Well, I hammered out all the bugs from the last beta and I have made many improvements to my forum system. It also now has a name, Lamp BB. I have installed the latest version here:

http://beta.massassi.net/

I would appreciate any help you could provide. What I need is a bunch of people to sign up for accounts, post messages, create boards and forums, test out all the features you can and let me know if you have any problems.

I am not currently looking for a stress test, so please don't bombard the server. However, feel free to try to break it in other ways - cross-site scripting, sql injection, extra-long input, funky characters, I want to know if there are any security issues here.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Brian

Some code is showing on the bottum... Not sure if it matters..

But LAMP BB? Why that name?

It's debug code, I can remove it if it's disconcerting

Got a better name suggestion that has a domain name open?

Well now without that code it looks quite nice actually.

Oak Patch Sofware? Nice :p .

i just registered, used IE. after going to the link that the registration email sent me, i have some frame problems.

more problems
(used firefox this time)

I got the same as landfish in Opera, except my black bars go down the length of the page.

I registered a name with funky characters, but it won't let me login with it. (you can see it in the member list)

Also, if I try to get a board the same alias as another board, I receive this complex error message, although nothing bad seems to come of it.

Error

Unfortunately, there was an error processing your request.
Error Number: 8
Error Message: Undefined index: board_id
Line Number: 461
File: /home/brian/sites/beta.massassi.net/classes/BFA.php
Processing time: 0.02525 seconds.
Total queries: 3
Duplicate Queries: 0

Brian is gonna hate me, I got another error:

Upon putting in "*" for my IP ban in my board, I get this error upon attempting to make a thread:

Error

Unfortunately, there was an error processing your request.
Error Number: 2
Error Message: preg_match(): Compilation failed: nothing to repeat at offset 1
Line Number: 30
File: /home/brian/sites/beta.massassi.net/classes/BFD_IPBan.php
Processing time: 0.0354 seconds.
Total queries: 3
Duplicate Queries: 0

Another problem:

You can't edit a forum name, it says the alias is already in use. Obviously, I'm trying to edit the forum!

No, I don't hate you, I appreciate the bug reports!

Wow, that design issue is strange, it works great for me in firefox and opera, there must be something weird going on. I will figure it out, never fear.

mmm, no character length on the sigs, mwaha

*click*"User Management"
'Hey, sweet!, WHATS THAT NUMBER UNDER USER ID' *click*

Another potential DDoS attack problem:

The Description section of a forum can be up to 64KB in size, which is gargantuan for its purpose. Not to mention having a bunch of 64kb descriptions would make MySQL cry.

The black squares appear to happen if you don't close your img tag. I can fix that.

[QUOTE=Cool Matty]Another potential DDoS attack problem:

The Description section of a forum can be up to 64KB in size, which is gargantuan for its purpose. Not to mention having a bunch of 64kb descriptions would make MySQL cry.[/QUOTE]
There's actually a setting for admins to wordwrap/cut those off at some point. Can you recommend a good limit to the number of characters?

I'd say 250 characters should be PLENTY.

Everyone, thanks very much for the help. I am tracking the bugs here: http://bugs.massassi.net/

I will fix the issues that have been reported so far and I'll post a note on this thread when I am done. Feel free to keep messing around, but things definitely look messy, so they will look nicer when things are fixed.

Also, the IE issue - does this happen on IE all the time, or just that one time on the registration confirmation page?

Thanks again!

This page is supposed to show your user profile. It's using the same routine as the regular user profile thing, and it breaks only on people who don't have the "private registration" box checked. I will fix this, too. Thanks.

Brian, do you need IE to do testing? I'll set my laptop up with VNC so you can test on IE if you like.

Genki, regarding how many posts the system can take, I've put in 1.5 million posts across about a dozen boards and everything runs just as quickly. The only thing that I've found that slows it down is making a really long post with a bunch of smilies and bb code - even then, it was still taking only .02s to render a page.

