My Little Forum 20220803.1, feature and bugfix release

This is a further bugfix release in the 2.5-branch with a new feature and a few enhancements. The minimal PHP version the forum is able to run is PHP 7.3, the maximal (tested) PHP version is 8.1.5. The minimal version of MLF from one can start an upgrade is version 2.4.19.1.

Features

• The upload function for images got a new file type: WebP. This was a feature request in the project forum. The image type has a far better compression and a better image quality at the same time as the image type JPEG.

Changes

• Separate the signature block from the posting in the HTML-structure. That way the posting block has a separate floating context. That leads to the situation, that possibly existing floating content in the entry does not affect the position of the signature. The signature will always be displayed under the complete content of the entry.
• Rewrite the CSS-rulesets for the usermenu, the options menu for every single entry and the button rows for classifying an entry as ham or as spam. Make the menus responsive and mobile aware.

Fixes

• Removed last occurences of the use of the outdated column mlf2_entries.email_notification. The column was removed with version 2.4.14 in the update script but left over in the installation script until version 2.4.22. This was after the split of the 2.5 development branch and so it remained here until now.
• Initialise a possibly empty search box input, because the lack of the initialisation led to a PHP warning. See this thread in the project forum for more context.
• When classifying old entries in locked threads as ham, it happened often, that the thread got unlocked. Locked entries should remain locked now in most cases. There is an edge case I was not able to hunting down until now, so that it remains for now.
• In the installation script as well as in the update script there was SQL-code, that led to doubled UNIQUE keys for mlf2_userdata.user_name and mlf2_userdata.user_email. The code, that doubles the keys was removed and the update script checks in this version for the obsolete keys and removes them.

The release 20220803.1 is equivalent to version 2.5.4 in the old version number scheme.

My Little Forum 20220529.1, feature and bugfix release

This is a further bugfix release in the 2.5-branch with a few new small features. The minimal PHP version the forum is able to run is PHP 7.3, the maximal (tested) PHP version is 8.1.5. The minimal version of MLF from one can start an upgrade is version 2.4.19.1.

Features

• Because of the new spam detection system B8, introduced with version 20220508.1 forum teams need to classify the entries in a forum as ham or spam, if this system is active. It is necessary, to perform both of the classifications to train the system with content of good and bad entries. To make it possible to identify unclassified entries without opening every single entry, we introduce a new icon with an eye to show the unclassfied status. The icon will be displayed behind the subject of an entry in the thread tree on the index pages (thread listings) and in the thread tree below an entry in the single-entry-view.
• The HTML-structure and CSS-rules for the main section of the forum pages got bit of a lifting. This is an ongoing task and far from done.

Fixes

• When deleting a user account, the script removes the user-ID of the user from her/his forum entries and places the name to the entries as those were written by an unregistered user. Beside of that the references to the user-ID will be removed from the user data table itself as well as from the user data cache table, the bookmarks table and read-status table. In old installations it was possible to get notified about replies when one was the author of an entry with a flag in the dataset of the entry in the entries table. With setting the column email_notification of the entries that was authored by the user that should get deleted to 0, orphaned notification tasks for old forum entries should get prevented.

The release 20220529.1 is equivalent to version 2.5.3 in the old version number scheme.

My Little Forum 20220517.1, bug fix release

This is a further bugfix release in the 2.5-branch. The minimal PHP version the forum is able to run is PHP 7.3, the maximal (tested) PHP version is 8.1.5. The minimal version of MLF from one can start an upgrade is version 2.4.19.1.

Fixes

• the feature inactivity notification sent an unlimited number of e-mails, what caused the project domain to get blacklisted; to prevent this for external forum operators, the number of e-mails is now limited to 5 per daily action
• because of the fixed height of the page header the user menu was inaccessible on narrow viewports since the change from XHTML 1.0 to HTML (5)
• the column mlf2_userdata.user_email was to large for using an index with charset utf8mb4 on MySQL 5.5 and 5.6, reset it to charset utf8 (3 byte chars only)

The release 20220517.1 is equivalent to version 2.5.2 in the old version number scheme.

My Little Forum 20220509.1, bug fix release because of the broken upgrade script

This is a first bugfix release in the 2.5-branch. The minimal PHP version the forum is able to run is PHP 7.3, the maximal (tested) PHP version is 8.1.5. The minimal version of MLF from one can start an upgrade is version 2.4.19.1.

In the release 20220508.1, that was released yesterday, a bug remained that I fixed only locally during testing but forgot to add to the repository and the release. This bug got fixed by @prbt2016. He also came across the (in the release) unfixed bug and provided a pull request within a few hours (#597). Thank you for your attention and your help. The bug in itself affects only the update script.

While working on the new release I harvested a few really low hanging fruits. One in a translation that affected six language files (because of being untranslated strings). The others are a few CSS- and HTML-issues.

Features

• stick the page footer to the bottom of the viewport with the help of a CSS-flexbox

Changes

• removed CSS-fixes for Internet Explorers 6 and 7 (RIP)
• replaced main block elements (<div>) in the page structure with semantic HTML-elements (<header>, <nav>, <main> and <footer>)

Fixes

• a syntax error that prevented the update script from working (the previously mentioned PR #597)
• a wrong used English word (a IMHO typical false friend for native German speakers)

The release 20220509.1 is equivalent to version 2.5.1 in the old version number scheme.

New major release of My Little Forum with PHP-compatibility up to PHP 8.1

This is a new major release that makes My Little Forum 2 (MLF) compatible with PHP up to version 8.1. The minimal PHP version the forum is able to run is PHP 7.3. The minimal version of MLF from one can start an upgrade is version 2.4.19.1.

We changed the format of the version number to a scheme that uses the current date and a consecutive number after a point. The new version 20220508.1 is a par with version 2.5 in the classic version numbering scheme.

