News from the Top

We’ve added two new, but small, features to the forums:

Default Charset

The default character set of the forums has been set to ISO-8859-1, in response to a request by the FMT to clarify the use of foreign language characters in our forums. If the alphabet you’re using in your post isn’t included in ISO-8859-1, it has the potential to look gibberish on other people’s computers, and may run afoul of the official language section of our code of conduct.

Capitalization

You can now adjust the capitalization of your display name in your profile.

We’ve added an :angry: () emoticon to the forums, in response to the outpouring of grief to the loss of the :( emoticon (which had been updated to )

Minor update.

Changes:

• Tweaked the IP filter
• Added .my to the TLD whitelist
• Forums now auto-create forum directories instead of throwing an error

Features Added:

• UPDATED R for RSS: As promised, there’s now a RSS Feed for new topics, messages, as well as VIP posts in public forums where it’s viewable by anyone. The forum needs to have at least one new topic created since around noon today. The New Topics/New Messages feeds are served on a per-forum basis, while the VIP feed includes VIP posts across all the public forums on a site.

It’s done, completed, merged, finished. After a lot of work comparing accounts, coming up with business rules and how to tackle conflicting account names, and worrying constantly about possibly breaking various programs that connect to the user database, we now operate on one database only. We can finally move on to other projects at HG :)

Aside from about 40 user accounts that we have not been able to merge, both the HGMain and the City Builders/AoEH user databases have been merged. See details for the rules involved in the merge.

Two cross site scripting vulnerabilities were recently discovered recently on forums that had HTML enabled during testing. This bugfix fixes those problems, as well as addressing some other minor problems and annoyances. This is not the year-end forum update with new features – that will come before 2006 rolls around.

Changes:

• Added more ports to check for an open proxy in the registration sentinel
• Added more major ISP web caches to the exclusion list in the registration sentinel
• Fixed a bug with registration notification messages where a field was still included in the email even thouigh it’s blank
• The following tags are now filtered out of user posts: INPUT, TEXTAREA, and SELECT (Tags are dangerous for anyone in administration mode)
• Changed members directory permission settings in order for the staff page authentication to work
• The option to allow Cascading Style Sheets and Inline styles for users to use in their HTML posts have been disabled. The forums will now always strip CSS directives from posts (CSS allows javascript in url() attributes)
• The face attribute is now stripped from FONT tags in user posts to maintain readibility in the forums.

The forums have been updated to 2.9.2.2. Unlike the previous release, it contains one new feature and several minor changes and bug fixes:

• NEW: More abuse/anti-spam checks implemented
• NEW: Added more major ISP proxy/caches to the list of hosts excluded from IP-Check tests
• CHG: The site ID is now included in warning/rejection notification emails
• CHG: The Database ID is now included in warning/rejection notification emails
• BUG: The year in the registration date in warning/rejection notification emails wasn’t properly formatted

I recently released version 2.9.2.1 of the forum software. The new features are focused on combatting various spamming and abuse problems we’ve been having, to allow for Zope verification, and also to accomodate the introduction of ESO2:

• New ESO2 field in profile
• New Password Recovery system
• Improved IP checks during registration
• Login IP Tracker
• Centralized login/logout log

(Hrm… after updating the changelog I think this should’ve been 2.9.3, but I’m too lazy to update the version number. There’s also several new features that are being worked on for 2.9.3 sooooo…)

The forums were recently updated to 2.9.2. It includes the introduction of several new features, as well as some bug fixes, that affects the following areas:

• User Registration
• Posting Topics & Replies
• Editing messages
• Administration

The following features are currently under development:

Forums 2.9.x

Automatic warnings/ban: An automated warning / banning logging and notification system that eliminates the need to manually post to the MAF, send email to user, and send email to the FMT.

New Password Recovery System: An improved password recovery system that requires email verification before actually resetting the password

New User Account Registration System: Account registration will no longer be handled by the forums, but handled by the HG User Login system.

Improved Anti-spam controls: Improved algorithms to prevent spam on the forums

Report Violation: Allow users to report violations to forum moderators

Hide Screenname: Custom Screennames have proved to be a major confusion, especially around major holidays when GillB typically holds “Name change” parties on the forums to give everyone a second (third, fourth, and often fifth) chance at changing their forum name. This feature will allow users to show only the user’s login ID.

Ignore User: Ability to add users to an ignore list, either by name or by other criteria.

Bug Fixes: Pasting a list of URLs with the enhanced toolbar causes IE to crash

Global Login Integration: The forums will be integrated with the HG Login system – one login to rule them all; one login to find them; one login to bring them all, and in the Forums bind them.

Forums 3.0

Development is underway for this forum. I’m currently – albeit slowly – incorporating all the existing features into the new codebase, which will run off FastCGI with a MySQL-based database. More information will be coming soon.