phpBB 3.3.11 Release 

Greetings everyone,

We are pleased to announce the release of phpBB 3.3.11 “Bertie’s trip to Zagreb”. This version is a maintenance release of the 3.3.x branch which increases the minimum required PHP version, adds a new search index progress bar with added statistics, optimizes our support for PHP 8.2, and adds further security hardening.

In order to ensure compatibility with PHP 8 while using the OAuth login, we have decided to increase the minimum required PHP version to PHP 7.2. While some operating system distributions might still be offering long-term support for PHP 7.1, it is no longer possible for us to offer this while supporting current versions of PHP.

The new search index progress bar will keep admins informed about the progress of the search indexing while displaying statistics about the current state like indexed posts and indexing rate. In order to optimize our support for PHP 8.2, we have resolved some deprecations and added improved checks to avert any unexpected side effects due to changed behavior in the latest PHP versions.

As a means to further strengthen the security of phpBB, we have changed how exceeding the maximum number of CAPTCHA attempts are handled. Users who have attempted to solve a CAPTCHA too many times will now have to wait until their session has expired.

Additionally, we have also improved the handling of smiley packs in the ACP. Previous releases did not enforce the smiley format as strictly, enabling admins to potentially add JavaScript code via these. While admins do have some freedoms, we deemed it to not be expected behavior and have added safeguards against this in this new release. We’d like to thank shin24 for contacting us about this issue via HackerOne.

The full list of changes is available in the changelog file within the docs folder contained in the release package. You can find the key highlights of this release below and a list of all issues fixed on our tracker at https://tracker.phpbb.com/issues/?filter=16291

The packages can be downloaded from our downloads page.

The development team thanks everyone who contributed code to this release: rxu, Christian Schnegelberger, battye, toxyy, Matt Friedman, im4bb, Andrii Dembitskyi, Dark❶, LukeWCS, MannixMD, Micha Ober, lionel-rowe

If you have any questions or comments, we'll be happy to address them in the discussion topic.

- The phpBB Team

Luk

phpBB 3.3.10 Release 

Greetings everyone,

We are pleased to announce the release of phpBB 3.3.10 “The Way of Bertie”. This version is a maintenance release of the 3.3.x branch which improves support for PHP 8.2, and resolves various issues reported in previous versions.

Previous versions of phpBB started showing a “broken image” icon next to the browser’s fallback emoji due to the service of the Emoji Content Delivery Network (CDN) being shut down. In order to resolve this, the emoji CDN has been replaced alongside other fixes which include improved handling of errors while using the Spamhaus blocklist, and proper handling of emojis when adding feedback in the Moderator Control Panel (MCP).

In addition to this, we have improved support for the use of reCAPTCHA for countries where the main domain might not be accessible, and the explanation of the ACP setting for allowing the “usage of third party content delivery networks” has been improved.

Further hardening has been added to the cron redirect to prevent exceptions from being left unhandled.

Thanks to recent changes to the phpBB repository on GitHub, contributing to phpBB has become easier than ever with the support of GitHub Codespaces. Check out our blog post on how to use GitHub Codespaces with phpBB or find out more on GitHub.

The full list of changes is available in the changelog file within the docs folder contained in the release package. You can find the key highlights of this release below and a list of all issues fixed on our tracker at https://tracker.phpbb.com/issues/?filter=16195

The packages can be downloaded from our downloads page.

The development team thanks everyone who contributed code to this release: Patrick Webster, Christian Schnegelberger, LukeWCS, Matt Friedman, SagePtr, wordlesswind

If you have any questions or comments, we'll be happy to address them in the discussion topic.

- The phpBB Team

Luk

phpBB Collective 

Hi everyone,

Following many other open source projects, the phpBB project has created the phpBB Collective on the Open Collective platform. Going forward, we will be able to accept donations from individual contributors, and you will be able to track those donations through the Open Collective platform. We have also joined the GitHub sponsors program, so as a GitHub user, you can now sponsor the phpBB project on GitHub!

