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!

MyBB license changes from GPL to the BSD-3 license with MyBB 2.0

Yesterday MyBB development team member Euan T announced a license change for MyBB 2.0. MyBB 2.0 will no longer be released under the Lesser GNU Public License Version 3 (LGPL3) like MyBB 1.8 but instead be released under the BSD 3 Clause (BSD-3) license.

The license is still open source and will probably allow MyBB to be used even more often, however there are the following limitations:

  • You cannot use the MyBB Group trademark or the names, trademarks or logos of any of the project’s contributors.
  • The MyBB Group cannot be held liable for any damages caused by the software.
  • The original copyright must be retained.

The last point is not clearly defined by the developers yet. For MyBB 1.6 and MyBB 1.8, users were allowed to remove the visible copyright with the backlink to MyBB.com. But if they did, they did not get support in the MyBB.com community forums.

I don’t think that this will change with the usage of the BSD-3 license, but you should be aware of the new license situation and check if there are any issues using MyBB for your business under the new license.

How to find the best theme for your MyBB (free or paid)

If you want to run a successful MyBB forum, you’ll need something else then the default theme.
You’ll need a MyBB design that makes your site unique. If your site looks like all of the other MyBB installations with the default theme, you’ll get less attention and make less money if you use MyBB for Business.

MyBB Default Theme
The default MyBB theme is no good choice for a Business forum.

Continue reading How to find the best theme for your MyBB (free or paid)

StefanT is the new MyBB project manager

MyBB project manager Tim B. promoted StefanT as the new MyBB project manager. Tim B. retired from the project because he was unable to dedicate the time the project deserves. StefanT will now manage the project together with Chris Boulton. StefanT knows MyBB very well, he owns the german MyBB support website mybboard.de since years.

After all, this change in the project management of MyBB does not seem to cause issues for us, running MyBB for Business. MyBB will remain free and open source.

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

Upgrade existing plugins from MyBB 1.6 to MyBB 1.8

MyBB 1.8 has been released to the public. If you’d like to upgrade your MyBB 1.6 forum, you’ll have to update your plugins too.

Most of your plugins will probably be updated by the plugin author. If a plugin author does not update his plugin to MyBB 1.8, you can try to upgrade it yourself.

Simply locate the plugin file in your forum’s inc/plugins folder. Open it with a text editor, I recommend to use Notepad++.

You’ll find a compatibility line that looks like this:

Plugin Info MyBB 1.6

Change it to 18* to support MyBB 1.8, it will look like this:

Plugin Info MyBB 1.8

Now you can upload and install the plugin. In most cases, the plugin will now work with MyBB 1.8.