear Developers,

We've been using My Little Forum on a very busy site now for about ten months (4276 Postings in 819 Threads and an average of about 250 unique visitors a day). I reported on your earlier forum that late in 2006 we had a security problem and the accusation was made that it was caused by MLF. We temporarily shut down MLF and used PHPBB for a few weeks but the general consensus of our members was that this was far inferior to MLF from a users' point of view. In the end our service provider kicked us off the server we were originally using (which also hosted a lot of other commercial websites) and they set us up on our own dedicated server basically so that we could go back to using MLF.

My own prognosis is that the security breach in fact probably did not occur through MLF and we certainly have not had a repeat of that particular problem. (For those who were following that discussion, whoever got into the server rewrote the code on every php and html file adding a couple of lines at the end of each file which caused visitors browsers to surreptiously visit other sites without their knowledge. It seemed to be some con job to increase the traffic to certain designated sites. They didn't seem to be stealing information from the server but just using the visitors to pages on the server for nefarious purposes. It was only inconvenient to users in that their "back" buttons on their browsers no longer worked properly but started taking them to these sites they had no idea they had visited.)

The foregoing is a long way of saying that we think your work is absolutely brilliant, Alex. There is very high praise for MLF from our users — some of whom have a great deal of experience on all sorts of different forums on the net.

The ONLY drawback we have not yet been able to solve is this ... and it is a real bugger when it occurs. It seems to be an intermittent problem and does not occur all the time.

Many of the posters to our forum write lengthy posts. We have some chit chat but they are often fairly lengthy commentaries that may take some time (like half an hour or an hour to compose). Sometimes after working on a post for an hour one finally reaches the end and hits the "OK-submit" button and the next thing one finds is that you have lost all your work and you are back at the log-in screen. We all try to remember to do a Control-A/Control-C before pressing the submit button but invariably people forget that from time to time and that's usually the times when the forum has this little spack attack and logs you out destroying all your good work at the same time. (The other alternative of course is writing the posts in a word processing program and then just pasting it in to the message field before one presses submit. Again some of us try to remember to do that but it doesn't always happen when one just wants to add a quick comment and that gets extended into a long reply and one forgets.)

Does anyone have any thoughts as to what the problem might be here?

Also out of interest I made a number of modifications to the BB-code function to enable users to include coloured text and to blockquote paragraphs, use a smaller font size for parts of the text, and a couple of other things.

You're most welcome to see our forum in operation — it's mainly to do with spirituality and theology — at www.catholica.com.au/forum.

If anyone among the developers has thoughts on the time out problem I would be deeply appreciative.

One other problem I am working on is that Google has a bit of trouble indexing the material on our forum. Google doesn't seem to like pages stored in a database for some reason. Has anyone else been doing work on this problem of having one's material indexed by Google and other search engines?

Cheers, BrianC