Funds acquired through the phpBB Collective will be used to pay project and development related expenses, like server or code hosting bills as well as expenses for in-person events like team meetings or conference attendance costs for phpBB Team Members.

phpBB Collective’s fiscal host, the Open Source Collective 501(c)(6), is a non-profit and allows us to accept donations. Unfortunately, the IRS does not classify donations to this type of entity as tax-deductible charitable contributions.

- The phpBB Team

This announcement can be discussed in the Discuss: phpBB Collective Topic

Luk

Intermediate fix for emoji loading issues 

Hi all,

We have noticed that the CDN that provides loading of emojis in phpBB has stopped working.
While a new version that takes care of this is already in the works, you will most likely notice issues with pages taking longer to load and issues with the display of emojis (see e.g. here: viewtopic.php?t=2634321).

Until the next version of phpBB is released, you can resolve this issue by applying the following fix that will be included in the next release:

Open phpbb/textformatter/s9e/factory.php

Find (~ line 359): Replace with: Find (~ line 362): Replace with: Afterwards go to the ACP and purge the cache.

Once the next version of phpBB is released, you should be able to simple overwrite this file again. Preparations for the next release are already underway and it will be published as soon as possible.

- The phpBB Team

Luk

phpBB 3.3.9 Release 

Greetings everyone,

We are pleased to announce the release of phpBB 3.3.9 “Bertie’s lunar flyby”. This version is a maintenance release of the 3.3.x branch which improves PHP 8.0 and 8.1 support and clarifies the message when using an unsupported PHP version. Multiple third party libraries like Guzzle and twig were also updated to include their latest bug and security fixes. Please note that the changes in twig might result in issues with loading template files and hence with loading pages of your forum (see viewtopic.php?t=2631681). Check if installed extensions are compatible before updating or disable them prior to the update to 3.3.9.

In addition to this, we have also resolved an issue that was preventing users from updating after having removed the default YouTube profile field. Furthermore, some issues with malformed emails due to special characters in usernames as well as differing behavior related to line endings in newer PHP versions were fixed.

Finally, more hardening was added in the form of ensuring that after a password reset through the “Forgot Password” functionality, all user sessions are also reset. This is now in line with the already existing behavior when changing one’s password.

The full list of changes is available in the changelog file within the docs folder contained in the release package. You can find the key highlights of this release below and a list of all issues fixed on our tracker at https://tracker.phpbb.com/issues/?filter=16194

The packages can be downloaded from our downloads page.

The development team thanks everyone who contributed code to this release: Christian Schnegelberger, Patrick Webster, Dark❶, ＡＮＤＲＩ Ｈ.Ｕ

If you have any questions or comments, we'll be happy to address them in the discussion topic.

- The phpBB Team

Luk

phpBB 3.3.8 Release 

Greetings everyone,

We are pleased to announce the release of phpBB 3.3.8 “Bertie: Beer and Summer”. This version is a maintenance release of the 3.3.x branch which introduces a deferred cache purge method and marks the PHP and INCLUDEPHP template functions as deprecated in order for them to be removed in a future release. It also resolves various issues reported in previous versions.

Deferred cache purging allows Extension developers to trigger a cache purge as part of their code that is not executed until the end of the request. Therefore, the state of data and the cache will remain consistent during the lifetime of a single request.

We have also decided to deprecate the use of the PHP and INCLUDEPHP as part of the phpBB template syntax. These are rarely used, have a high potential to cause issues or be used incorrectly, and also have not been recommended for a longer period of time. These functions have now been marked as deprecated and will no longer be available in the next feature release of phpBB, i.e. 3.4.0 or 4.0.0.

The fixes include, among others, an issue with the native search backend only returning 1 match and 1 page as result, and resolves issues with emojis in the subject line of emails and email based notifications.

The full list of changes is available in the changelog file within the docs folder contained in the release package. You can find the key highlights of this release below and a list of all issues fixed on our tracker at https://tracker.phpbb.com/issues/?filter=16091

The packages can be downloaded from our downloads page.