Please take into account to upload the files config/VERSION and update/update_2.4.19.1-2.5.php in the very first step and start the update process from the admin interface afterwards. It's common that you will see two links to update scripts in the admin interface (update_2.3.5-2.4.php and the new update_2.4.19.1-2.5.php). Use the script update_2.4.19.1-2.5.php for the current upgrade. You can remove the content of the directory update if the upgrade succeeded.

Features

• image upload management page in the admin area, list all uploaded images, delete images groupwise
• information about the user who uploads a new image gets stored in a database table
• Bayes based spam filter
• introduce PHPMailer class as optional replacement for the PHPs own function mail, has to be cofigured in the file config/php_mailer.php
• optional TeX support through MathJax library (has to be linked and activated manually)
• restrict access to the user list to the forum team (administrators and moderators)
• allow topics to be pinned/sticked to the certain category or to all categories
• change the charset of most of the tables to support 4-byte-characters, i.e. for using emojis
• provide a forum wide setting to store a target name for breaking out of a frame or iframe (possible values are _self, _parent, _top or a given name of a target frame)
• add BB-codes for marking text as right-to-left or as left-to-right written
• unify the HTML-structure for a user name to make it possible to style the HTML-element of the user name in every place with the same CSS-rules
• provide a user setting to make it possible for users to open links in a forum entry in a new browser window or tab
• request a reaction of an inactive user after a given time of inactivity and delete the account after an additional waiting time when there was no reaction
• provide a back-to-top-link on every page and every single forum entry

Removals

• optional TeX support through the Google online service, service got abandoned
• flash button and flash bb-code
• forum-scripts own backup funtionality, please use an external solution like for example phpMyAdmin
• the files js/admin.js and js/admin.min.js
• the directory includes/classes with its only content Backup.class.php

Changes

• the quote-message-link is now a button
• new language file for Traditional Chinese
• upgrade of many of the external modules, where one was available
• overhaul of the swedish language file
• removed the compatibility to ancient browsers down to IE6 from the JavaScript sources

Fixes

• replaced several functions and language constructs, that was removed or got deprecated with PHP 8 and PHP 8.1
• unify mail encoding, was different depending of the checked characters
• added a CSRF-token to posting delete function calls
• absolute URLs for images in the RSS-feeds, relative pathes in the src-attribute of images in the RSS feed made them inaccessible in the feed
• show spam entries in the thread tree not for authors of spammy postings
• database table columns for user names and e-mail-addresses are set to be unique to prevent the use of similar user names (in the meaning of the MySQL-database-system) or the double use of e-mail-addresses

my little forum 2.4.24, bugfix release

In case of an update: This version can only be an update target for existing installations from version 2.3.5 upwards!

Attention

Because of a silly copy'n'paste error the list of files to update mentions two wrong file names. This affects only forum operators who upgrade the software from an earlier version. New installations are not affected.

• wrong: themes/default/style.tpl => correct: themes/default/style.css
• wrong: themes/default/style.min.tpl => correct: themes/default/style.min.css

Fixes

• fixed wrong formatting of the link for a threads own RSS-feed again, got broken by a change in the previous release
• fixed the formatting of the back-to-top-links in the options menu of an entry, lowercase is not correct for every language

Featurette

• added classes mentioning the user type in the thread tree below an entry in the single-entry-view

my little forum 2.4.23, bugfix release

In case of an update: This version can only be an update target for existing installations from version 2.3.5 upwards!

Fixes

• fixed wrong formatting of the link for a threads own RSS-feed, got broken by a change in the previous release
• fixed the non-English and non-German strings for the to-top-of-page-links, they had a broken comment part

my little forum 2.4.22, bugfix release

In case of an update: This version can only be an update target for existing installations from version 2.3.5 upwards!

Fixes

• fixed the broken backup restoring function for the entries table, rework of the backup function for better code readability
• fixed the insufficient file size computation for the list of backup files; very small file sizes (up to a few hundred bytes) was shown as "0.00 MB" instead i.e. "0.0006 MB"
• fixed deprecation warnings that occurs since PHP 7.2, removed function each() in while loops, replaced the construct with foreach()
• fixed a wrong key name for the error message in admin area about a provided but incorrect e-mail-address

Features and featurettes

• added links to top of the page in the page footer and in the options menu of every entry
• added a backup function for subscriptions and tags
• added the natural sorting of the tag list, makes sorting of tags case insensitive

my little forum 2.4.21, bugfix release

In case of an update: This version can only be an update target for existing installations from version 2.3.5 upwards!

Fixes

• fixed the regular expression for checking the syntax of an e-mail-address to be compatible with PRCE2 and so also with PHP 7.3 and newer, the old PRCE1-compatible syntax prevented new user registrations when the forum software runs under PHP 7.3.x or newer
• fixed the image source paths from within forum entries, when provided as a RSS-feed, output of images was broken because of invalid paths to the image sources

my little forum 2.4.99.3, public beta for version 2.5

In case of an update: This version can only be an update target for existing installations from version 2.4.19.1 upwards!

This is a testing version. Please do not use it in production.

Fixes

• when an entry was classified as spam, the author was able to see other as spam classified entries, this is a feature for admins and mods only
• the new tables was not included into the drop-table-functionality in the uninstallation function

Removals

• the old update script update_2.3.5-2.4.php got removed because it led to confusion when starting the update process

Included changes of version 2.4.99.2

Features

• 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. So you'll have the manipulation functions of the main view also for the listed spam entries.
• 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 registered and unregistered users should be able to add tags to postings.

Changes

• All database tables are of type InnoDB 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.
• Send the notification e-mails only, if the entry was classified as ham (not as possible spam).