Hello

I'm proud to announce the first public testing version for My Little Forum 2.5, named 2.4.99.1. You can in principle update a forum with a starting point of version 2.4.19.1 or 2.4.20. No older versions are supported. I tested an update from 2.4.20 and it worked. But it is strongly recommended to test the script as a separate installation. You can add existing content to the testing forum after its installation.

Until now we introduced only some of the features, that got discussed in example in this thread. We will add further features and refinements of existing features during the testing phase.

What did we add until now:

- add an upload management page in the admin area, list all uploaded images, delete images groupwise after selection
- store information about the user who uploads a new image in a new database table
- replace the optional TeX support through the abandoned Google web service with the MathJax library (one has to install the lib or choosing it from a CDN and to provide the URL to the lib via the advanced settings manually)
- restrict access to the user list page to the forum team (administrators and moderators)
- allow topics to be pinned/sticked to the certain category (classic way) or to all categories
- Bayes based spam filter, this has to be activated and works locally without contact to a foreign service
- change the charset of most of the tables and text columns to support 4-byte-characters, i.e. emojis

Fixes:

- all fixes, that got introduced in the 2.4 version branch
- relative pathes in the src-attribute of images in the RSS feed made the images inaccessible in the feed, the fix was provided by Mardor

Removals:

- the Google web service for TeX support
- the flash-bb-code-button

Known issues:

- informations about existing uploaded images will currently not be added to the upload table, only informations about new uploads will be stored there
- if one deletes uploaded images from the new upload management page the informations, stored tin the upload table, will not get deleted
- a pinned thread, created in a restricted category (access for registered users or the forum team only), will be shown in the main views to the whole possible audience (depends on forum settings), even the access to the postings in itself gets restricted (when opening them)

Please take into account, that the required minimal version of the MySQL server is 5.5.3 from now on. This is because of the changed default charset of utf8mb4 in many of the tables and text columns.

A few words about the Bayes based statistical spam filter. You have to enable it in the spam protection page of the admin area, point "B8". You will have to check your forum very often in the first few days to classify every posting manually as spam or ham (depends on traffic in the forum, open the posting to classify it). After a few (10 to 30) postings you will see, that the script classifies the postings alone and normally with a lowering amount of wrong decisions. With a trained filter you are able to renounce one or several of the other methods, mainly the ones that needs to send data to third party services (Stop Forum Spam and Akismet).

Notes for updaters

If you want to test an update of an existing installation (not recommended at the moment), please make a backup of the database and the installation itself before –or better– make a parallel test installation of your existing version and upgrade the test- instead your live-forum.

Attention: The update is only possible when the existing installation is a version 2.4.19.1 or 2.4.20!

Attention: Use the update file update/update_2.4.19.1-2.5.php

Tschö, Auge

Hello

I'm proud to announce the next public testing version for My Little Forum 2.5, named 2.4.99.3. We skipped version 2.4.99.2 which was inofficially available directly from the master branch.

[edit]
Changes from 2.4.99.1 to 2.4.99.2

- All database tables are of type InnoDB from now on.
- The listing of spam entries for forum team members is part of the main view and not a possible view in the search results page from now on.
- After storing an entry after it's creation that was classified as possible spam we generally redirect to the single posting view to show a message about the situation.
- several database columns got a smaller size. This is because they should store UTF-8 with four bytes and have an index at the same time. The indexes for text fields istself are limited in their size what limits the possible size of the text fields. We limited the sizes of the columns mlf2_userdata.user_name, mlf2_tags.tag, mlf2_b8_wordlist.token to 128 characters.
- A registered user can decide for whom se/he is contactable about the forums e-mail-based contact function.
- The forum is now able to send e-mails via a SMTP-function. That's currently a proof of concept and the configuration is located in config/php_mailer.php but not accessible in the admin area.
- The forum operator can decide if registerd and unregisterde users should be able to set tags for postings.
- Send the notification e-mails only, if the entry was classified as ham (not as possible spam).
[/edit]

There was only a few changes from 2.4.99.2 to 2.4.99.3. So we corrected several queries in the installation and in the update scripts, fixed a bug that made it possible to see postings, classified as spam, when one wrote self a posting that was classified as spam in the same thread. The last change affected the uninstalling-function in the admin script, that contains from now on the new tables when dropping the database content and tables.

Please take into account, that the required minimal version of the MySQL server is 5.5.3 from now on. This is because of the changed default charset of utf8mb4 in many of the tables and text columns.

Notes for updating admins

If you want to test an update of an existing installation (not recommended at the moment), please make a backup of the database and the installation itself before –or better– make a parallel test installation of your existing version and upgrade the test- instead your live-forum.

