Two months ago we noticed that someone had found a security exploit in the IP.Board forum software to randomly redirect our visitors to other sites. It turned out this was done through a forum feature that we did not even use (or want), but it was still there, dormant, vulnerable to an attack. Although none of our user accounts were compromised at this time, we still felt that we could not trust the software anymore and shut it down immediately.

I decided right away to write my own replacement forum, from scratch. By doing this I could make it just the way I wanted it and have full control over its future. It also meant I could export all the old forum data, convert it to my own format and not lose any posts.

It has been a lot of work, but today the first version of the forum is ready to go live. Here are some main features and instructions:

• Forum page (topic list)
  
  • I choose to implement a flat forum layout with hierarchical "tag-like" sections. The latest posts from "all sections" will be displayed by default. Click a section tag at the top to limit the list to topics posted in that section.
  • Clicking a topic will go to the first post, clicking the "Last post..." link will jump to the latest post in that topic.
  • Topics with unread posts (since last visit) will automatically jump to first unread post when clicked.
  • All dates and times are displayed using your local time.
• Topic page (post list)
  
  • Clicking the "Write a reply" box will open the post editor.
  • In most modern browsers you can make the editor textarea larger by dragging the resize in the bottom corner.
  • The post editor uses a custom markup (markdown) language. See this post for a full reference and examples.
  • Next to each post is a quote button that will insert the quoted text in the post editor. The full post will be quoted, but you can easily remove unneeded lines in the editor.
  • I choose to implement an editor without WYSIWYG, instead a live post preview is shown above the editor as you type.
• Profile page
  
  • Link to the profile page is under the user menu in the top right corner (when logged in).
  • By default, your full name is used on the forum. You can chane your forum display name by clicking the edit link next to the name.
  • Click the "change" button in the profile picture to upload an image or drag drop an image onto the profile picture box.
  • If you have not uploaded a picture, the forum will use your facebook or google picture (if you sign in using those methods), your gravatar.com picture or a generated 8-bit avatar.
  
  
  

Let me know if something is broken, or behaving odd in your browser.

/ Fredrik

Excellent work! So clean. The category buttons are brillant, and the automatic embedded media support is very nifty.

really nice job with the forum

theres a little overlap of the txt box over the markup help

looks like this ...

Oh, the box is resizable and you can pull it over the markup help, but it should not cover it by default. What browser version and OS are you on, I'll see if I can get the same problem somehow.

safari 6.1.6 on 10.7.5

dragging the box doesn't seem to work on my outdated browser

Next to each post is a quote button that will insert the quoted text in the post editor. The full post will be quoted, but you can easily remove unneeded lines in the editor.

Clicking on quote button does not work for me: the text of the initial post does not appear in post editor. (OS X Yosemite 10.10.4, Safari 8.0.5)

EDIT: it just started to work after I have disabled/enabled the AdBlock plugin. Will try to examine this further.