[QUOTE=Cool Matty]Brian, do you need IE to do testing? I'll set my laptop up with VNC so you can test on IE if you like.[/QUOTE]
Thanks for the offer, I don't really know how to use that, though. I was planning to test on IE thoroughly once the design work is finished.

Sorry for the double post on your bug report. I didn't know hitting back would do that.

yay, someone read that post! still need to do something about the doomsigs

<3 brian

The problem is that some people have a different idea of how long a sig should be. I guess I have to make it configurable on a per-board basis.

But actually, that can get weird since different boards will be able to set different limits, some sigs will work fine on one board but be truncated on another. Hrm.

Don't sweat it, I appreciate your help. I'm wondering if the profanity filter SHOULD work retroactively. Interesting question. The way to make that would would be to filter things as they come out of the db, instead of when they go in. Problem with that is that it can slow things way down. Do other forums work this way?

I took a look at the SMF forums source to see how they do it. I'm not exceptionally familiar with PHP, and I don't know how SMF forums work, but from what I could gather, their software passes everything through a censor filter everytime a page is requested and does a string replace before displaying the page.

As far as efficiency go, on one hand it's not too bad because it only does a string check and replace only on the pages requested, but on the other hand it runs every request through the filter.

I may be misinterpreting the code though, so don't take my word for it.

Why don't you do this?

When adding a word to the filter, have an option to "Apply retroactively" which will scan all posts currently in the database, and fix it. All the big hard work done in one shot!

1. This isn't a bug and won't be consequential in the long run, but when I was not registered and typed in a username and password, it simply said "Invalid username/password." I don't know if it is even worth the effort, but I thought that it would have been nice to tell me that I am not registered. Then again, just for the heck of it, I tried to login under a username that probably does not exist at Lucasforums (the username was RickJamesB****, uncensored of course) and it didn't tell me that I wasn't registered either. It actually warned me of 4 remaining attempts to log in.

2. I tried to confirm my registration for the username tester001_________________________2342342 (how many characters are allowed for a name?). After I read that it was confirmed, I tried to log in but was rejected, having an invalid username/password. Then, I decided to confirm registration again, using the first link in the confirmation email (btw that's the link I used in the first attempt at confirmation). Upon the second attempt, I got the following:



3. In the confirmation e-mail, I clicked the page to use a unique registration code to register. The page that allows me to enter the code is titled "No Title - Lamp BB." No title?

Hardly a real bug, but I made a board in Japanese characters and it broke it (due to the ampersands and stuff when it got escaped? Or something). This might happen with all irregular characters/symbols etc. when they have to get escaped .. I'm not sure. Didn't go very extensively into it

It's a nice update, btw. Though, the menu kind of doesn't fit with the rest of the stuff, but that's inconsequential.

Thanks again, all. Right now, the most important thing I'm fixing is the character encoding issues. You should be able to use any fancy (non-reserved) characters you want and not break the board. So I am working on that. I have a lot of reading to do to make it work right, but I am confident I can have it wrapped up before the weekend. Once that is done, I will continue to address *every* issue you guys have brought up. Thanks again, I can't tell you how much I appreciate all your help!

Oh. Um.

I posted this on the bug site, but apparently putting a zero in your post will cause everything after it to be cut off.

I.E. on a computer in class.

Wow, that attachment file image came out odd.

Holy WTF!? Now that has gotta be the strangest freaking bug I've ever seen! Damn I can't believe you even found that! I will figure out what is wrong and fix it, but... geesh! Thanks a lot for finding that.

Okay, today I was able to almost completely sort out the character encoding issues. Once I update the beta site (probably over the weekend, I want to fix everything else first), you will be able to use any language and any special characters (except of course HTML entities like > < & ' " etc.) for user names, forum names, etc. Since it now supports multi-byte character sets, I have to go through and make sure all my string handling does that in an intelligent manner (which it doesn't currently - well, it's PHPs fault for having stupid string-handling functions).

Thanks guys, I really appreciate all your effort. I will post again when I have updated the beta site. This is good, it gives me a chance to test my database upgrade scripts