MyBB 1.6 is no longer supported

As I announced before in this post, the MyBB team decided to drop the support for MyBB 1.6.

Since MyBB 1.8 has been released more than one year ago, this is a very valid decision. If you are still using MyBB 1.6 you should really upgrade to MyBB 1.8 now because you’d risk security issues otherwise.

If there are plugins that have not yet been updated to MyBB 1.8 compatibility they’ll probably never will and you should drop them.

MyBB 1.8.6 and 1.6.18 security updates

The MyBB development team released new version of MyBB 1.8 and MyBB 1.6. MyBB 1.8.6 is a maintenance and security update, MyBB 1.6.18 is a pure security update.
You should update your MyBB forum to include security fixes for low and medium security issues.

If you are using MyBB 1.8.5 you can use the changed file package to update to MyBB 1.8.6. Do not forget to run the update script!

Check the update descriptions on the MyBB blog.

Keeping your MyBB at the newest version is important to prevent hackers from getting access to your forums data. If there are security updates you should always do these updates as soon as possible.

MyBB WordPress User Integration

In this post, I’ll tell you how to integrate your MyBB forum with a WordPress blog.
Wordpress is probably the most successful blogging software in the world. And beside blogs you can also use it as a small CMS for websites.

MyBB WordPress Integration

If you’re running MyBB for Business, you might want to get a blog or a website too. It’s a great opportunity to earn some extra cash.
But if you are running two different systems, you’ll have two different user bases. Your users, having registered in MyBB already, have to type their email adress over and over again if they want to comment on wordpress. They’ll need to register a second time in WordPress for subscriptions.

This is annoying for users. So let’s fix that. Continue reading MyBB WordPress User Integration

MyBB 1.6 will reach End of Lifetime September 2015

The MyBB development team announced that they will be concluding maintenance and support for the MyBB 1.6 series at the 1st of September, 2015. MyBB 1.8 will be released for one year by that date and MyBB 1.6 will no longer get maintenance or security updates.

There is no LTS release for MyBB.

If you are still using MyBB 1.6 you should update your forum software, plugins and theme to MyBB 1.8 as soon as possible. If you need support with the plugin update check out this tutorial.

MyBB 1.8 comes with nice features to support your MyBB business too, so hurry!

Color the staff author information on MyBB posts

In this tutorial, I’ll teach you how to give the author information of certain usergroups a special background color. It’ll look like this:
MyBB Thread Background
Instead of this:

MyBB Post Background

We can achieve this effect for each usergroup. Moderators for example could have a light blue background for their author information, VIPs could have a light yellow background and so on. You can also use background images.
We will use simple template edits for this modification instead of a plugin.

Continue reading Color the staff author information on MyBB posts

The best robots.txt for your MyBB

MyBB is not very optimized for search engines by default. One of the biggest problems is that it does not come with a robots.txt file.

Search engines will crawl all kind of stuff in your forum that makes no sense. Examples are the calendar, the archive, new reply pages and many more.

They will also find a lot of duplicated content in your forum because the same posts can be displayed in the archive, using a direct post URL and all kinds of thread URLs with lastpost or newpost.html additions. MyBB does not ship with canonical URLs by default so you’ll have issues here too.

My currently recommended robots.txt for MyBB with activated SEO-friendly-URLs looks like this:

Continue reading The best robots.txt for your MyBB

Prevent adblockers on your MyBB forum

If you want to make money with your MyBB forum, you’ll probably use ads to generate revenue. Google Adsense is a popular choice for example.

But a lot of visitors are using adblockers in the meantime and you’ll loose a lot of money this way.

This is a way to prevent adblockers on your MyBB forum to make a business out of your MyBB.

Open your MyBB Admin CP and visit the Templates & Styles section. Choose Templates.

Open the templates of your theme and find the ungrouped templates:

MyBB Ungrouped Templates Continue reading Prevent adblockers on your MyBB forum