We hope all of you had a good start into the new year. Stay healthy and stay with us - we've got some nice things planned for you this year!

As promised, we have been working on our next major version, 2.0, for the last months. We were (mostly) diligently working, and the first alpha release is not far away.

Nontheless, while not implementing new features anymore, we are still taking care of the 1.4 branch. Thus, we now have a new release for you, which fixes 20 bugs.

As always, some small enhancements have also found their way in:

• Topic links are now shown at the start of notification mails. - making it easier to jump to the topics on mobile devices.

• Added a new constant FORUM_DISABLE_STRIPSLASHES that fixes integrations with other software which also takes care of stripping slashes from user input automatically, thus stripping them twice (because FluxBB does it, too).

• Performance improvements when stripping bad characters.

Fixed bugs include:

• Posts with a large amount of newlines in a row could break the forum on some server configurations.

• Search could be tricked into examining every single post, essentially crashing large forums.

• add_field() didn't work for SQLite.

• File uploads on Windows servers were broken if magic_quotes_gpc was enabled.

• URLs ending on slashes were automatically hyperlinked, but only up to that slash, not including it.

• URLs inside image tags were incorrectly hyperlinked.

• The new auto-link BBCodes for forum, topic, url and user were accepting invalid input (non-integer IDs).

• Some minor JavaScript fixes for Internet Explorer and forms.

• New BBCodes weren't ignored in the search index.

• PHP's is_writable() mis-interprets file permissions on Windows NTFS Server

• Russia has dumped summer time.

• Some special UTF-8 characters could cause a post to be truncated at that character (MySQL-only).

You can view the full list of changes here.

As usual, downloads can be found on the download page.
Changed files and patches can be obtained on the upgrade page.

Updating to FluxBB 1.4.8 will still work if you use any prior version of FluxBB and even from PunBB 1.2/1.3.
As always, please remember to do a backup of both your files and database!

Good luck with updating and enjoy stability!
If you have any problems or spot any errors, please let us know!

And with that, back to v2.0.

Well, what is probably very important to most of you is that we are making good progress on the development of v2.0. During the last weeks, a lot of advancement could be seen in the new extensible, object-oriented database layer. We will soon "release" a first alpha version of FluxBB 2.0, called alpha1. Note, however, that this will just be a development milestone, not equipped with any new features or anything visible immediately. All changes so far were focused on simplifying development in the future. This will also be the case in the upcoming milestone alpha2, where we will restructure almost the entire code.

We are also happy to announce that we have a new team member on board: Dariusz - probably better known as daris to most of you due to his countless contributions of great modifications, e.g. his automatic mod installation tool "FluxBB Patcher" - has been diligently hacking away at FluxBB's code. His main work so far has been on the official converter tool for FluxBB. A first (beta) version is around the corner! Also, Dariusz has been playing around with an implementation of a true topic-tracking system.

For those of you roaming the wondrous world that is Google+: follow us on our official page - a place where some periodic development updates and, of course, release announcements will find you (instead of the other way around).

This is a security release, however only affects anyone running FluxBB behind a reverse proxy, with FORUM_BEHIND_REVERSE_PROXY enabled - we expect this to be a small number of users.

Thanks to Roman. B for reporting the security flaw.
This release also includes a fix for RTL languages in the update script - provided by zaher.

As usual, downloads can be found on the download page.
Changed files and patches can be obtained on the upgrade page.

The last release was some months ago and since then we've fixed 49 tickets!

• Performance improvements

• You can now search in multiple forums at once

• Separate forum e-mail and report flood

• Code tags inside a code tag are now allowed (as long as they are balanced)

• Templates for all emails for full translatability

• New BBCode: topic, post, forum and user

• BBCode in URLs was being parsed

• Subscription emails don't include BBCode anymore

• Maintenance page is now displayed during updates

And a lot more.

As usual, downloads can be found on the download page.
Changed files and patches can be obtained on the upgrade page.

Updating to FluxBB 1.4.6 will still work if you use any prior version of FluxBB and even from PunBB 1.2/1.3.
As always, please remember to do a backup of both your files and database!

This will be the last big release of the 1.4 branch and we'll only provivde bug fix releases from now on. As of now we're going to focus on 2.0. On a side note, FluxBB 1.2.24 has also been released.

