Bulletin Board Upgraded

[Eric Frost]

You may have noticed that the board was down for about 10 minutes yesterday for an upgrade, below are the details. I know we don't use 10% of all the features of vBulletin, if anyone ever has any suggestions let me know!

Eric


---------------- WHAT'S NEW IN 3.6.1? ----------------

In addition to the many new features introduced with vBulletin 3.6.0 (a run-down of which can be seen here: http://www.vbulletin.com/go/36features) vBulletin 3.6.1 contains several new improvements. This is a brief summary of what's new:

* Admin Control Panel News System
The vBulletin Admin CP now checks vBulletin.com for news articles and announcements, allowing the vBulletin team to quickly alert customers to new releases, security problems etc.

* Infraction System: Infraction Extension
When a user receives the same type of infraction twice, the second offence will now be tacked-on to the first one, resulting in a longer life for the infraction.

* Infraction System: Automatic Bans
Users can now be automatically moved to a 'banned' usergroup by the infraction system if their 'offence' is sufficiently serious.

* RSS Importer Supports 'Invalid' RSS
We have found that several popular RSS formats are in fact invalid according to the RSS spec. These formats would cause an error in vBulletin previous to 3.6.1, but work-arounds are now in place to allow them to be used.

* RSS Importer Improved Character Set Handling
Some problems encountered with obscure character sets have been rectified with vBulletin 3.6.1.

* CAPTCHA for Guest Searches
To prevent robots from flooding your server with requests to search.php, which can be expensive in terms of system performance, a CAPTCHA system has been implemented to ensure that only humans can search.

* HttpOnly Cookie Support to Defeat XSS Attacks
In order to prevent XSS attacks using Javascript to steal cookie data, we have switched several cookies to use the HttpOnly flag, causing them to become unavailable to Javascript. PHP has also accepted our patch to add this feature to PHP 5.2.0 in future.

* Podcast Improvements
Several Podcast options can now be set on a per-thread basis rather than just per-forum.

* 'Search This Thread' Improvements
Additional options are now available when selecting 'Advanced Search' from 'Search This Thread'

* Improved Event Ordering
Events are now sorted in a greatly improved manner when grouping events by date on the front page, or when viewing events on the calendar in daily, weekly and monthly views.