Thank you very much for the bugs report and suggestions. I will check them in the next update.

Hi Milan, and thank you!

Having worked as a product owner in the IT industry, I know how irritating user suggestions can be, and I'm sorry for bombarding you with a stream of suggestions. You probably already have a planned roadmap that contains certain features you deem necessary, and any deviation from that roadmap potentially causes chaos. I do see that you have lots of products to take care of, and once again, I apologize for bothering you with this.

I am convinced that Simple Forum has vast potential in a wide range of use cases, including serving as an extension of support solutions for IT products, particularly in the gaming industry. By gaming industry, I specifically mean the part where players in multiplayer games tend to create online communities for their clans. Given that gaming is making a comeback after its slowdown in the mid-2010s, I believe that Simple Forum could be a valuable tool for facilitating communication and community building within these gaming communities.

I believe you are aware of open-source/free-to-use forum/community platforms like SMF, myBB, NodeBB, phpBB, and many others, but they all lack the simplicity that SF offers. I would love to see you implement some core missing features, either as an extension of SF or by supporting plugins/extensions that you can develop and sell as separate products, which will generate more revenue in general. That being said, I would like to add one more suggestion to the list: create a form builder (not an advanced form builder with complicated logic, but as simple as possible) Laravel package, such as https://github.com/tanthammar/tall-forms.

On another note, I understand that Simple Forum is currently in its Beta phase, and while I appreciate the need to be thorough and diligent in testing and development, I would like to politely suggest that updates for Beta products should be released faster than planned. This is because some of the bugs that may be present in the Beta version could potentially cause serious issues for users, and releasing updates more frequently could help mitigate these risks. Of course, I understand that you have a planned roadmap for the Beta version as well, but I wanted to bring this to your attention for consideration.

Thanks!

Hello,

There are a few features in the roadmap that will be added in future. For beta, we have planned to release updates weekly for the first month and then will move to fortnightly and monthly depending on the issues/bugs.

Most of your reported bugs and suggestions are already fixed and implemented on the demo. You can have a look at the live demo.

For features, we will work slow, but the errors and bugs will be fixed on a priority basis.

Thank you for your valued feedback and suggestions

Hi Milan,

Thank you for taking the time to respond. I am interested in the upcoming updates and look forward to seeing them.

Best regards!

Hello guys!

Here are some of the bugs I found so far with my log file attached.

BUG: During the installation of Beta 1, after the setup wizard is complete, users who try to log in to their account are prompted to "Confirm Email." However, the email is never sent. When attempting to resend the mail, the following error occurs:
"Sorry, the server encountered an error. Please try again later." The expected response code is "250/251/252," but the code received is "550," with the message "550 - Your IP: 162.0.217.67: Your domain example.com is not allowed in the header 550 From."
This issue can be easily resolved by editing the .env file on line 38 “MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS="[email protected]" to include the correct email address.
To prevent this error from occurring, a header or from email field should be included in the installation setup.

BUG: In the Manage/Settings section, under "Social Links," users can turn on and off Pages, Knowledge Base, FAQs, and Contact Page. However, when a user turns off the Contact Page, it is still present on the homepage.
The feature works correctly for Pages, Knowledge Base, and FAQs. If a user turns any of these off, they will be removed from the homepage.
As an additional improvement, I suggest creating a separate section called "Links Settings" or a similar name and moving it above the "Contact Page Text" section. To make it more logical, the Contact Page Text field should be dependent on whether the Contact Page is turned on or off. If the user turns off the Contact Page, the Contact Page Text field should be hidden from the settings.

BUG: When trying to create a page the following error occurs:
500 Server error Sorry, server encountered an error, please try again later. Cannot bind property [page.order] without a validation rule present in the [$rules] array on Livewire component: [page.form].

BUG: When trying to Add Knowledge Base the following error occurs:
500 Server error Sorry, server encountered an error, please try again later. Cannot bind property [knowledge_base.order] without a validation rule present in the [$rules] array on Livewire component: [knowledge-base.form].

BUG: When trying to FAQs the following error occurs:
500 Server error Sorry, server encountered an error, please try again later. Cannot bind property [faq.order] without a validation rule present in the [$rules] array on Livewire component: [faq.form].

BUG: Descriptive text under User/Extra Profile contains a spelling error “The meta.display name field is required.” since field's name is Display Name I do believe that the “meta” part along with the dot should be removed.

BUG: When trying to access /knowledgebase the following error occurs:
500 Server error Sorry, server encountered an error, please try again later. Undefined variable $k_b_category

Guys sorry for the bombardment with bugs and suggestions but here are additional bugs.

BUG: Uploading a logo works, and the logo is previewed in settings. However, when changes are saved, the logo disappears, and a textual description replaces it. For example, if the forum is called "Laravel," after uploading the logo and saving changes, the logo image will be replaced with the forum name "Laravel."

BUG: The descriptive text under the Manage/Settings icon is "Max. size 200mb and dimension min 24px x 24px and max 250px x 25px0 with ratio 1/1" and it contains a typo "25px0." My suggestion would be to use "00 x 00 px" instead of "00px x 00px" as it is not repetitive and looks cleaner.

SUGGESTION: To better organize settings, which are currently presented in an "infinity scroll," I would suggest using tabs or a left-side menu like "Update Policies." You could categorize the settings into the following:

General Settings, which contains Icon, Logo, Name, Mode, Results Per Page, Page Title, Meta Description, Contact Email, Language, Theme, RTL Support, Upload File Dropped on Body, Allowed File Types (Extensions separated by a comma), Min. Search Length, Search Backdrop, and Sticky Sidebar + SubCategory Links Settings (or something else) containing toggles to turn on and off Pages, Knowledge base, FAQs, and Contact page + Contact Page Text if Contact page is enabled.