If you have any questions, don't be afraid to ask.

First of all: unfortunately, we will not be able to continue reviewing modifications. This job has been far too time-consuming and resource-intensive to keep it up with our limited resources and team size. This duty has also mostly been fulfilled by Quy Ton, who will only have very little time for FluxBB until October. Thank you for all the efforts and your eye for detail, though!

The bright side: you will never have to wait for us to review a quick release that just fixes a little problem in an older version of your modification. Still, we obviously don't want to see the quality of submitted modifications drop. There are multiple options on how we could go about this, and we would like to receive some input from the community about them.

We could

• add a simple rating system.
  This would happen similar to how it is done on many other sites: registered users are able to rate a modification, using a 5-star-system. This way we would basically use the crowd to come up with good recommendations on the quality of modifications.

• allow users to write comments/reviews.
  Users could write a small text about a modification, judging its quality. This would, of course, take more time for users and less users would contribute.

• do something else?
  What are your suggestions? I can also imagine the 5-star-rating in combination with automatically generated per-release forum topics - the way it was done at PunRes. Your input, please!

Let's move on to nicer things:
After having started with removing all the review code from the repository, I am currently in the process of cleaning it up. This has always been the major roadblocker for me to adapt the repository to plugins and styles, too. But you can now expect the plugin repository to roll out fairly soon. How does that sound?

On a related note, I would like to add a screenshots feature to modifications. Is that a good idea? What would you think is the most important feature that is still missing?

P.S.: The release of FluxBB v1.4.6, our last feature release in the 1.4 branch, is just around the corner. Another update on the progress of v2.0 is also in the pipeline. Stay tuned!

Today, in honour of the beginnings of online communication, the FluxBB project is proud to present the newest member of our family of communications software, FluxBBS!

FluxBBS will be a light and fast telnet BBS system in the spirit of FluxBB; featuring a simplistic and slightly customizable look and feel, a light extensible architecture, and cross-platform server software.

System Requirements

To run at its best, FluxBBS will potentially require the following:

Intel i386 compatible processor
MS-DOS 5.0 or later
1.2 MB of hard disk space
At least 16MB of memory
One or more modems, at least 2400 baud speed (in order to enable multi-user access)

Later versions will include FidoNet integration, bridges between the FluxBB forum script, and better support for theming.

Right now, the server software is very unstable, thus we are not releasing an alpha yet. We're not sure how we were even to get that single screenshot! But be prepared world, do you wish to go Future to the Back? We hope so, great scott indeed.

Only one and a half months after our last release, we bring you another packed release featuring 21 bug fixes and 13 enhancements, most of which are again focused on usability and performance.

The highlight of this release should be the new batch editing functionalities on the admin users page, which allows you to quickly ban, delete or move multiple users at once.
FluxBB 1.4.5 should also bring you some more gains on the performance side, as we now also cache board statistics and (optionally) allow for caching feeds.

Changes include:

• Batch editing of users.

• Moderators cannot be banned anymore.

• Board statistics are now cached.

• Feeds can be cached.

• New "last visit" field in user profiles.

• You can now choose a target forum when splitting posts off a topic.

• Stopwords cache gets recreated automatically when necessary.

• Admin menu is now split up into moderator and admin menu

• "Quick reply" for guests

Fixed bugs include:

• Moderators could move/split posts to any board.

• Quoting failed on usernames with special characters.

• Post contents in subscription emails were not censored.

• Authentication works again with PHP 4.

And there's more, you can view a full list of changes here.

As usual, downloads can be found on the download page.
Changed files and patches can be obtained on the upgrade page.

Updating to FluxBB 1.4.5 will still work if you use any prior version of FluxBB and even from PunBB 1.2/1.3.
As always, please remember to do a backup of both your files and database!

On a side note, development of FluxBB v2.0 has officially started a while ago. With this release out of the door, we can now focus our efforts on that new branch. But don't worry, we'll keep you and the 1.4 branch updated in the meantime.

We hope you can enjoy using this new version as much as we enjoyed developing it!
If you have any problems or spot any errors, please let us know!

Warning: There is a bug in FluxBB 1.4.4 which prevents authentication when using PHP 4. PHP 4 reached end-of-life over 3 years ago, however if you still use it, we recommend you either use a development snapshot (not necessarily stable!) or wait for FluxBB 1.4.5.

