UBB.threads 7.7.4 Release

This version contains many new features, maintenance items, and fixes for php 7.1+ and mysql 5.7+. It has been tested to be compatible with php 5.4 – php 7.4.

Primary Changes In This Release

  • Likes system with Likes summary pages for threads and users.
  • Major updates to the UBBT77 and UBBT77-Dark forum styles.
  • Post sharing menu for Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Email.
  • Quick Search within the navigation-bar.
  • Threaded Mode topic tree updates.
  • Fixed new private message indicator.
  • Updated Member Profile page.
  • Posts can now be unapproved.
  • New user registration issues fixed.
  • RSS feed time and formatting issues fixed.
  • New sticky Control Panel breadcrumbs bar.
  • Control Panel data column sorting and zebra striping.
  • Additional information in the Member Editor.
  • Style Editor updates and fixes.
  • Improved Cache Manager.
  • Improved Database Backup.
  • Content Rebuilder is now faster.
  • Transition tool for Unicode support (Asian characters and Emojis).
  • Added more friendly URL formatting (SEO) to the URLs.
  • Updated several libraries and assets.
  • Cleanup of templates, CSS files, and UBB JavaScript files.
  • More bug squashing and layout updates.

Added

  • Posts can now be Liked. Settings are available to set how many per 24hr period, if they can like their own posts, display who else has liked the post.
  • Complete Like summary page is available per thread, posts, and for each user.
  • Post Likes are removed when a member account is deleted.
  • Post Share drop-down menu has been added to each post. This menu includes: Copy post link to clipboard, Email Post, Report Post, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. It is configurable through the Control Panel > General > Social/Sharing Settings.
  • Posts from Ignored Users will now be completely hidden and replaced with a link to toggle its display, for if the blocking member chooses to view it.
  • The Print Thread output has been completely rewritten.
  • Users can toggle password visibility for login form input.
  • New Member Registration emails now display additional information of stored Member IP addresses. Using the GEO-IP lookup API, the member’s country and continent are displayed in addition to their ISP and its general location, and if their connection type was mobile or broadband.
  • Quick Search within the navigation-bar will now present a drop-down entry box for easier searching.
  • Topic Tree for Threaded Mode display now marks the current post and highlights any unapproved posted within the thread.
  • Follow List Editor (Forums, Threads, Users) now have "Select All" and "Unselect All" buttons for easier management.
  • Posts can now be Unapproved. This is useful for when moderators want to put a post "on hold" without pausing the entire thread for everyone.
  • Unapproved posts are now preceded with a notice of the post status and a link to the "CP: Approve Posts" list page. A moderator may optionally choose to edit the individual post to approve it from that page also.
  • Custom Islands are now each wrapped in their own custom div ID which is based on their island number in the CP (ex: div id="island2" would target Custom Island #2. They can now easily be targeted through CSS as desired.
  • Upgrader will now recommend that if you are using styles from an older UBB.threads install, you should replace them with their current version. An additional step can automatically add the new style versions to your forum for you. They will be installed but they will not be active until you activate them within the forum Control Panel. You may skip and continue to the next upgrade step, but it is recommended that you update your styles, fixing any display errors which were since corrected.
  • CP: Top/Breadcrumb bar is now sticky to the top.
  • CP: Breadcrumbs presentation has been updated to include a link to your forum and link to your main site.
  • CP: Member Editor now displays additional information of stored Member IP addresses. Using the GEO-IP lookup API, the member’s country and continent are displayed in addition to their ISP and its general location, and if their connection type was mobile or broadband.
  • CP: Approving and Unapproving posts are logged to the Admin Log.
  • CP: Post Likes Settings have been added (Control Panel > General), ie; Enable/Disable, Display Total and Member Names, How Many Names To Display, Allow Self-Likes, Display Only Active Members on Summary, Max Likes Per 24hrs. The defaults for each configuration item are also shown.
  • CP: New Portal Islands are available, "Top Likes" and "Top Likes (30 Days)."
  • CP: New Portal setting, "Total Members To Show In Top Likes."
  • CP: Content Rebuilder now also rebuilds Post Like Counts for when you want all user like counts to reflect their current number of likes, and not how many they have ever liked. This is relevant for when liked posts are deleted/purged.
  • CP: Content Rebuilder can now help transition your forum tables for full Unicode support (utf8mb4) which will allow for Asian characters and Emojis to be used. 4-Byte UTF-8 Unicode requires MySQL 5.5.3 or above. It is highly recommended to create a database backup as the process cannot be undone.
  • Added Clipboard library version 2.0.6.

