Announcement Site Status Updates

[CJ]

The latest forum software has been installed.
Major items completed.

• Upgrade software from 2.2.16 to 2.3.4
• Remove PHP Memcached and install Redis cache
• Upgrade PHP to 8.3

There are more items to upgrade.

• Enhanced search (Completed)
• Classifieds (Completed)
• Wiki (Completed)

I'm going to get some sleep. It has been a long night...

 

[Belizean]

Great ! Not that I understood all of the above.

 

[CJ]

Great ! Not that I understood all of the above.

The gist is, the site is faster and more secure.

 

[CJ]

Enhanced search is complete.
Next up are the classifieds. This is not an upgrade but a completely new software package.

 

[Armyvet25]

 

[CJ]

New classifieds are up. I put the last two ads in under the correct user names.
The system looks great!

 

[CJ]

Changed cacheing system from memcached to REDIS for less resource usage but more control and speed.
Thanks for all the support and understanding.

 

[CJ]

In the near future the site will be closed for image migration to type WebP. This will speed up image display time / server speed and greatly reduce storage space. Due to the complexity of the upgrade we will be closed for several hours.
Thank you for your support.

 

[CJ]

Well, because the projected site closure time was estimated to be over five hours I ran the optimization process in the background and it is now complete. Any guess as to how many attached images that are stored in the forum?
A Christmas cookie if you guess correctly... Click the Spoiler button for the answer.

Spoiler

 

[Belizean]

175,247

 

[Belizean]

Guess I was off.

 

[CJ]

I know most are not infatuated with what keeps this site working as long as the site info works but here is some new info:

NEW CACHE SYSTEM:


SEARCHES IN THE LAST 24 HRS:
That is a load of searching - that shows our popularity!

 

[CJ]

An FYI. Just installed another big software upgrade. Thank you for your support. Here is what your donations and support help with.

XenForo 2.3.5 Released​

XenForo 2.3.5 is now available for all licensed customers to download. We strongly recommend that all customers running previous versions of XenForo 2.3 upgrade to this release to benefit from increased stability.

In addition to the usual bug fixes, XenForo 2.3.5 includes a critical security fix for any customers making use of OAuth2 where client applications may be able to request unauthorized scopes. This will affect any customer using OAuth2 clients on any version of XenForo 2.3 prior to 2.3.5.

Some of the changes in XF 2.3.5 include:

• Fix unassociated attachment limit checks
• Clamp client-side color contrast evaluations
• Appropriately load tweets after page load.
• Update Twitter connected account references to X.
• Fix X (formerly Twitter) connected account
• Ensure xf_oauth_client and xf_oauth_request have primary keys.
• Allow a Passkey credential_id to occupy up to 1024 characters.
• Make code editor search highlighting similar to editor selection color.
• Remove unused jQuery snippet.
• Fix reactions tabs for direct message replies.
• Support multiple variation menus when updating variations
• Fix number box handling when step value is any
• Fix a server error when no custom error phrase is specified for an error response
• Improve type hinting of schema manager closures
• Properly reset write-pending status when calling Entity::saveIfChanged
• Fix server error when log search results return a record for a deleted user
• Properly represent field and prefix user group IDs as a list of unique sorted integers
• Support lazy-loading variation pictures
• Suppress PhpStorm warnings in class extension hint files
• Fix unstable sort order for class extension output
• Fix potentially undefined array key when determining an entity cover image
• Properly validate OAuth client redirect URIs
• Pass import command interactive state to import-finalize command
• Improve BBCode HTML rendering PHP 8.3 compatibility
• Do not escape HTML when rendering custom field titles in the control panel
• Allow saving cookie preferences when board is inactive
• Fix duplicate moderated icon in article preview thread titles
• Allow fetching all server globals using \XF\Http\Request::getServerInfo
• Fix incorrect phrase in user change log handler
• Fix handling of null auto-complete results
• Do not scroll to last viewed image when closing the lightbox
• Fix error 'TemplateFinder::searchTitle() accepts 1 parameters but 2 are passed'
• Fix server error getting conversations by ID via API.
• Fix incorrect route format for the OAuth2 account/applications route
• Fix issue where code challenges for public OAuth2 clients could not be verified

The following public templates have had changes:

• code_editor.less
• connected_account_associated_x
• connected_account_macros
• core_button.less
• editor_insert_gif
• helper_js_global
• login
• passkeys_macros
• post_article_macros
• share_page_macros
• style_variation_macros

Where necessary, the merge system within the "outdated templates" page should be used to integrate these changes.

As always, new releases of XenForo are free to download for all customers with active licenses. You may now upgrade from your admin control panel or grab the new version from the customer area.

Please note that XenForo 2.3 has higher system requirements than earlier versions.

The following are minimum requirements:

• PHP 7.2 or newer (PHP 8.3 recommended)
• MySQL 5.7 and newer (Also compatible with MariaDB/Percona etc.)
• All of the official add-ons require XenForo 2.3.
• Enhanced Search requires at least Elasticsearch 7.2.

XenForo Media Gallery 2.3.5 Released​

XenForo Media Gallery 2.3.5 is now available for all licensed customers to download. We strongly recommend that all customers running previous versions of XenForo Media Gallery 2.3 upgrade to this release to benefit from increased stability.

The following public templates have had changes:

• xfmg_media_add_macros

Where necessary, the merge system within the "outdated templates" page should be used to integrate these changes.

XenForo Media Gallery requires XenForo 2.3 or later.

XenForo Resource Manager 2.3.5 Released​

XenForo Resource Manager 2.3.5 is now available for all licensed customers to download. We strongly recommend that all customers running previous versions of XenForo Resource Manager 2.3 upgrade to this release to benefit from increased stability.

XenForo Enhanced Search 2.3.5 Released​

XenForo Enhanced Search 2.3.5 is now available for all licensed customers to download. We strongly recommend that all customers running previous versions of XenForo Enhanced Search 2.3 upgrade to this release to benefit from increased stability.


Some of the changes in XFES 2.3.5 include:

• Hide credentials from error message in ConnectException.

 

[CJ]

A little update. The site is now using HTTP2 protocol as opposed to HTTP1.1
Why (for those that are intrigued)? See below.

http 1.1 vs http 2.0
HTTP/2 offers significant performance improvements over HTTP/1.1 by utilizing binary framing, multiplexing, header compression, and server push, leading to faster and more efficient web page loading. HTTP/1.1, while widely implemented, has limitations like sequential resource loading and larger header sizes that HTTP/2 addresses.

 

[CJ]

Added Brotli server side compression.

What is brotli compression?

Brotli is a lossless compression algorithm, primarily used for compressing web content to improve website loading speeds. Developed by Google, it utilizes a combination of LZ77, Huffman coding, and context modeling to achieve high compression ratios. It's an open-source technology and is supported by most modern web browsers.

Here's a more detailed breakdown:
Key Features:

• Lossless Compression:
  Brotli ensures no data is lost during compression, preserving the integrity of the original content.
  
  
• High Compression Ratios:
  It generally offers better compression than older algorithms like gzip, resulting in smaller file sizes.
  
  
• • Web-Oriented:
    Brotli is designed to optimize the compression and decompression of web content, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
  • Faster Loading Times:
    Smaller file sizes lead to quicker downloads and improved website performance, especially noticeable on mobile devices or with slow connections.
  • Browser Support:
    Most modern web browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge, support Brotli.