This release has a couple of changes worth noting, so please read below before upgrading!

Changes include:

• Fixing a bug introduced in 1.4.3 which prevented upgrades from 1.2 working properly.

• Added a hash to cookies to prevent tampering with the user_id or expiration date.

• Added back the "show your posts" quicklink which was removed in 1.4.3.

• Moved the mark as read link to the bottom-right of the index and new posts pages.

• Fixed an error with validation of RSS feeds.

• Added permalinks to the breadcrumbs for searches.

• Fixed a bug when searching the ban list when using SQLite.

• Improved the error messages when attempting to rebuild the search index of an empty board.

• Added support for recognizing UTF-8 characters in URLs.

• Hide announcements, additional menu items, and rules, when groups don't have "read board" permissions.

• Caching censored words.

• Added option to list topics alphabetically in a forum.

• Made the search indexer recognize, and strip out, UTF-8 punctuation and symbols.

• Merged stopword lists from all languages into one global list.

• Added a preview button on the quick reply area.

• Automatically delete old (>10) reports.

For a full list of changes, see here.

Important notes:

• When performing an upgrade the search index will want rebuilt and the posts will want re-parsed. On large boards this can be a slow process, and will put the server under high load while it runs. While recommended, this isn't absolutely necessary. If you want to skip the rebuilding simply update the config items "o_searchindex_revision" and "o_parser_revision" to 2, in the config table (before running the upgrade). For anyone wondering if it's worth skipping or not - The search indexer now strips out UTF-8 punctuation/symbols more aggressively when splitting words. If you have a primarily English board you can probably skip this.

• The cookie has been changed to include a hash, to prevent tampering with either the user_id or expire time. This means the structure of the cookie has changed, and will result in everyone needing to log in again after the upgrade.

• The stopwords.txt lists from all installed language packs are now combined into 1 list, which is cached. This means you should delete all .php files in the cache folder when installing/removing a language pack, or updating any stopwords.txt file.

• The minimum required PHP version has increased to PHP 4.4.0.

We would like to give thanks to Peter Maxwell for alerting us to the insecurity of the expiration time in the cookie, and helping provide a fix as well as general advice. Since this release improves the security of the cookie we would strongly recommend upgrading.

As usual, downloads can be found on the download page and in the download folder.

As always please remember to do a backup of both your files and database!

If you have any problems or spot any errors please let us know!

This release fixes a total of 21 bugs, and includes 25 enhancements. This is not a security release, so upgrading isn't critical - however still highly recommended.

Some of the more important changes since FluxBB 1.4.2 include:

• Automatic login after registration was broken.

• Categories with matching position values could be confused.

• Fixed moderators being able to edit administrators profiles.

• Changed PUN_ROOT to use absolute paths.

• Quoting a post with an image inside a link caused nested url tags.

• Only admins can run the upgrade script.

• It is now possible to subscribe to a forum, and be alerted by email of any new topics posted.

• Added some new user post searches similar to that found in FluxBB 1.3.

• The install script is now translatable.

• The update script is now translatable.

Note: As you will notice, only admins may now run the upgrade script. When attempting to update you will be challenged for the database password (example). This is the value stored in $db_password inside config.php, or in the case of SQLite the value in $db_name.

As usual, downloads can be found on the download page and in the download folder.

As always please remember to do a backup of both your files and database!

After two maintenance releases and one up-coming feature release (read on for more about that) we feel that our 1.4 branch is now fairly stable, and it is now time to make a start on the next stage in FluxBB's future.

The 1.4 branch was never supposed to be the end of the road, but rather a milestone before getting back to what 1.3 was once meant to be. Granted, 1.4.0 has become more than just that, but this also gives us more security and a solid base to build our future on.

How we reach that future was the question we brought to the community four months ago. We wanted to hear your opinion because we saw two options for us to move on: either do a complete rewrite of the software, called 2.0, or, step-by-step, improve this software incrementally. The aim was the same: at the end, we wanted to have a 2.0 version, complete with a template system, extensions and much, much more.
But how to get there? The incremental approach would both be good and bad for our users, we felt: they would get regular heavy updates, but this would also make updating a pain (especially with and for modifications). On the other hand, rewriting would allow us to create the "perfect" forum software from scratch. But, knowing our past and our current team size, we knew this could take a long time.

