We're pleased to announce the release of the 1.2.0 version of Gossamer Forum. This release contains several major updates, in addition to the usual round of bug fixes and minor tweaks/updates.

Major items:

• Payment support. This is the primary new feature for 1.2.0 (and the reason for 1.2.0 instead of 1.1.9). The payment support allows you to set up your forum to require payment from users for signup, or to accept donations from your users. The signup payments are time-limited (e.g. $10 gets you one month access), or unlimited (e.g. $10 gets you a lifetime account). You may optionally also define different renewal payment levels (e.g. $8 lets you renew for a month, as opposed to the initial $10). It also supports automatic recurring renewal support. The payment system includes support for the following payment systems (other payment systems may be made available later, upon demand):
  • Moneris
  • Authorize.Net
  • PayPal
  • WorldPay
• Sticky threads are now supported. We've shown off sticky threads here on our support forum here for a couple weeks, and they are working well. You can create a sticky thread by clicking the "Sticky" link beside the post (it shows up around the same area as the Keep/Lock/Move links), or by clicking the "Sticky thread" checkbox when writing a new thread. Of course, only moderators and administrators can make a thread sticky. The initial work for this modification was done by CRUZN8R, posted here - helping him with the plugin was what prompted me to include this as a core part of Gossamer Forum.
• Attachment ordering in now supported. Attachments now appear in the same order they are uploaded. This applies to all posts and messages - including ones that were posted before the 1.2.0 upgrade.
• Username aliases are supported. This allows you to post using a different username. This may or may not be useful to certain people, and so defaults to not being enabled.
• A signature prefix/suffix is supported. This change was made available here on the forum as a modification to 1.1.8 a few weeks ago, but is now available as part of the program.
• "Login as this user" option in the admin panel user details. This link appears beside the username on the details page and allows you to login as the user from the admin panel without having to save their profile (previously this was possible by setting a temporary password). Due to the nature of this feature, it is disabled by default (the option is in Setup -> Admin Panel), and is recommended only to be used when troubleshooting or assisting a user with their account.
• When deleting a user, you now have an option regarding what to do with their posts. You can: a) leave the posts alone, b) Set the posts to deleted (but don't remove them), c) Remove the ones that don't have replies, and set the ones that do have replies to deleted, or d) remove posts, and any and all replies those posts may have.

Minor items:

• The "options" link in the search part of the footer now preselects the current forum when performing a search.
• Searches no longer return moved post pointers
• A bad bug that caused incorrect reply counts to occur when deleting portions of threads has been fixed. Additionally, install.cgi detects and repairs any incorrect reply counts. Just a warning to people upgrading to 1.2.0: this reparation may take quite some time on large forums, so give it a bit of time.
• Subscription e-mails no longer include moved posts.
• Importing now has a --force-version option to override the version detection.
• The WWWThreads_PHP import has been updated to work with newer versions.
• Fixed a bug that caused an incorrect count to be displayed when deleting old posts/messages from the Delete Old options in the admin panel.
• Reserved usernames may now contain wildcards (? for any character and * for any number of characters).
• Various other small updates and bug fixes, most of which were posted here and have had prior fixes either in the Gossamer Forum: Discussion forum or the Official Bug Fix forum.

You can download it from the usual place (the "download" link on the Gossamer Forum product page). Unfortunately, we do not have translated (french and german) versions available at this time, but we hope to make them available shortly.

The Gossamer Forum administration manual (updated for 1.2.0) is available from:

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/...ts/gforum/manual.pdf

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Jason Rhinelander
Gossamer Threads
jason@gossamer-threads.com