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