Changed

  • Member Profile page has been updated to clean up and improve its data presentation.
  • Show/Hide Column(s) toggle has been moved to the Navigation Bar.
  • Forum Help (FAQ) has been moved to the Footer bar.
  • Forum search has been moved to the navigation-bar top-right.
  • Show/Hide Columns has been moved to the navigation-bar top-right.
  • Post Buttons for "Email Post" and "Report Post" have been moved to the Post Share drop-down menu. This creates addition space for the "Like" button and improves display on thin displays, such as smaller smart phones in portrait layout.
  • "Search Engine Agents" is now "Robots (Crawlers)." The updated terminology also helps to cover web robots used for marketing, webpage screenshots, site monitors, feed generators, link checkers, web scrapers, misc tools, page speed tests, and vulnerability/virus checkers, in addition to the expected search engines.
  • Mailer has had several language strings updated and corrected.
  • RSS feeds for single forums and multi-forum bundles have been updated.
  • Gallery Islands now display the gallery title and gallery author with the image thumbnail.
  • Moved the left/body/right columns out of HTML tables and in to DIV containers.
  • Add more browser window information to debug info in footer.
  • Multiple updates to common.css to further correct (reset) and define common display ground rules across the major browsers.
  • CP: Columns within the Style List, Member Searches, Subscription Transaction List, Portal Island Column Layout, Referer Log, Admin Log are now zebra-striped, have hover-over row highlighting, and columns are now sortable.
  • CP: "Enable Spider-friendly URLs" is now "Enable Friendly URLs" because this function generates URLs that are easy to read and include words that describe the content of the webpage, which is useful to readers beyond web spiders.
  • CP: General Settings now displays relevant general forum information together. Items were moved from the Primary Settings page to here.
  • CP: Cache Manager will now also: update post view counters, purge pointers to moved topics that have expired, purge inactive users from who’s online table, and purge expired bans.
  • CP: Database Backup has been updated to utilize MySQL’s escape function to pre-epend backslashes where needed. Using the data provider’s escape function instead of addslashes() takes into account the character set used by the current connection to the database rather than PHP’s.
  • CP: Database Backup can now analyze and optimize tables as part of the backup task.
  • CP: Database Information and Backup will now only work with tables which use the forum’s configured database prefix (ex; ubbt_)
  • CP: Content Rebuilder data blob limits have been increased to account for modern web server specifications running PHP 5.4+. This should further reduce the time needed for processing any of the rebuild actions.
  • CP: Textarea entries, including Style Editor entries, will now have whitespace, tabs, new lines trimmed from their beginning and ends.
  • CP: Member Manager saved queries will now have a default name if none was given to them during their creation.
  • CP: The layout of Add New Forum & Edit Forum has been updated and now match each other.
  • CP: Adding a new forum will now have default values populated for it.
  • CP: Removed "Features > Max Width For Images Used In Posts" because the setting is obsolete. Since version 7.6.0, UBB.threads uses responsive layout based on the user’s browser display width.
  • CP: The display of more SQL queries (when debugging in enabled) has been added to more pages.
  • Updated FontAwesome library from 5.10.0-11 to version 5.12.1.
  • Updated Smarty library from 3.1.33 to version 3.1.34.
  • Updated TinyMCE from 5.0.12 to version 5.2.0.
  • Many SQL queries within the PHP script files have been reformatted to be consistent with a modern standard. During this process, several queries were optimized and updated to support new stricter SQL versions and engine settings.
  • Cleanup of several language strings, templates, CSS files, and all cache builder scripts.

Fixed

  • Long usernames will now be wrapped if a space is not found within the name to wrap at.
  • Category Titles now display within the breadcrumbs. This is in addition to the Forum Titles which are already displayed.
  • Topic Tree for Threaded Mode display on mobile devices is fixed
  • Creating a moved/merged pointer message when moving/merging threads no longer creates a bad URL pointer to its new location. (Thanks to Baldeagle for reporting this bug.)
  • Custom Island Inserts appearing twice in Gallery Forums is fixed. (Thanks to ECNet for reporting this bug.)
  • New User Registration "ICQ issue" where Twitter was configured as a required field would fail to add the new registration.
  • Time formats used in RSS feeds now use proper ISO-8601 format rather than a timezone abbreviation.
  • User posts/messages and subjects now have whitespaces (spaces, tabs, extra lines) stripped from their beginning and end.
  • Additional (undesirable) trailing line breaks are now removed from post quotes, spoilers, lists, etc. Optionally, rebuild your Posts, Signatures, and Private Messages with the Content Rebuilder, to update your older posts.
  • Many forum generated URLs have been updated to correctly use Friendly URLs, when enabled.
  • CP: Style Editor preview now updates with the CSS from within the Extra Properties section.
  • CP: Style Wrapper Editor is now fixed. You can now add, delete, and edit wrappers. The wrapper preview will also remember the current style being used within the wrapper preview. Creating a new wrapper will pre-populate the editor with default opening/closing HTML.
  • CP: General Display > Maximum Table Width For All Screens issues fixed.
  • CP: Member Manager saved queries which include Member Groups are now fixed. (Thanks to Ruben for reporting this bug.)
  • CP: Subscription Transaction status will now display "NONE" if the item does not have a default status. (Thanks to Ruben for reporting this bug.)
  • CP: Dashboard fixes to correct the display of long server information items.
  • CP: Adding New Forums. New forums will now correctly save selected style you’ve chosen for them.
  • CP: Approve Posts. Clicking on the post title now takes you directly to the post requiring approval.
  • CP: Fix language string substitutions from within the language files which would get lost when using the language editor. (Thanks to Ruben for reporting this bug.)
  • CP: Fixed the long-standing bug of the Whos Online list being empty when an additional new line (blank line) was added to the end of the Robots/Crawlers (Search Engines) list.
  • CP: (PHP 7.1+) Sending an exported result list of member email addresses has been fixed. (Thanks to Ruben for reporting this bug.)
  • Fixed the installer/upgrader to create a proper "extra_css" section.
  • Fixed New Private Message indicator flashing when there were no new private messages to read.
  • Several minor HTML fixes throughout the templates.
  • Several minor php 7.1+ and MySQL 5.7+ code fixes.

UBB.threads 7.7.4 has been released and is now available to download in the Member Area.