Attention: The update is only possible when the existing installation is a version 2.4.19.1 up to 2.4.24!

Attention: Use the update file update/update_2.4.19.1-2.5.php

Tschö, Auge

Hello

After a very long time with only slow or no progress we got it! Here we are with a brand new version of My Little Forum 2. The new version comes with full UTF-8-support including emojis like 💥🎉👍 and with the compatibility with PHP up to the 8.1.x branch.

Beside these main features, there are several features and featurettes. A forum operator is able to specify a target for opening links in forum entries as a forum setting for the case that the forum runs in a frameset or an iframe. On the other hand a registered forum user is able to specify, that links in entries should open in the same browser wirdow/tab or in a new window/tab, possibly differentiated if the link leads to an internal or external site.

The forum can be configured to send e-mails with the class PHPMailer, which is able to send the e-mails via SMTP. This has to be configured by hand in the file config/php_mailer.php. A further remarkable feature is the local spam filtering which works with a Bayes algorithm. You and your teams in your forums have to train this filter by manual classification of entries as ham or spam. It will get better with more classification input from you. It will make the use of external spam classification services obsolete in the long run.

Because of the abandoned Google service for rendering LaTeX formulas it got replaced with the option to use the MathJax library. To make it possible to lower the dependencies for external services a further bit, an administrator has to provide only a link to a MathJax-instance, self hosted or from an external service (i.e. a CDN). Then it has only to be activated by a second, boolean forum setting.

Pinned threads can be restricted to a specific category as before or can be displayed in all categories.

To clean up the list of registered users, the forum sends an e-mail to a user after a certain time of inactivity (default: 3 years). In case of no reaction after a specified period (default: 30 days), the inactive account will be deleted.

The forum has now a simple image upload management. A forum operator/administrator can list the images and can delete them groupwise. For new uploaded images the forum stores meta information as the time and the ID of the uploader (if registered and logged in). It is planned to enhance the functionality.

Attention: The forums own backup feature has gone. This was planned because it was to often broken when a new feature changed the database structure and we forgot to adapt it to the backup code. With an external tool like phpMyAdmin (for example) a changed database structure is no issue at all. So please use such a tool for backups.

Also gone os the BB-Code-button for Flash and its interpretation. Even old forum entries with embeddings of Flash-content will not work anymore.

There are a few obsoleted files: js/admin.js and its compressed comrade admin.min.js and the subdirectory includes/classes. Please delete them after (!) the succeeded upgrade.

With the first release of the 2.5-branch, we start with a new version numbering scheme. From now on we will use a date based numbering as shown at the end of the subject of this entry. Additionally we will provide an equivalent version number in the old scheme. For the current release 20220508.1 the equivalence is 2.5.0.

You can download the new release 20220508.1 from Github. For an update you will need at least a forum with the version 2.4.19.1 or newer.

Please report any problems with the new version here or in the projects issues section on Github.

Tschö, Auge

Hello

This is a first bugfix release in the 2.5-branch. As mentioned in another posting, I forgot to iron out a bug I found and fixed locally during the tests for the relase. This bug got now fixed by the Github user prbt2016, He also came across this unfixed bug and provided a pull request within a few hours. Thank you for your attention and your help.

The bug in itself affects only the update script.

Being on it, I harvested a few low hanging fruits (a translation and HTML/CSS-issues). The changes are noticed in the release message on Github where one also can download the package of the new release.

I'm sorry for the inconvinience of the broken upgrade script.

Tschö, Auge

Hello

This is the next bugfix release in the 2.5-branch. After introducing of the feature to notify the users, that logged in for the last time more than 3 years ago, the project forum sent hundreds of e-mails what caused the project page to get blacklisted because of sending spam. Thatswhy we limited the code to send only five e-mails per daily actions/per day to prevent the blacklisting.

Beside of that the Github user prbt2016 found a bug, that occurs only when installing the forum on a server with MySQL in versions 5.5 and 5.6. We recommend to use a newer MySQL version (at least 5.7 or MariaDB) but in case of a configuration with an older version of MySQL we want to prevent you as forum operators from not being able to use the 2.5-branch.

Additionally I came across a bug I introduced with the change from XHTML 1.0 to HTML (5) and the corresponding changes in CSS. On narrow screens/viewports the user menu was inaccessible because it slipped below the bottom border of the header because of the headers fixed height.

The changes are noticed in the release message on Github where one also can download the package of the new release.

Tschö, Auge

Hello

This is the next bugfix release in the 2.5-branch. We also introduced a new feature and begun the HTML and CSS-overhaul for the main section (between the submenu and the page footer). This is far from done but the main thread listing views and the start page of the admin panel should now be less buggy looking in a smartphone browser. Additionally we fixed an edge case in the function to delete a user account.

