FluxBB is fast, light, user-friendly forum software for your website.

I am glad to finally announce the next patch release of FluxBB: version 1.5.11.

Feature updates

• Increase minimum password length

• Prohibit links in topic subjects (based on existing anti-spam permission)

• Allow longer SMTP passwords

• Return correct HTTP status code on error and maintenance pages (to prevent search engines from indexing)

• Prevent duplicate bans

• User profiles: Use user's date/time formats, not the viewer's

• Improve error message for very short searches

Please check out the details in the full changelog. In addition, this release fixes nine bugs, some of which affect...

Security

• Proper CSRF protection for rebuilding the search index, logging in and promoting users

• Stop using insecure random number generator on certain PHP versions

• Fix insufficient escaping of HTML output in installer and error pages

This release has benefited from contributions by jasonrohrer, nsuchy and Visman. Thank you!

I also want to thank TheBritain, Visman, Li of SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab and Omar Kurt of Netsparker for respectfully and responsibly disclosing security-relevant issues.

Project update

As you know, this is the first release in a long time. I have decided to continue giving FluxBB the maintenance it deserves. However, I need support to achieve this. Before I announce all of my plans, as a token of goodwill and to regain some trust, I plan to release the long-awaited v1.6 within the next few weeks. This release will clean up some of the dusty bits under the hood of FluxBB. By removing support for old PHP and browser versions, we can lay the foundations to carefully modernize the codebase, while staying true to the spirit of FluxBB. This means that 1.5.11 is the last release to support PHP 4 (which is horribly outdated). In addition, 1.6 will get some much-needed love in the realm of security hardening.

With that out of the way: please go ahead and download the new version on the downloads page. If you are upgrading an existing forum, you can find instructions and resources on the upgrade page.

Enjoy using FluxBB and stay tuned for more news on v1.6!