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.

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