So here is what we have come up with after all of your input: While we would of course enjoy a rewrite (give me a developer who wouldn't), we feel that it would be too big a task - especially with our relatively small team.

With FluxBB 1.4, we all can enjoy a very stable and working code base. It would be foolish to throw away all of this work and the many ideas and solutions that went into this just for something we feel could be a better architecture. We still don't want to give up on that architecture, though. Our goal for the next major release is still named 2.0, but not through a rewrite. We are confident that we can start at 1.4 and create a 2.0 version by refactoring - re-arranging and -architecturing the existing source code rather than throwing it away and rewriting from scratch.

This gives us the freedom to concentrate on building a well-designed system without having to reimplement all the actual application code that makes FluxBB what it is now. Another benefit of this approach is also that we can release an intermediate version (aka "1.5" at almost any time if the development takes too long).

As a quick reminder: The most important features that you can look forward to for 2.0 are an extension system, a real template and style system and improved integration with other software by making it easier to interchange certain parts of the system (like the authentication adapter, for example). It is also planned to drop the PHP4 support with the release of our next major version, so that we can benefit from PHP5's better object-orientation support when further modularizing the software.

Let's get back to the very short-term future:
The release of 1.4.3, which will consist of about 20 bug fixes and quite a lot of improvements, is now close around the corner. After that, we want to focus on planning the details of 2.0 (i.e. what features should be included, and in what order they should be added), while we fix remaining issues and finish parts of the site that are still missing.

It is not far to the end of 2010 and we can now look back at what was probably the most exciting year in the (young) history of FluxBB. With the move to a new server and the release of our new website, the release of v1.4.0 and the following updates we covered big milestones on our road to providing the users with a stable and modern platform while staying true to our philosophy of shipping fast, light-weight and user-friendly software.

We currently don't have a download section on the main site for old versions, though will try and put up some kind of archive with all previous releases, including FluxBB 1.2.x. For now, you can download the update from it's release folder.

This update fixes a couple of minor bugs, and addresses a critical vulnerability discovered in PHPs unserialize() function which affects PHP <= 5.2.13/5.3.2.

Note: The vulnerability is in PHP and not FluxBB itself! If you are running PHP 5.2.14/5.3.3 or later the vulnerability does not affect you, and this upgrade is not critical, though obviously we recommend upgrading anyway

Changes since 1.4.1 include:

• PHP unserialize() vulnerability affects cookie data

• Upgrading to utf8_general_ci can cause "identical" usernames

• Huge posts can break formatting

• Blank errors from DBLayer::error() when a transaction fails

• Parameters of extern.php changed from 1.2 to 1.4

• Reason must be under 65535 bytes when making a report

• FluxBB's cache is not updated when used with apc.stat=0

• Constant PUN_RANKS_LOADED already defined

• Censor URL in viewtopic.php

• No IP when banning a user without posts

• LIMIT X,Y is used in various places other than just displaying posts

• Add database password confirmation in install script

• Localization of "New forum"

• Name for quick reply form

For language pack maintainers:

• admin_forums.php - new entry: 'New forum'

• misc.php - new entry: 'Reason too long'

• post.php - 'Too long message' has changed to accept a parameter specifying the max length instead of being hard-coded

• mail_templates/rename.tpl - New mail template

As usual, downloads can be found on the download page and in the download folder.

As such we have decided to move to GitHub. GitHub is a very similar idea to Gitorious, however has many more projects (including a lot of big names), and dedicated support staff to ensure there is minimal downtime. GitHub also has some nice features which allow announcements of commits on IRC and various other nice features.

What do these changes mean to you?

Well, if you don't follow development and have never used our Gitorious page or Git repository, nothing at all.

If you have used the Gitorious page but not the Git repository, you simply have a new URL to visit: http://github.com/fluxbb/fluxbb

If you have used the Git repository you will need to update it's path. The new URL is:

git://github.com/fluxbb/fluxbb.git

If you are a developer (i.e. have write access) the new URL is:

git@github.com:fluxbb/fluxbb.git

If you need write access on GitHub please register an account and let me know.