The development team thanks everyone who contributed code to this release: lionel-rowe, rxu, battye, LukeWCS, Kailey, MichaIng, nomind60s

If you have any questions or comments, we'll be happy to address them in the discussion topic.

- The phpBB Team

Luk

Introducing the new phpBB Status Site 

Hello everyone,

We are proud to announce the availability of the new phpBB Status Site, a simplified status page to monitor the sites and services on our network.

The Status Site is a single location to check on the current availability of phpBB sites as well as any planned maintenance work. You will also be able to check on any previous maintenance or incidents.

Please note that the Status Site only monitors sites on the phpbb.com domain, it does not monitor externally deployed phpBB forums. The page is created using Upptime, an open source uptime monitor and status page powered by GitHub Actions, Issues, and Pages. Check it out to see whether it might also be a good fit to monitor your site.

If you have any questions about the new phpBB Status Site or the website in general, feel free to ask in the phpBB.com Website Feedback topic.

Thanks,

The phpBB Team

Luk

Server Maintenance: Multiple days 

Hello,

Our hosting provider, OSUOSL, will be performing some maintenance on the infrastructure that powers www.phpbb.com and several subdomains of phpbb.com.

During the following timeframes our sites might be temporarily unavailable:

April 19th:
9:00AM - 13:00 AM PDT (16:00 - 20:00 UTC). During this window we do not expect downtime.
April 20th:
10:00AM - 13:00 AM PDT (17:00 - 20:00 UTC). During this window we expect a 20 minute downtime.

This downtime applies to our various sites, including, but not limited to:
https://www.phpbb.com
https://area51.phpbb.com

This downtime will not affect any other installation of the phpBB software other than www.phpbb.com. However, the version check in your administration control panel might give a temporary error message.

Many thanks,

The phpBB Team

Luk

End of the phpBB wiki 

In 2008 we announced the introduction of the phpBB wiki for development related documentation. In the past few years we also introduced several other locations which contain (development) documentation. Over time more and more documentation about Extensions and phpBB development moved over to these new locations.
Taking this and the fact that it's not feasible to maintain all of these locations into account, we have decided to merge the wiki into the other documentation locations.

All development related documentation can now be found in the development docs on area51: https://area51.phpbb.com/docs/dev/master/index.html

Extensions development documentation is part of the development documentation, and can be found at https://area51.phpbb.com/docs/dev/maste ... index.html

And as before, all user documentation can be found on https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/, which includes the User Guide and the knowledge base.

We have added redirects to important pages from the wiki to the new locations for these articles.
If you want to contribute to the development documentation, or to the user guide, you can create a pull request on https://github.com/phpbb/documentation

If you have any questions or comments, we'll be happy to address them in the discussion topic.

The phpBB Team

Luk

phpBB 3.3.7 Release 

Greetings everyone,

We are sorry to announce the immediate release of phpBB 3.3.7 “The Book of Bertie, Part Two” to address an issue some users experienced when updating to 3.3.6. Unfortunately the issue wasn't noticed during testing and has only surfaced after the release of 3.3.6.

The fixed issue may have resulted in role-based group or user permissions being accidentally removed. As a result of that, some users were no longer able to see forums when visiting phpBB. If you have already updated to phpBB 3.3.6, please check your tables for phpbb_acl_groups and phpbb_acl_users tables for changes compared to before the update to 3.3.6 (replace the phpbb_ prefix with your table prefix).

All other changes remain the same as in phpBB 3.3.6, so please check out the phpBB 3.3.6 announcement for important news about new features and changes to the naming of update packages.

The full list of changes is available in the changelog file within the docs folder contained in the release package. You can find the key highlights of this release below and a list of all issues fixed on our tracker at https://tracker.phpbb.com/issues/?filter=15991

The packages can be downloaded from our downloads page.

If you have any questions or comments, we'll be happy to address them in the discussion topic.

- The phpBB Team

Luk