Simple Machines Forum

It includes many custom templates for a personal and professional design of the message boards.

SMF is written in the popular language PHP and uses a MySQL database.

It is designed to provide all the features needed from a bulletin board while having an absolute minimal impact on the resources of the server.

Features:

• General Features:
• Admin dashboard
• Comprehensive template system.
• Advanced permission and user management.
• Supports multiple languages at once.
• Open and well-documented source code.
• Tracking of new and old unread topics, not just from the last visit.
• Designed for optimal performance and scalability.
• Multi-media output. (XHTML, XML, RSS, WAP)
• Multi-language support from a large community.
• Package manager that automatically installs or uninstalls mods (also known as hacks.)
• Security:
• All actions seamlessly require a session based authorization code.
• Administrative actions require the user's password (and do not rely solely on cookies.)
• Major actions are time and IP locked, preventing 'hammering'.
• The number of login attempts from a certain IP can be limited and time locked.
• Forum Settings:
• Ability to display page creation time and query count per page.
• Put a board into maintenance mode, allowing only admins to login.
• Word censoring, either full word or partial.
• Ability to break up long words.
• Boards and Categories
• Group boards into collapsible categories.
• Set categories as non-collapsible.
• Reorder boards within categories, or reorder categories.
• Create child boards under other boards. (sub boards)
• Assign moderators to boards.
• Allow certain membergroups to access a board, including guests only.
• Configure permissions for each membergroup on the board level.
• Ability to indicate new posts to child boards but nothing new in parent.
• Member Registration;
• Require registration before forum entrance.
• Require a user to agree to terms before they register.
• Disable member registration completely (allowing only moderators to register people).
• Require email authentication by sending an authentication link.
• Require a moderator to approve registration.
• Register new members from the admin center.
• Member Navigation and Authentication
• Several security checks during navigation.
• Password reminder option, by email with confirmation. (doesn't automatically reset the password.)
• Both cookie and session based authentication (works without cookies.)
• Cookies can be set local to a path, global to all subdomains, or normally.
• Adjustable expiration time for authentication cookies.
• Member Tracking and Tracing
• Sortable and searchable public memberlist (accessible by a permission.)
• Powerful sortable and searchable admin memberlist.
• Show all (error) messages and IPs made by a member. (track user)
• Show all (error) messages from an IP address or range. (track IP)
• See who's doing what (accessible by permission.)
• Statistics:
• Several board statistics (accessible by permission.)
• Tracking of member's online time in seconds.
• Tracking of topics, messages, new members, and hits per day.
• Individual member statistics accessible from their profile.
• News and Announcements
• Ability to create announcement boards (members receive a notification of topics automatically.)
• Member option to disable receiving announcements.
• Email or private message to the members by membergroup.
• Show a news ticker or news fader.
• Communication
• Ability to choose sendmail or SMTP (with or without authentication.)
• Ability to send a topic to a friend.
• Ability to view a "printer friendly" version of topics.
• Membergroups:
• Create membergroups to group members on permissions, access rights, and/or appearance.
• Assign several membergroups to a single member, with one membergroup as the primary group.
• Define membergroups that are auto-assigned based on the amount of posts a user has.
• Determine the maximum number of personal messages a membergroup is allowed to have by group.
• Assign graphical symbol(s) to a membergroup by primary group.
• Determine which membergroups are allowed to access a board.
• Banning:
• Ban members based on their username, email address, IP address or hostname.
• Support of wildcards for email address, IP address, and hostname.
• Include a ban reason (viewable for the banned user).
• Include a ban note (only viewable by the admins).
• Chose between full ban, 'no post' ban, or registration ban.
• Include an expiration time for bans.

What is new in this release:

• This patch focuses on fixing a few memory issues caused by some of the changes in 2.0.7, as well as fixing a crucial bug which caused the boards to appear in a seemingly random order for forums running on MySQL version 5.6 and above.
• It also fixes a rare bug that could cause a database error when invalid data is passed to the memberlist search form.

What is new in version 2.0.6 / 1.1.19:

• Several security issues were identified in both release lines and have been addressed with this patch.

What is new in version 2.0.5:

• A critical security patch.

What is new in version 2.0.4 / 1.1.17:

• A few critical security issues have been identified in the two maintained versions and are fixed with this update.

What is new in version 2.0.3 / 1.1.17:

• A security patch with version numbers: SMF 1.1.17 and SMF 2.0.3.

What is new in version 2.0.2 / 1.1.16:

• SMF 1.1.16 and SMF 2.0.2 contain security patches.
• A few bug fixes for SMF 2.0.x are also available with the patch.

What is new in version 2.0.1:

• A sensitive token was sent in the URL, allowing CSRF vulnerability (ModerationCenter.php).
• Html entities fixes for spoofing and injection prevention. (Load.php, Subs-Members.php).
• Fix undefined index (ManageMaintenance.php).
• Some versions may not contain a minor type. (Subs-Package.php).
• Some upgrades could fail due to file hash not existing in the attachments table. (upgrade_2-0_mysql.sql).

What is new in version 2.0:

• Fixes to login protection system
• Real name spoofing prevention
• MySQL 5.5 compatibility fixes
• Several PostgreSQL related fixes
• Fixes to integration hooks
• Several user interface fixes
• Fixes related to member profile updates
• Fixes to upgrade scripts

Requirements:

• PHP 4.1.0 or higher
• MySQL 3.23.4 or higher
• 512 kilobytes of storage space in the database
• two and a half megabytes of storage space on the web server
• Apache or IIS