My Little Forum 20241215.1, forms, forms, forms and a few bugfixes

This is a further bugfix release in the 2.5-branch with several changes to forms and a few fixes. The minimal PHP version, the forum is able to run is PHP 7.3, the maximal (tested) PHP version is 8.2. The minimal version of the MySQL database server was raised to version 5.7.7 respectively version 10.2.2 in case of a MariaDB server with the previous release (20240729.1). The minimal version of MLF from one can start an upgrade is version 2.4.19.

Important notice: after finishing the upgrade process the forum stays in maintenance modus. You have to manually enable the forum again in the settings page afterwards.

Changes

• rework of the posting form for a better usability and enhancements in displaying on mobile devices
• rework of the popups for uploading a profile avatar and uploading images for the use in postings
• general use of modern form field types, where they are appropriate (in example the input types "search", "email", "url", "number")
• use of form element attributes (in example "required", "autofocus" and so on)
• rework of the elements of a posting in the thread trees
  • adding element time for the posting time
  • move the no-text icon to the trail of icons at the end of a posting item
  • prevent breaking of the subject and the metadata of a posting item
  • add a breakpoint between the subject and the postings metadata

Fixes

• correct the broken query to select only the postings of a specified category
• display images of the type WebP in the gallery of uploaded images in the upload popup
• restrict the width of the sidebar in narrow viewports to the native width of the viewport (including margins, borders and paddings)
• prevent sending of passwords for AI training to the browser vendows when the password is unhidden
• add a few fixes for writing direction awareness
• do not check the name of a posting author for duplicate use in case of a posting edit by an administrator or a moderator
• take the posting time into account when checking the name of a posting author for duplicate use (names of registered users are blocked against the use through unregistered visitors)
• remove the tabindex attributes in the posting form because the caused a absolutely weird tab order (for details read this posting in the project forum)

Full Changelog: 20240827.1...20241215.1

My Little Forum 20240827.1, layout and bugfix release

This is a further bugfix release in the 2.5-branch with a several changes to the page layout and a few fixes. The minimal PHP version, the forum is able to run is PHP 7.3, the maximal (tested) PHP version is 8.2. The minimal version of the MySQL database server was raised to version 5.7.7 respectively version 10.2.2 in case of a MariaDB server with the previous release (20240729.1). The minimal version of MLF from one can start an upgrade is version 2.4.19.

Important notice: after finishing the upgrade process the forum stays in maintenance modus. You have to manually enable the forum again in the settings page afterwards.

Changes

• large enhancements for an writing direction independent page layout, mainly for support of right to left written languages
• large enhancements of using modern layout techniques (flexbox, grid) for a better support for mobile devices with typically narrower browser viewports

Fixes

• add a forgotten case of adding a column to the column list of a select because of using the column in the order-by-clause
• several fixes and enhancements in the upgrade script
• fixes in the language files for arabic, german and italian languages

My Little Forum 20240729.1, performance and bugfix release

This is a further bugfix release in the 2.5-branch with a few new featurettes and database performance improvements. The minimal PHP version, the forum is able to run is PHP 7.3, the maximal (tested) PHP version is 8.2. The minimal version of the MySQL database server was raised to version 5.7.7 respectively version 10.2.2 in case of a MariaDB server. The minimal version of MLF from one can start an upgrade is version 2.4.19.

Important notice: after finishing the upgrade process the forum stays in maintenance modus. You have to manually enable the forum again in the settings page afterwards.

Features

• lazy loading of images in forum entries, that are not in the viewport when loading a page with entries
• add BB-codes [ins], [del] and [s], mainly intended to mark subsequent changes

Changes

• new upgrade script, from now on it is possible to use also version 2.4.19 as starting point of an upgrade
• apply database performance enhancements, this was provided by @joeiacoponi1 (thank you)
• enhancements and corrections in a few translations (simplified chinese, traditional chinese, danish, english, french, spanish)
• add new language arabic, this has been contributed by Abdul Salam in the project forum, it is in beta status
• unify the use of the pagination link lists (from now on they are shown above and below the page content, where in use)
• set the new source URL for the MathJax CDN, that is recommended by the project
• remove the spam prevention method Bad Behavior because the projects seems to be abandoned since a longer time
• all tables use now the charset utf8mb4, because the previously in some cases used utf8 (a.k.a. utf8mb3) will be deprecated by MySQL in one of the next server main versions
• use the SameSite attribute in cookies

Fixes

• resize the columns mlf2_useronline.ip and mlf2_logincontrol.ip to 128 bytes, mlf2_useronline.ip was 15 bytes long and caused HTTP-500-errors in case of visitors with a IPv6-based connection, mlf2_logincontrol.ipwas unecessarily long with 256 Bytes
• the mouse cursor should show up as pointer when hovering buttons
• prevent passwords being sent for spell checking to Google (or other spell checking services) when the content of a password field is shown as plain text
• a few occurences of dates and times, that did not follow the new time formatting
• add missing strings for the administration of the Bayes based spam prevention filter (B8) in simplified and traditional chinese
• correct a few errors in the HTML-structure of several templates
• replace function imagerotate with imageflip in the captcha class because imagerotate failed to work in some cases
• check for existince of a given category before using it in the template

The release 20240729.1 is equivalent to version 2.5.5 in the old version number scheme.

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