Hi all!
I wanted to let you know that we've just released 4.7.0 Beta 1 and I wanted to run though some of the highlights on the release notes page.
We recently released a cool little feature to enable you to consolidate a forum and all sub-forums into a single list of topics, much like the global fluid view mode. We took onboard some feedback and made it a little more efficient and also reversed the checkboxes so they are ticked by default as some reached out to let us know it was confusing loading a page with content and unchecked boxes. We also added the new URL parameters into the default robots.txt to avoid Google and friends adding faceted pages into its index.
This week, @Daniel Fadded hCaptcha as a new CAPTCHA method to be used on the contact us form, guest posting and other areas a captcha is used. hCaptcha seems to be a more robust method to keep those pesky bots out. You will need to sign up to hCaptcha, but it's a short registration process and they have a free tier which should be all you need.
One of our enterprise clients mentioned that bots and guests are searching for random things which makes analysing the search trends difficult, so we've added a feature to allow you to omit member groups from adding to the anonymised search logs.
Another popular piece of feedback was to add 'solved' and 'unsolved' filters to the activity stream, and @Andy Millne did just that for 4.7.0.
Elsewhere, @Stuart Silvester improved the speed at which Elastic Search re-indexes the site (useful as 4.7.0 needs a re-index due to the new solved filters).
Our master API person @Daniel F made some improvements to the Zapier integration for this release.
We have raised the minimum PHP version to 7.4, but we do recommend 8.0. We are still working through 8.1 compatibility.
Our cloud platform has new architecture to remove a lot of existing if( \IPS\CIC ) code that you may have seen in our codebase. Moving all cloud functionality into its own area means that those on the self hosted platform won't have to run these checks constantly in the code.
We chose to name this release 4.7.0 because of the PHP minimum version changes and the cloud platform code consolidation.
Let me know if you have any questions on this next release.