Known issue: When installing the forum, it is in some cases possible, that the installation succeeds but the redirect to the forum page fails with the error message "database unavailable". In this case you will see the URL of the forum in the address bar of the browser (i.e. https://www.example.org/forum or https://forum.example.org) without the trailing /install of the installation script. When refreshing the page, the forum works normally. We know this but we didn't find the cause til now.

This was solved with version 20240729.1.

The changes are noticed in the release message on Github where one also can download the package of the new release.

Tschö, Auge

Hello

This is the next bugfix release in the 2.5-branch. We also introduced a new feature, the possibility to upload images in the WebP format. We continued the HTML and CSS-overhaul for the user and options menus (in the page header and below the entries). Furtermore we fixed a few bugs.

Known issue: When installing the forum, it is in some cases possible, that the installation succeeds but the redirect to the forum page fails with the error message "database unavailable". In this case you will see the URL of the forum in the address bar of the browser (i.e. https://www.example.org/forum or https://forum.example.org) without the trailing /install of the installation script. When refreshing the page, the forum works normally. We know this but we didn't find the cause til now.

The changes are noticed in the release message on Github where one also can download the package of the new release.

Tschö, Auge

Hello

After a long time we released the new version 20240729.1 with several bugfixes, two new featurettes and database performance enhancements. The forum user Joe I (user joeiacoponi1 on Github) helped to improve performance by overhauling various database queries.

After finding the cause of several reports about empty pages or HTTP-status 500 (server error) we officially fixed this bug by correcting a database column, that was to small to store IPv6-addresses. Inofficilally the cause was described and a solution provided in other forum postings nearly a year ago. Furthermore we solved a problem in the captcha class and we prevent to send the password for spell checking to the services of the browsers in case of displaying a password in plain text.

For seeing the layout changes as they are intended, you possibly have to reload the forum with [CTRL]+[F5] in a desktop browser after the upgrade.

Attention: There are two important things you have to be aware of.

1. We removed the plugin Bad Behavior, because the latest update of the project was a long time ago. Furthermore the project seems to be abandoned, I wasn't able to find a project page.
2. After proceeding the upgrade, the forum stays disabled. This is a change in the behaviour ov the upgrade script. Until the last version the forum was disabled when starting the upgrade and was enabled again after applying the database changes but before uploading the changed files and directories. From now on the forum stays disabled and has to be reenabled manually in the forum-settings page after uploading the changed and new files.

The changes are noticed in the release message on Github where one also can download the package of the new release.

Tschö, Auge

Hello

Three weeks after the latest version we release a new version with a few bugfixes and a large rewrite of the CSS. The latter was done to improve the support for right-to-left written languages and the display in mobile devices. It's not perfect but far better than before.

For seeing the layout changes as they are intended, you possibly have to reload the forum with [CTRL]+[F5] in a desktop browser after the upgrade.

Attention: There is an important thing you have to be aware of.

After proceeding the upgrade, the forum stays disabled. This is a change in the behaviour ov the upgrade script. Until the last version the forum was disabled when starting the upgrade and was enabled again after applying the database changes but before uploading the changed files and directories. From now on the forum stays disabled and has to be reenabled manually in the forum-settings page after uploading the changed and new files.

The changes are noticed in the release message on Github where one also can download the package of the new release.

Tschö, Auge

Hello

[edit]
Attention: Filtering the overview pages for a specified category is currently broken in the project forum. Since we had to fix the query used for filtering due to a bug, I assume that a new error has crept in. We are looking into it.

[edit of the edit]
After several tests, I can state, that the filtering for a category feature works and my assumption, that it is broken, was a misinterpretation of the first page with its pinned threads.

So there is no bug in the category filter feature, that prevents it from working in general.
[/edit of the edit]
[/edit]

Nearly four months after the last version we release a new version with a few bugfixes and reworks of a few forms. The biggest is the posting form, that now has a better usability (in general but also for screen readers) and respects the native dimensions of viewports, especially in mobile devices. Furthermore the input elements, not only in the posting form, make use of the full range of types, that are provided nowadays where it's appropriate. Also several attributes, which was introduced with HTML5, are now in use, in example to set the cursor to the first (relevant) input field or to mark a form field as mandatory.

The popups for uploading images and avatars got a rework of their HTML-structure, styling with CSS and JavaScript code. The thread tree structure also got a rework. The metadata of a posting are now content of a dedicated element and a breaking point between the subject and the metadata was added to make the position at which the line break occurs the same everywhere.

