Phorum Support Forums - Announcements

Version 6.0.5 Released

Brian Moon — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:21:38 -0500

Fixed a bug with email confirmation
Fixed a bug in the admin when running behind a non-standard port reverse proxy.

Re: Phorum 6.0.3 Released

Neustradamus — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:24:29 -0500

Dear Brian,

Thanks to have listenned to me, to have relaunched the development of Phorum and to have added PHP 8.x support.

Development on GitHub:
- [github.com]

Phorum 10.0.0-alpha-5 available

Brian Moon — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 17:50:00 -0500

It is available on Github.

[github.com]

Version 6.0.4 Released

Brian Moon — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:26:35 -0500

Version 6.0.4 is released. This fixes a bug where the editor toolbar was not showing.

[github.com]

Phorum 10.0.0-alpha-4 available

Brian Moon — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 10:07:16 -0500

Phorum 10.0.0-alpha-4 available

[github.com]

New features

RSS, Atom, and JSON Feed subscriptions — every forum, and every thread, now has a feed, alongside a site-wide "recent posts" feed. Available in three formats (.rss, .atom, .json) so readers can pick whatever their feed app supports, with an admin on/off switch and proper autodiscovery tags for feed readers to pick up automatically.
Icons throughout the interface — the navigation bar, forum and folder listings, thread list, post actions (Reply, Edit, Delete, Follow), and announcements all now carry icons, making the UI easier to scan at a glance.
A cleaner moderator toolbar — moderator actions (Review Queue, Reported Content, Close, Move, Merge, Delete) are now tucked behind a single "Moderate" dropdown instead of a wall of same-weight buttons sitting next to Reply and Follow.
Admins can now pick up schema patches without a full version bump — visiting /upgrade?force=1 while logged in re-runs the upgrade/patch process on an already-installed site, for cases where a patch ships between releases.

Fixes

Editing a forum in the admin panel no longer silently turns a folder back into a regular forum on save.
Upgrading from Phorum 6 no longer hits a MySQL syntax error partway through the schema check.
A partially-applied schema patch (e.g. from an interrupted upgrade) no longer blocks every later patch from applying — already-applied changes are now detected and skipped instead of aborting the whole run.
Sites upgrading from Phorum 6 now get the pm_new_count column they were missing, backfilled from existing unread private messages instead of starting everyone at zero.

Polish

Font sizes across the Emerald theme (and everything that builds on it) are now driven by a shared, named type scale instead of scattered one-off values — more consistent typography sitewide.
Assorted sizing and spacing refinements: thread author byline, forum descriptions, announcement subject text and spacing, RSS button placement and styling.

Phorum 10.0.0-alpha-3 available

Brian Moon — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:12:12 -0500

Phorum has been fully rewritten from the ground up — and yet, if you're running Phorum 6 today, you can upgrade in place. The database schema is unchanged and fully compatible. Same tables, same columns, same data. What's changed is everything around it.

(If you're still on Phorum 5.x, you'll need to upgrade to Phorum 6 first before moving to Phorum 10.)

In this version:

Added

In-place upgrade from an existing Phorum 6 database. A new /upgrade flow detects a Phorum 6 database (identified by its own internal_version setting) and brings it up to Phorum 10's schema — adding new tables and columns without touching anything Phorum 6 already created. No data is changed, deleted, or converted.
Forced password change. Admins can flag a user account to require a new password before it can do anything else; the user is redirected to a dedicated change-password page until they comply.
Per-forum edit permission + site-wide edit time limit. Editing your own posts is now gated by a real permission bit (configurable per forum/group, alongside the existing reply/post/moderate bits) and an optional site-wide time limit after which a post can no longer be edited.
Thread merge. Moderators can fold one thread into another as a single-form action — the merged thread's posts, permalinks, and search index entries are preserved.

Changed

Custom fields storage now matches real Phorum 6. Field values live in one user_custom_fields table (previously two invented tables), and field definitions are stored as a settings blob rather than a separate config table — mirroring how Phorum 6 itself has always done it.
Note: forum-level and message-level custom fields — which never existed in real Phorum 6 — are no longer supported, only user-profile fields. If your alpha-2 install has data in the old tables, it is not migrated or read by this release; it will need to be handled manually if it needs to be preserved.

Fixed

/upgrade could stay reachable and mutate the database on an already-installed site; it's now guarded the same way the installer is.
The upgrade flow didn't mark the site as installed on completion, so it would loop back to /upgrade forever after a successful upgrade.
The post-password-change redirect could double up base_path (when configured) and dropped the original query string.
Two admins editing different custom fields at the same time could silently overwrite one another's change; saves are now conflict-safe.
Merging a thread didn't carry over the target thread's open/closed state, and could leave already-read posts marked unread after a cross-forum merge.
A flagged admin account could use the entire admin panel indefinitely without ever being forced to change its password.
A database upsert helper used by several mappers could silently swallow a genuine constraint-violation error instead of surfacing it.

Improved

Reduced duplicated logic around URL building, open-redirect validation, schema migration, and thread moderation.
Extended translation coverage to the installer/upgrade screens and several previously English-only validation messages.
Reduced database queries on thread pages (permission checks are now resolved once per request instead of once per message) and on the upgrade confirmation screen.

