Feature: Drop the xx seconds from relative times

UBB never had resolution down to seconds anyway, so it was always a bogus value to display.

Relative times now display 'xx Minutes ago' and no seconds.

When the time is less than 1 minute, the wordlet 'A Moment ago' is now displayed

This reduces a small amount of unneeded overhead and less display space too.

Feature: Remove all the copyright baggage from each file and put into ONE copyright.txt in ubb root

We've carried around a huge copyright header in every script file that was unneeded to maintain proper copyright info.

Additionally, whenever things changed, all those headers had to be modified.

Now, the copyright is in one file and covers all files underneath ( excluding the add on libraries -- those are mentioned as well however )

For modders, this was a HUGE pain in the ass when running compares.

Now, the headers are short, sweet and even more meaningful ( ie: i give you a blurb on WTF the file does! )

Every script and lib file has a consistent header like:



Templates are also consistent like:



CSS like so:



and Javascript files as well...



Now, with this consistent structure, it will also be possible to add automation to updates and file comparisons in the future... ( can you say more automated upgrades? -- maybe )

All in all, this just cleans up the code and makes it a better foundation for moving forward

Feature - cleaned up Mailing of Topics and Private Topics

In addition to the aforementioned bug with Emailing a gallery post, I overhauled the topic mailing system in general.

Removed lots of dead code.

Properly use SITE permission, instead of hardwired ( legacy ) $config value.

After mailing a topic, you are now redirected to exactly where you began. Before, it was hit and miss.

All this is merged into one file, instead of 2 for the equivalent file size that is half of the 2 combined.

Feature / cleanup - Notify Moderator on post

This has had bugs all along, where it notified too many people of an offensive post.

notifymod.inc.php is cleaned up to only notify:

1. moderators in the particular forum
2. admins / global mods who have it enabled in their profile to receive notifies

Redundant code has been merged ( [i][/i]donotifymod.inc.php is obsolete ).
Dead code has been removed.
Bugs fixed.

Obsolete templates, never used

modifypost_stickpost.tpl
modifypost_unstickpost.tpl

Feature: Portal enhancement

The Portal has really never gotten any love at all. The middle column was perty much fixed with only 1 option: what forums to grab 'news posts' from.

That was it

Until now!

I added a Middle column option in the portal layout:



If any islands are selected, they will be shown before any news items. This allows for an endless number of ways to feed content to the middle column.

Example below, is just my grabbing the "Nivo Slider" jQuery plugin and slamming it in a custom island.


With custom islands, you can pull in Rss feeds, Popular topics, have a wide shoutbox only on the portal...

Really, the possibilities are endless..

There is much more to do in future versions, but it makes sense to at least give this little bit of love to the current portal page for now..



Check out the demo of a quickie nivo slider Here

Feature: Forum Display options

These have always been a little used and kinda added clutter to the bottom of the forum display.

The form was perty ugly and wasn't even put on 1 line to save vertical space, at least.



Well, now it is added as a tab / hidden div that slides out upon click.

Here is the tab, sitting under the last post in the forum list.


Clicking on it, reveals the form, to change your prefs, like it always did.


Clicking on the tab again, hides it, or you can click 'Change' and preferences will be changed _AND_ it will be hidden on auto refresh.

Feature(s) - Editpost, approvepost, deletepost

The code for these 3 functions were spread out over too many files to reliably manage. I've now made all the editors and positions of the buttons consistent.

A ton of code cleanup was done ( cleaned out a ton of obsolete code ). Security holes were fixed and common functions ( validation / permissioning ) were used to ensure consistency and non-corrupt databases.

The number of things that could potentially go wrong are too long to list here, but we now have a more solid foundation.

To take just edit post for an example: the total code size in 756 was 29K.. now with the combined / cleaner code, it is 17K and does fewer unnecessary queries as well.

Smaller things, like LOCKING THE TOPIC that is about to be deleted have also been added. Before, there was a chance that a use could be replying to a topic that was about to go gonzo and produce a post that was an orphan.

( the same idea / cleanup has been applied to deleting a user -- 756 leaves stray unhooked PMs from users -- spammers -- who get deleted ) This happens on this forum all the time and is very annoying!

Anyway, for many forums, there is a desire to only make the topic subject be the subject for all replies after that. Some people change the subject and especially in flat mode, it makes no sense at all.

There is now a way to configure the board to disallow this:


When a user edits any reply, they just see the subject and cannot change it.


All of the save buttons go thru a common fadeout message as well..


I really should post another 10 screens here to show all the possibilities, but this should just be considered a template for all editors now with the buttons right below the editor.

Additionally all templates are chock full of CSS goodness for the stylers to go crazy with..

Feature: editor text area, autogrow

In the past, we had the two up / down buttons to grow/shrink the text area for the editor:



This is not needed anymore, since the text area autogrows as needed.


the buttons are removed to also clean up the markup bar.



The above picture is hard to show what it does, but as you approach the end of the editor and need more lines, the jQuery plugin will increase the height as needed.

It also won't interfere with any browsers who have the handle enabled ( firefox, chrome etc ), but just be an extra along for the ride.

-- This is all part of the editor cleanup / standardization --

Captcha preview in Admin cpanel

This has always been lacking, since an admin should at least see if captcha works and which one to use has a preview



Additionally the ImageMagick code had bugs in it that has now been cleaned up.

All code has been merged into one file, since the lib directory file was only used by 1 file. Dunno, why that was ever done.

The angles used to distort the letters were also relaxed a bit from some of the extremes that were in there before. This still maintains needing a human to decipher, but at least gives the poor bashtids a chance to even read the letters

Additionally ( i think i already mentioned before ), there is a fallback to GD, as default, if nothing is initialized.