Forum Settings, which contains Banned Words, Replacement Words, Notifications, Review New User Threads, Registration, Allow to change vote, Guest Reply, Allow Delete, Flag Option, Hide Flagged, Members Page, User Signature, Trending Threads, and Who to follow.

Ads & Analytics Settings, which contains Top Ad Code, Sidebar Ad Code, Bottom Ad Code, Footer Code, and additional Analytics Code (I do understand that footer code is meant for that, but non-tech-savvy users might get confused as to what they can put in it.)

Social Login Settings, which contains Facebook Social Authentication, GitHub Social Authentication, Google Social Authentication, and Twitter Social Authentication.

Hello,

Don't be sorry, we appreciate your help in improving the product.

I have released v2.0.0-beta.2 with few fixes. I hope that should fix the FAQ and knowledge base form issues.

I will check the form error and settings in the next update.

Thank you

Great! Thanks Milan. Ill then just keep sticking bugs I find in here.

BUG: When trying to upload an image for Category the following error occurs:
500 Server error Sorry, server encountered an error, please try again later. SQLSTATE[42S22]: Column not found: 1054 Unknown column 'image' in 'field list' (Connection: mysql, SQL: update categories set image = images/1h0XrjKDaS1yJTsnhQIyAYFh4fO4f7UF63yVFqEc.png, categories.updated_at = 2023-04-03 10:12:20 where id = 2)

BUG: When trying to upload an image for FAQ Category the following error occurs:
500 Server error Sorry, server encountered an error, please try again later. SQLSTATE[42S22]: Column not found: 1054 Unknown column 'image' in 'field list' (Connection: mysql, SQL: insert into faq_categories (name, title, slug, description, faq_category_id, order_no, active, private, image, updated_at, created_at) values (FAQ, Testing, testing, Server error. Sorry, server encountered an error, please try again later., ?, 1, 1, ?, images/uy8XhxHsDXCnNwCauF6KR6hluYUIs4pLvK3KUshi.png, 2023-04-03 10:18:07, 2023-04-03 10:18:07))

BUG: In Beta 2 email does not give an error from Beta 1, however, verification emails are not sent. I've checked the .env file to see if I made any errors in the Forum installation setup, but it still doesn't work. I managed to activate my account via phpMyAdmin by entering manually when my email was verified.

BUG: After successfully adding the Knowledge Base category, I proceeded to add a Knowledge Base article. Both adding the category and article worked fine. However, even though I am able to access "domain.com/knowledgebase" and see the article, when I click on it, the URL changes to "domain.com/knowledgebase/testing-kbc," but it actually shows "domain.com/knowledgebase" aka it doesn't show article.

BUG: Even after changing “Name” and “Page Title” under Manage/Settings, the forum still shows “Simple Forum ExampleName” in the browser tab instead of “ExampleName Page”.

SUGGESTION: Current forum is missing a text editor, while the old version had one (actually it had 3 if I remember well). My suggestion is to add TinyMCE as the only option for simplicity. https://www.tiny.cloud/docs/integrations/laravel/laravel-introduction/

SUGGESTION: Current forum is missing the messages feature, while the old version had that feature.

SUGGESTION: Adding an external storage option like Wasabi as it is cheap and fast. (I can see in .env that AWS is added as external storage, but my suggestion would be Wasabi as its ultra-simple to set up for users) https://github.com/ProbablyRational/wasabi-storage

UPDATE ON BUG: While exploring the code, I discovered that the field "APP_NAME="Simple Forum"" in the ".env" file is not dynamic. Therefore, I changed it to "APP_NAME="ExampleName"" in the hope that it would update the name. However, even after clearing all cookies, the forum was still called "Simple Forum." Upon further investigation, I found that the forum name is actually pulled from the "en.json" language file. When I changed the value of "Simple Forum": "Simple Forum" (line 452) to "Simple Forum": "ExampleName," the browser's tab name was updated.

My suggestion would be to remove "Simple Forum" from the language file in the production version of the script. Usually, forum names are not translatable as they are seen as brands. Therefore, they do not have linguistic variations.

Hello guys!

Here are some new/old bugs. I'll continue to report everything I find.

BUG: When changing the editor from SimpleDME to TinyMCE, the editor is not changed in all places. For example, when replying to a thread. Furthermore, if the selected editor is TinyMCE, adding FAQs (not FAQs category) results in the error "The body field is required," while when using SimpleDME to add FAQs, everything works fine.

BUG: The bug with uploading images is still persistent in Beta 3. When uploading the Badge image, the preview works fine. Once saved, text appears instead of the image. The same thing happens with the logo.

BUG: When logged out in the mobile version, the link "Manage" is present, although it is grayed out and cannot be clicked. I don't know if this is actually a bug or a feature, but to me, it seems like a bug.

BUG: The same bug as in version Beta 2 still exists with adding a Knowledge Base article. The category is displayed under Knowledge Base, but not the articles themselves.

BUG: Both the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy are present only on the /registration pages. Since I am from the EU, it is mandatory that users can access both the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy from every single page. Thus, my suggestion is to add them to the footer. Maybe to distinguish them a bit, they could be under Home, Pages, Knowledge Base, FAQs, and Contact. Anyway, it's your app, your decision.