Dependencies

Bumped league/commonmark to 2.8.3.

Phorum 10.0.0-alpha-1 available

Brian Moon — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 21:00:39 -0500

# Phorum 10 — A Complete Rewrite, Built for Modern PHP

*A note on the version number: Phorum 10 is a ground-up rewrite, schema-compatible with earlier versions but otherwise entirely new code. The version number reflects that break, not a count of ten sequential releases.*

Phorum has been fully rewritten from the ground up — and yet, if you're running **Phorum 6** today, you can upgrade in place. **The database schema is unchanged and fully compatible.** Same tables, same columns, same data. What's changed is everything around it.

*(If you're still on Phorum 5.x, you'll need to upgrade to Phorum 6 first before moving to Phorum 10.)*

## A modern foundation

The old procedural, PHP4-era codebase is gone. Phorum now runs on:

- **PHP 8.3+**, with a proper class-based architecture — controllers, services, and data mappers replace the global `$PHORUM` superglobal and bare procedural functions
- **Composer** for dependency management and autoloading (PSR-4)
- **Twig 3** templates instead of Phorum's custom template syntax
- **PHPUnit**, with nearly 700 tests covering the application

Existing plugins aren't abandoned: the classic `phorum_api_hook()` plugin hook system is preserved (via a compatibility wrapper), and the BBCode module has already been ported over.

## New capabilities

- **Markdown support**, alongside BBCode — posts can use either, per-message
- **A real admin panel**, including a moderation audit log, ban management, custom fields, and user groups with per-forum permissions
- **Automatic redirects from old URLs** — legacy `read.php?1,2,3`-style links 301-redirect to the new clean URL structure, so old bookmarks and search rankings survive the migration
- **Flood control** and **edit-history diffs** (line-level, so you can see exactly what changed in an edited post)
- **A web-based installer**

## Built for search engines and social sharing

- Canonical URLs and `rel=prev`/`rel=next` pagination hints on every listing page
- OpenGraph tags on forums and threads, so links posted to Slack, Discord, or social media get proper title/description previews
- Schema.org structured data (JSON-LD) on forum and thread pages
- Smart pagination that scales to forums with tens of thousands of pages, instead of rendering every page number

## Design

- All six original themes — Emerald, Topaz, Sapphire, Ruby, Diamond, Amethyst — carried forward, rebuilt with modern CSS (custom properties, no more table-layout hacks)
- Fully responsive: table-based lists collapse into touch-friendly cards on mobile
- Accessibility built in: skip links, ARIA labels, visible focus rings, proper heading structure

## Speaks your language

16 locales ship out of the box (Arabic, Bengali, Chinese Simplified/Traditional, Dutch, French/Canadian French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Portuguese/Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Urdu), with English as the reference translation and a fallback chain so partial translations never show blank strings.

## Security

CSRF protection is enforced on every form submission, and output is auto-escaped by Twig by default — the two most common ways old-school forum software gets exploited.

Phorum 6.0.3 Released

Brian Moon — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 21:32:02 -0500

Phorum 6 brings PHP 8 support to Phorum.

Download on the download page.

Re: Move complete!

Stefciu — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 10:51:14 -0600

Super !!!!

Move complete!

Scott Finegan — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 09:24:28 -0600

If you find something not working here, and it worked previously, let me know.

Re: Future of Phorum.org Hosting

ZME_243 — Sun, 07 Nov 2021 08:59:37 -0600

Hello,

Please check your PMs - sent you a message. Thank you!

Future of Phorum.org Hosting

Thomas Seifert — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 05:32:55 -0500

Hello everyone,

while I couldn't work at all on Phorum anymore, I was hosting the phorum.org site for the last couple years.
As I'm not running public servers anymore from 15th of November this year, I also can't continue hosting the phorum.org site anymore.

Any proposals or takers who can reliably and trustfully continue the hosting adventure?

Get in touch through PM here!

thomas

Re: Bugfix _phorum_wordwrap {was:Re: Phorum 5.2.23 released]

Andrej Kikelj — Sun, 12 Jul 2020 10:01:43 -0500

Hi Barcino,

I did as you proposed and now quoting works as it should.

Thanks a lot!

Bugfix _phorum_wordwrap {was:Re: Phorum 5.2.23 released]

barcino — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 06:05:46 -0500

yes, in both instances.

Re: Phorum 5.2.23 released

Andrej Kikelj — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 13:41:44 -0500

Hi Barcino,

Thank you for letting me know of your solution.

But before I make your suggested change I have a question:

In the file format_functions.php there are two instances of
$text = trim(mb_substr($text, mb_strlen($part, $encoding), NULL, $encoding));

Should I replace them both?

Regards,
Andrej

Re: Phorum 5.2.23 released

barcino — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 10:59:42 -0500

well, old stuff, but anyway:

I could reproduce the issue with the report-function. Long lines were cut off in the mail in the parts "explanations" and "body" (i.e the message body of the post you are reporting).

