Maintenance update for the Forums
We’ve pushed a maintenance update to the forums, with one new feature
New Features
- BBCode Assistant now works across all modern browsers with javascript enabled, thanks to the work done by HussarKnight
Bug Fixes
- Backslashes not escaped properly in the Forum Styles control panel (Thanks Aro)
- HTML Entities not escaped properly in the Forum Styles control panel
- Incorrect formatting for the Last-Logins table in the “My Accounts” area
- Moved google analytics javascript to the bottom of source code
- Minimum value check not performed for “max topics per page” when value exceeded maximum permitted
Forums 2.3.1
The forums software was updated to 2.3.1 to fix minor bugs.
Details:
- Links to YouTube and Vimeo inside the URL BBCode tag are no longer converted into embedded videos (Fixes [#6])
- The text-wrapper function no longer truncates URLs inside BBCode tags (Fixes [#7])
- “me” is now an allowed username for email addresses (Fixes [#4])
- Embeddable content only shows up on the news when the news database was rebuilt. It should show up when posting news. (Fixes [#9])
- Fixed unquoted HTML attribute on the post reply page. (Fixes [#3])
- Fixed “Unterminated string constant” error on the login page. (Fixes [#11])
Embedding YouTube and Vimeo videos in the forums
An oft-requested feature is the ability to embed video on the forums. We’ve gone and done just that.
To post a video, just post the link to the video. For example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3p6c2m4BCU
or
http://www.vimeo.com/1950685
They will embed the flash player into the post. These videos will not autoplay – you will still have to click on the play button to start the video.
If you are on dialup, you can disable the embed by going into your User Preferences and checking the “Hide Embedded Content” checkbox. After saving your preferences, video embeds will appear as links instead.
We currently support only YouTube and Vimeo embeds.
Empty forums are sad
Forums that have been archived, or have been around too long and have low activity, are usually shown as having only a couple threads or no threads at all in the forums (even for a huge archive like the Knights of the Round Table forum on HGMain), so we’ve made a trivial change in the code so that for any forum it’ll display a full page of the most recent topics on page one of the topic listing, no matter how old the most recent thread was.
Props to Jay for coming up with the title for the post
Public Service Announcement: Smurves
While I have nothing (yet) against the registration activities of certain individuals who shall remain unnamed (but you know who you are), please be advised that certain moderators (myself included) have a tendency to decide to use or upgrade to the heavier penalty vs. a lighter one (e.g., an official warning vs. an unofficial warning, a ban vs. a warning, a month ban vs. a week, a week ban vs. a day) should, after a check for smurves, it is discovered that you own multiple accounts, should you run afoul of the Code of Conduct accidentally or intentionally.
Forums Bugfix Update
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.
Forums Updated to 2.9.2.2
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
Forums 2.9.2.1
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…)
New Features
- Administration: Added confirmation dialogs for deleting posts individually or via a batch
- Administration: Super Admins can view a user’s login history via the user’s profile
- Administration: The moderator who banned/unbanned a user is saved to the user profile, in addition to a timestamp, to facilitate tracking
- Administration: Unban requests are now also sent to the moderator who banned the user
- Display: There are now .error and .message classes for displaying errors and messages inside a form (Check out the “My Account” area to see how they apply)
- My Accounts: New ESO2 field
- Posting: Now checks for common shock images and filters them out
- User: New password recovery system requires the user to click on a link in the initial email in order for the password to be actually reset
- User: Added login history support. A User’s last 5 unique IPs and their most recent logins are now saved to the user’s profile
Changes
- Administration: lib_users is now loaded as a standard library in admin.cgi
- Administration: EMails registered to existing accounts that fail the new validation rules are grandfathered
- Display Thread: (id: ...) tags not displayed if the screenname and username is the same case insensitive wise
- Gatekeeper: Removed old trip-wire for people who tried to access EEH’s staff forum using a leaked password
- Misc: Updated constant for message fields so they really represent what they say they are
- Misc: Removed obsolete function EncodeUserName (Used in the first forum mod(!) to encode the IP into the username field in messages)
- Misc: The default permissions for user profiles has been updated so Zope can read them
- Misc: Removed BANINFO code as better systems have taken over
- My Accounts: Passwords now must be at least 6 characters long without any limits on how long the password could be
- My Accounts: Field length validation now silently truncate fields that are too long instead of throwing an error
- My Accounts: Error messages now show up in the form instead of on separate page
- My Accounts: Personal URL is now validated to make sure it’s a valid URL for Web servers only (http/https)
- My Accounts: Display Names are now subject to validation tests (whether the name already exists as someone else’s display name or username, must only be 6-24 characters long, and also other username validation and censor checks)
- My Accounts: When a user changes his/her email, the email will be processed through the same validation process as registration.
- My Accounts: Password changes will not require the user to re-log into the forums
- My Accounts: if Email Verification is required and the email address was changed, the user will be forwarded to the forum index if the change was sucessful, or back to the change form, with the error message displayed on the form
- My Accounts: The wording on the Signature page describing what’s allowed and not allowed has been updated
- My Accounts: Profile changes now return you to the profile page
- My Accounts: Profile login errors now display the error on the login form
- My Accounts: The ICQ field now has a new validation check – the ICQ number must be at least 100000
- My Accounts: Login History added to main profile page
- Posting: The Attribute ‘expr=’ is now filtered out to prevent javascript from being executed
- Registration: Character sequence checks now start at triples and up (i.e. ‘banana’ now passes this test)
- Registration: Hostname check skipped if hostname is empty (unresolvable)
- Registration: Wording updated to reflect username restrictions (length and type of characters allowed)
- Registration: Usernames now must be at least 4 characters long, up to a maximum of 16. Previously the minimum length required was 2 characters.
- Registration: The short hostname check has been removed – it gave way too many false positives on possible proxies
- Registration: Shawcable users are exempt from the IP->username check as Shawcable forces their users to view websites through their proxies
- Registration: Registration logs now have a new field that indicates whether a registration was OK (‘OK’) or if it was rejected (‘BANNED’)
- User Preferences: Preference changes now return you to the preference screen with a “save successfully” message (before it sent you to the forum index)
- User: Moved login / logout logs to a centralized location
Bugfixes
- Administration: A missing parenthesis in the javascript prevented any javascript-based functions from functioning
- Administration – User Editor: The user index is now updated when a user is banned or his/her staff/vip title changes
- Administration: Banning a user returned a bug that resulted in the action being omitted from the user ban log
- Cookies: Cookies are now URL Escaped (i.e. ’ ’ => %20)
- Display Thread: Fixed bug where a stickied thread was also labelled as a closed thread
- Display: Font size was too big in error messages using the new .error CSS class
- Display Profile: Removed extraneous ; that shows up in the HTML when viewing a profile in admin mode
- Display Thread: Removed extraneous ); that made it into the HTML
- Display Thread: Individual URLs for posts replaced by ‘0’
- Misc: Typos caused initialization routines not to be run, disabling registration, profile changes, recovery, etc.
- Registration: Typo in failed_reg logger resulted in the omission of the severity score from the entry
- Registration: Typo caused rejection message to FMT to be truncated
- Registration: Typo caused the browser agent to be omitted in alert emails
- Registration: Inserted linebreak between UserName label and textbox
- Registration: User index wasn’t updated after a banned/closed account was registered
- User: Bug in update_login_history caused subsequent userprofile writes to wipe out the login history
- User Preferences: Changes to user preferences now also affect the preferences currently loaded in memory