We are happy to announce the final release of miniBB 2.0! More than 20 months passed since we've released first release candidate of 2.x series, and a lot of work has been done. New features and fixes are neverending story, but this is the release we would like to stop on, and bring it as carefully proven and tested program for any size online communities and web-projects.

Latest release candidates already may be called "stable", so we are happy many users are using them already. Welcome to upgrade, if you want to use new important features in this final version:

a) More cares about anonymous users, and saving posted data. There could be many reasons, when you can lose what you've typed: anti-spam protection message; topic was moved to another forum or deleted; your access to forums was limited while you've posted; incorrectly entered login/password; message posted anonymously under nickname which is already taken, etc. This version of miniBB introduces "post-hold" algorithm, which is allowing to not lose your posted data, it will be available on error screen, and you will be able to re-submit it, or copy and save it. In the best traditions of miniBB, one algorithm module is widely used for all errors.

b) Improved IMG tag BB code - now you are forced to type not just URL to an image, but also ALT (alternative) text, which is a good addition for spiders. "Nofollow" attribute for [URL] links now will be automatically removed from all URLs pointing to internal forum pages, which makes our software even more Google-friendly.

c) XSS fix in registration form - not really a security issue, but good manner of checking the data improved now.

Welcome to miniBB 2.0 - as always, your feedback is most desired. In the nearest time, we will also release powerful Captcha addon, which already may be seen on our boards; also as File Storage addon, which will be an alternative and simplified version of our premium File Upload plugin, and will extend our own forums. Both addons will be offered for a very small fee.

If somebody celebrates a birthday today - we wish you a lot of health; if somebody celebrates Independence Day - we wish you a good celebration; if somebody remembers about holocaust vistims today - let them never forget; but if somebody celebrates our second final release - let it be secure, stable and fitting almost everyone's needs :-)

We thank all of you a lot for your support - your suggestions, notices and impressions are always welcome!

Upgrade tutorial from latest Release Candidate, as usual, may be found in our Update History file, as much as complete update history from the very first release candidate, followed after 1.x series releases.

Great News! Thanks miniBB.com!
:)

Thank you a lot for the wonderful script and support!

Thanks, congratulations, and many good wishes for the future, Paul! And to all the team, of course!

Are there any tricks to updating an existing board? I just got the previous version up and running with all the settings, tweaks, colors and plugins that I want and I really don't want to have to do all of that over again.

Thanks...

Just check the Update History file and compare the files you can just to overwrite. You are not losing your addons on upgrades anyways, because they are separate scripts...

Cheers and thanks to Team - miniBB just gets better by the day!
- mb

Thanks Paul, I'll look through it. There seems to be a lot of things to do, so I'll cross my fingers. Thanks for backups!!!

Hi Paul! There is something with the pictures/smiles.

I just posted a message with only one line of text and a single smile. As a result I produced one very small message and half of a novel with code for the smile in the DB - the full code, the HTML part, and even the ALT tag :) This is too much stuff in the DB for one innocent grin. The smilies were OK before...

My version is 2.0, installed yesterday.

[EDIT]

Now I posted a second message and the above didn't happen. In it there was only the smile, as it must be. I even could correct the smile in the first letter. Very strange. In both cases the smile was ":)".

[EDIT 2]

Now I saw that some of the old smilies (posted with RC6e) are normal inside the message (when opened for editing), but others are with those long tags. I cannot understand...

[EDIT 3]

Something wrong definitely happens. Again the same. Others' messages with smilies has about a 500 symbols link for each smilie :) In addition, the links of the smilies somehow are messing up with the links of the other pictures. Someting happens either with the code-decode script, or with the smilies plugin.

[EDIT 4]

Also, sometimes when there is a text and smilies, the text exists (in edit mode) but is not visible hwen it's pubished. The smilies somehow are eating it.

the full code, the HTML part, and even the ALT tag
Oh yes, but these are W3C rules :-) If there will be no all attributes, forum pages won't be W3C valid.

Can you try/repeat all your errors on our test server? I'm a bit confused about description and not quite understand all that.

Paul, simply sometimes ":)" is ":)", but sometimes the same ":)" produces a very long full picture tag. This means that in some forum I could have a DB of less than 30% useful text and 70% picture tags of smilies. In addition - other errors.

My opinion is that the smilies, and even the pictures themselves are for the participants of the board, not for the web officially. The web is only a text and picture telephone for them! These are not presentation web pages. People talk there for their pleasure and sometimes because they are friends. This discussions are not the people to be servants to the W3C association. And not to Google as well. And not to anyone else, too. Excepting to their other friends.

I don't understand why the pictures, too, must have full HTML tags, and not only the BB code. They are not on the same sever, they are linked. So, after they are removed and links are broken - ":All the Web presents itself a system of broken links." - we all will have a very fat DB full of unuseful symbols, rubbish.

If here most of the users want these tags, I.ll be happy if you say me how to remove the HTML attributes. I was so stupid to delete the RC6f distribution for getting the files from it. Or they won't work with the present release?

ALT - I even don't know what is it for, only saw somewhwrw that it's for the blind people... Why ALT inside a board?

Anyway, I prefer to send you a name/pass to the board in question, to see the errors inside the messages. The errors might not be reproduced in the tes board. Only, please, wait until I make you a mod name/pass...

ALT! HMMM... :))) For the templates - OK, but for inside W1C compliance is enough :))) Or even W0C :)))

*

I will also be very grateful if you tell me to which lines to put "//" for disabling the "Google friendly" enabling - that you talk about in the first message :)

Ivan
I could have a DB of less than 30% useful text and 70% picture tags of smilies
That's right, and that's why we dislike smilies.

All picture and other tags are saved in database in ready HTML. It's done not in the latest release, it was always so. When we read the messages from database, no additional converting is made, which saves a lot of proceeding time.

ALT is necessary because of standard rules, if we have XHTML version.

I think you discovered this just recently, but it was made such way a long time ago. Yes, you can contact me in private to get this cleared.

As about "google-friendly" addition - I think, you don't need to comment or remove something concerning that. By default, all URLs you insert via [url] tag, have "nofollow" attribute. If you don't want to appear it at all, then just modify necessary BB code.

I always express myself emotionally and hope this does not insult you :)

No, I finally was with RC6e and did not see that the smilies make a full tag. I even now have smilies without any tag - see there, please, I sent you a mod name/pass.

As per my personal opinion, it's better to have one more "convert-deconvert-reconvert" for half second than 300% bigger database. But I;m not a programmer, as you know :) But if putting this apart, it's not good that we'll have in the future huge stuff of DBs with only few useful letters :)

Congratulations, Team! Thanks :) We'll waiting for versions 2.1, 2.2 etc ;)

There was a little problem with editing messages containing smilies. I'd change positions of two blocks in bb_codes.php function deCodeBB:

/* [IMG] tag code - without fixed width. */
...
/* [IMG] tag code - without fixed width, with alt. */
...

instead of

/* [IMG] tag code - without fixed width, with alt. */
...
/* [IMG] tag code - without fixed width. */
...

And now it's all right :)

I always express myself emotionally and hope this does not insult you

We have over +35 heat here, and I have no emotions at all :)

As per my personal opinion, it's better to have one more "convert-deconvert-reconvert" for half second than 300% bigger database

No, I still think it's better to save on processing, else on data saving. In our gigabytes era it doesn't really matter, but the speed still matters. We will not change anything in this case.

Serg

Thanks, I'll take a look.