Problem is indeed in include/format_functions.php, function _phorum_wordwrap():

NULL as a parameter for length in mb_substr() means a length of zero (i.e. "0") for PHP version prior to PHP 5.4.8.
As Phorum says it's requirements are 5.2, this can result in the wrong behavior ;-) And as there are still enterprise level distributions like CentOS 6 alive and supported, which run only PHP 5.3.3, it might be useful to fix it ;-)

Fix:
Replace

Quote

$text = trim(mb_substr($text, mb_strlen($part, $encoding), NULL, $encoding));

with

Quote

$text = trim(mb_substr($text, mb_strlen($part, $encoding), mb_strlen($text,$encoding), $encoding));

in file include/format_functions.php

Re: Phorum 5.2.23 released

Andrej Kikelj — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 05:27:32 -0500

I'm afraid I don't know what to look at because I am not a programmer.
Help me out, please.

Regards,
Andrej

Re: Phorum 5.2.23 released

Oliver Riesen-Mallmann — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 05:23:22 -0500

Hi Andrej,

yes, i know...

But which part of the "if" uses YOUR specific Phorum installation?

Regards
Oliver

Re: Phorum 5.2.23 released

Andrej Kikelj — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 05:05:30 -0500

Hi Oliver,

These are the lines from 395:

function phorum_wordwrap( $text, $width = 72, $break = "\n", $cut = false )
{
// Unfortunately, mbstring is a non-default extension and we can therefore
// not be sure that it is available in the PHP installation.
if (function_exists('mb_internal_encoding')) {
$paragraphs = explode($break, $text);
foreach ($paragraphs as &$paragraph) {
$paragraph = _phorum_wordwrap($paragraph, $width, $break, $cut);
}
return implode($break, $paragraphs);
} else {
return wordwrap($text, $width, $break, $cut);
}
}

Best regards,
Andrej

Re: Phorum 5.2.23 released

Oliver Riesen-Mallmann — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 02:52:16 -0500

Hi Andrej,

ok, next question: does your Phorum installation use the internal PHP function wordwrap or our internal function _phorum_wordwrap? See /include/format_functions.php starting at line 395...

Regards
Oliver

Re: Phorum 5.2.23 released

Andrej Kikelj — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 12:20:02 -0500

Hi Oliver,
Thank you for your response!

Yes, in request_first.php file the string was:
$quoted = phorum_wordwrap(trim($quoted), 50, "\n> ", false);

But in my forum, the quoted text was still truncated.

Just for now, I changed the value to 9999:
$quoted = phorum_wordwrap(trim($quoted), 9999, "\n> ", false);

Now only very large quotes get truncated.

Best regards,
Andrej

Quote
Oliver Riesen-Mallmann
Hi Andrej,

can you check please that the corresponding php file on your server includes the change from this commit:
[github.com]

Regards
Oliver

Re: Phorum 5.2.23 released

Oliver Riesen-Mallmann — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 06:54:37 -0500

Hi Andrej,

can you check please that the corresponding php file on your server includes the change from this commit:
[github.com]

Regards
Oliver

Re: Phorum 5.2.23 released

Oliver Riesen-Mallmann — Sat, 19 Aug 2017 05:42:49 -0500

Hi Andrej,

I'll check after my vacations... I'm back on monday...

Regards
Oliver

Re: Phorum 5.2.23 released

Andrej Kikelj — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 19:00:32 -0500

I updated my forum to 5.2.23, but quoted text lines are still truncated - see the picture:

[www.dropbox.com]

Am I missing something?

Quote
Oliver Riesen-Mallmann
[*] Quoted text lines truncated after 50 characters (fixing #1020).

Re: Phorum.org now hosted in Germany! Please report any issues you encounter

Koret — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 09:40:18 -0600

As I have stopped working your forum via ip Germany. Fortunately, he recovered. Maybe the problem is my proxy (advanced.name if matters), or any system settings.

Phorum 5.2.23 released

Oliver Riesen-Mallmann — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 07:34:47 -0600

I'm happy to announce our latest stable release Phorum 5.2.23.

It is a bug fix release over 5.2.22 fixing some issues reported since the last release.

You can download this new release from our downloads page or our github page.

Missing column force_password_change added.
Quoted text lines truncated after 50 characters (fixing #1020).

Re: Phorum 5.2.22 released

Simon King — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 16:28:23 -0600

I second that — the Stop Forum Spam service works very well against known spammers. It was instrumental for me in a recent fight against spammers and ends up blocking approximately 50 users a day.

Re: Phorum 5.2.22 released

Oliver Riesen-Mallmann — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 03:34:34 -0600

Hi SneakBug8,

please use additionally the Stop Forum Spam Module.

Regards
Oliver

Re: Phorum 5.2.22 released

SneakBug8 — Tue, 01 Nov 2016 11:18:48 -0500

Thanks for good update!

P.S. Wanna see better antispam in future versions, it is quite bad nod.

Re: Phorum 5.2.22 released

Thomas Seifert — Sat, 29 Oct 2016 07:29:45 -0500

Marco, your live site shows at [www.droominfo.nl] that you are using 5.3-dev version.
So a 5.2.x install would actually be a downgrade, which is not supported and therefore you got a not-matching database version.