YaBB 26 Archive
Note: This is an 'archive' read-only section.
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New Features for YaBB 2.6
- Subboards
- More flexibility in organization. (Also a feature in Next.)
- Event Calendar
- Popular mod and a feature on many other forums. (Also a feature in Next.)
- https and ftp urls in AddTab tabs
- A much needed addition to allow admins to add links to sites that aren’t simply ‘http’.
- Print individual posts
- Add printing for individual posts in addition to the usual Print Thread.
- Print IMs
- Allows members to print an IM the same as printing an individual post.
- Attachments in IM
- Send an attachment using IM.
(For security and space reasons the Admin does have access to all Attachments including IM ones.)
- IM Sender and subject in Email subject line.
- Lets the recipient know who the IM is from and what it’s about when it’s emailed to them.
- Board Passwords
- Password protect individual boards rather than just limiting access by age, gender or Group. (Useful for admins who would like to restrict access to adult-only or other material without adding members to a public group.)
- Board Rules
- Set out rules for specific boards
- External Board Links
- Another popular mod added by request.
- Moderator position and assigned boards
- shows in Member Profile. Lets people know what boards a member is moderator for.
- Forum Moderator position
- New in YaBB 2.6.0
Found on other forums, this is position that has moderator permissions on all boards and has ban member privileges without having access to the Admin Center.
- Page Load time
- Addition of Page Load time only for debug mode. This let’s everybody know how long the page took to load. Useful when people complain of slow page load times. (Admin Center option)
- CSS buttons
- (An adaptation of Carsten’s CSS Button mod) 2.6.0 only has CSS created buttons and has the added feature that the button definition list is kept with the Forum Templates so custom templates can have their own button graphics if desired.
- Login with User ID or email only
- As added security, user’s can no longer log in using their publicly accessible screen name. Admin option to turn off for converted forums.
- RSS Category and Board Feeds
- In addition to the main RSS feed for the whole forum, the Admin can activate RSS feeds for categories and individual boards.
- Login cookie time length
- Login cookies are now set to either expire on browser close or be in ‘Remember Me’ mode. (This was a feature on 3.0/Next and most other web places.)
- Topic Sort
- Members can choose how they want topics to be sorted on the page.
Admin and Security features
- Timed banning
- Another popular feature on other forums – allows admins to choose to limit bans on members.
- Admin choice to keep AddTab and EditTab visible
- A minor change – less clutter for the admin to look at when not actively adding or changing tabs.
More Anti-spam Features
- YaBB 2.6.0 includes Carsten’s famous Spamfruits and Derek Barnstorm’s Anti-spam Question.
- Admin editable anti-spam additions to standard captcha
- (AKA ggn’s captcha hack) – a very popular ‘hand-added’ mod which now has the added functionality of being editable from the Admin Center – Admins can now choose how many extra ‘to be ignored’ characters will be added and what they are.
- Enhanced anti-spam verification for Guest posting, password reset & Guest Event posting.
- The admin has more choices in what types of anti-spam features will be loaded for various Guest functions.
- IP banning from error log and registration log.
- Allows the admin to access both IP check and IP banning from where the IP actually appears.
- Admin input on charset
- For forums with older imported data the admin can choose what default charset YaBB will use. (This is predominantly for English language forums where the old data was encoded as ISO-8859-1 but a fresh new forum could go with UTF-8.)
- Admin max characters in posts and IMs
- Allows the admin more characters in posts and emails than regular users. (Some admins are just wordy.)
- Admin edit for the honeypot text
- Edit the honeypot from within the Admin Center
- IP Search
- For the Admin – search for poster IP addresses.
- Admin choice to show Search Box
- (Carsten’s Search Box mod) Admin has additional choices on the search function.
- Add Moderator from member Profile and from Board
- (One of Carsten’s Mods) The admin can assign a moderator to a board from that board and can assign a member moderator duties from the member’s profile (under Admin Edits).
- Sticky Sort (aka Shimmy Shuffle)
- The admin can rearrange the order of Stickied Topics.
Other changes
- Icon definition list
- Icon graphics are now assigned via a definition list with the Forum Templates. This allows a single file to be edited when the graphics are changed instead of searching through the templates and files in Sources and changing each instance.
- More Templates
- Nearly all the html code has been put into templates for easier editing.
- Module/Code Nomeclature
- As the first step in bringing YaBB to a more rigorous coding standard, all non-directly executable files have been renamed to .pm (indicating their ‘status’ as modules — aka libraries) The directly executable files remain .pl. One module has been moved from Messages/ to Variables/ to make it easy to rename the Messages and Members folders if that’s needed for an individual forum’s security. This also changes the amount for CHMOD operations significantly during setup, and indirectly tells you which files need a ‘shebang edit’.
- Old Board Conversion
- Yabb 2.6.0 uses the Conversion folders to convert ALL older forums to the new system. The conversion process includes importing the settings from Settings.pl and removing deprecated data files.
- There is also a BoardConvert.pl that will create a conversion file for heavily modded Boards by using the old forum’s YaBB installation to determine what variables have been added. (This won’t work on a non-functioning YaBB forum.)
- Bug Fixes
- YaBB.js QuickLink bug
- minlinkweb/buddy list bug
- multiple words in alt tag bug
- negative incrementing of IM numbers with Moderator alert PMs
- Guests appearing as ‘ex-members’
- Guest name formatting when Printing topic.
- read BMs sent to groups bug