For seeing the layout changes as they are intended, you (and also your users) possibly have to reload the forum with [CTRL]+[F5] in a desktop browser after the upgrade (I've no clue how to do it in the different mobile devices).

Attention: There is an important thing you have to be aware of.

After proceeding the upgrade, the forum stays disabled. This is a change in the behaviour of the upgrade script. Until version 20220803.1 the forum was disabled when starting the upgrade and was reenabled after applying the database changes but before uploading the changed files and directories. From now on the forum stays disabled and has to be reenabled manually in the forum-settings page after uploading the changed and new files.

There is an existing message to the upgrade performer but is not be displayed because of a bug. This bug was fixed with the current version but because one will upload the new files (also this with the fix) after the script want's to show the message, one can't see it in this upgrade. The message will appear with the next upgrade when starting from 20241215.1.

The changes are noticed in the release message on Github where one also can download the package of the new release.

Tschö, Auge

Hello

After three months we release a new version. The main focus was on eliminating errors but we also introduced a few small and one greater enhancement. We …

- fixed the broken MySQL-error reporting in the reworked upgrade script
- fixed the not allowed access to a restricted user list (accessible only for registered users or for the forum team), if a logged in user opened the userlist (in a new browser tab or window) and logged out, the user still had access to the userlist, even after a reload of the userlist page
- fixed a few errors in the HTML-structure of the posting form page
- fixed the restrictions for categories, one saw the thread trees of threads in a restricted categories one has no access to including the subject lines in the overview pages without being able to open the postings

Beside these bug fixes we …

- overhauled the sidebar toggle function; it was based on a small 9x9 pixel icon and an additional text link with support of a JavaScript-function; with the overhaul only the text link remained, the mini icon got replaced by status- and pagesize-dependent SVG background images and the JavaScript-function was simplified
- overhauled the forms for login, registration and for sending an e-mail because of a forgotten password. The forms moved horizontally to the centre of the page, got a borderframe and their explanations was included in these boxes
- in connection with this, two JavaScript-functions whose tasks are now fulfilled by HTML attributes could be removed from the codebase
- changed the definitions of index columns in the database tables that counts from 1 to any positive number to an unsigned integer; this doubles the range of possible values
- introduce a new management feature for the administration of uploaded images (for more details see below)
- checked the language files for date format strings, that doesn't match the rules for INTL date and time formats, where possible we altered the strings according to the rules of the main country for this language

The new management feature for uploaded images

With version 20220508.1 (2.5.0) we introduced a new table to store information about the upload. This includes the filename, the uploading account (if the user is registered and logged in) and the time of the upload. A new image upload comes with the creation of a related dataset. Images that was uploaded in an older version before the upgrade to version 20220508.1 (or a newer version) was not checked and are there are no informations about these images in the upload table.

With the new version 20250323.1 comes a new feature in the upload management page in the admin area. The purpose of the checkbox on an images card changes from "mark to delete" to "mark for (any) management feature". This includes the deletion of marked images as before but now also the inclusion of information about the selected images in the database. The upload time is reconstructed based on the file name. The user ID of the uploader is reconstructes based on the information about the author of the oldest existing post in which the image is used. This method is not exact but the best we can do with the information we have in the forum database.

The screenshot above shows a card for an uploaded image in the upload management page. Below the image thumbnail we can see an icon in the first line and the checkbox for selecting the image for a management function in the second and last line. The purpose of the icon is as follows.

If a images already has a database entry or not is shown with the following icons, showing a typical database icon one without and one with a red cross in the foreground. They are here displayed in their original image size but in the upload cards they are displayed only with the height of a normal text line (as one can see in the screenshot above). Together with the icons for the overhauled sidebar toggle these icons start the time of SVG icons which are scalable and with further preparations also able to support light- and dark-modes for themes.

To simplify the overview of the uploaded images one is able to set a filter for listing images (not) managed in the database table above the uploads list as can be seen in the following screenshot.

The screenshot shows the currently available three states of the filter. One can filter for "not managed images", "managed images" of "all images".

As before one can select only the images of the current page for deletion or for creating the database entries. Even with the default value of 25 images per page the run of the function to create database entries for all of the 25 images can take a few seconds. This mainly depends on the amount of forum entries to check for being the first/oldest entry, where the image is referenced.

We plan to apply further enhancements to the upload management in the future.

Addendum

Known issue: When selecting a category in one of the overview pages by selecting it with the select field in the sub navigation bar or by clicking on one of the category names at the end of a subject line of an opening posting does not filter the thread list by the selected category.

As it has since turned out, my observation that the threads displayed after selecting a category did not correspond to the selection was a misperception. I apologise for any confusion that may have arisen.

Tschö, Auge