But I don't understand why you don't upgrade JForum? How will you manage security vulnerabilities in Java EE 8 when it's not supported anymore?

We certainly will at some point. It's mostly a matter of time and priorities. TC 9 will likely be supported for a few more years, and currently JForum runs fine on TC 10 with the webapps-javaee mechanism, AFAIK. So there is no pressing need. Your use case is a bit of an outlier in that respect. This doesn't mean it'll be years before a JakartaEE version comes out, though. Just that we have nothing to announce right now.

But we also need to consider hosting, which in places is restricted to Java 8, meaning TC 9 (for example, on this very host). That would need to be updated in order to run the latest JForum, which we would want to do - we wouldn't want to maintain builds for different API levels.

there is a public Apache release available with support for Servlet 6 (which uses Jakarta EE).

We're aware of that, as I had mentioned above. That was just an example.

It is not as simple as that. JForum has various dependencies, some of which are also based on javax packages rather than jakarta ones. (Commons FileUpload comes to mind right away, although that one does have a Jakarta version.)

But it's not clear that a new version is needed. Some time ago, JForum ran fine in Tomcat's webapps-javaee folder; have you tried that?

I don't think banning is ever an automatic action. It's always manual through Admin Panel -> Banning. Maybe you played around with that, and did it inadvertently?

We're glad to help, as JForum is a pet project of ours

If you have access to the DB, check the jforum_banlist table. There are various ban types: by user ID, by email and by IP. Check if anything in there matches your case. (The anonymous user, which is used for non-logged-in sessions, has ID 1.)

If the test fail, there should be exception stack messages in the output - post those here in full. Without those, it's hard to tell what's going wrong.

This kind of issue is hard to track down without having access to the forum in question. Can you reproduce it on this site?

So the problem is i have 159 results. First page is good, but when i try to pass any other page i have no results.

You mean clicking the pagination buttons?

Experimentally i found that problem in the number of search keywords.

What specifically did you test, and what, exactly, was the result?

Should i use any other delimiter instead of spaces or it's a bug?

Spaces are correct.

They also noted that their ISP occasionally reassigns IP addresses, so it's possibly they just got one with an abuse history.

IP reassignment is common for both DSL and cable. Although users usually keep their IPs for weeks or months at a time these days, at some point it does get changed.

It's also possible to ban by user ID, so be sure to check for that as well. But it seems unlikely to be the problem here, if they're not banned by email.

As an admin you can see the IP address of where people posted from - maybe check a few of the IP addresses that user posted from, to see if one or more of those are listed in the Banning list.

If I go to the "users" section and try to look up their account, I can't find it.

That is really odd. Note that you can search the user list by email, so you should find it that way. Or maybe the user misremembered under which email address they registered?

I'm not aware of a war archive of the original JForum (the versions that came before 2.2). You can find the final source code of version 2.1.8 by the original maintainer (Rafael Steil) at https://github.com/rafaelsteil/jforum2. From that, you can build the war.

We've upped the container and Java requirements at various points in time as older versions became obsolete, but we haven't documented which JForum version required what.

But all your software is so old that it doesn't matter much - compared to upgrading from Windows Server 2003, upgrading Java and TC should be a piece of cake (And as discussed above, TC 5.5 will not do - TC 8 is the minimum, and there is no good reason not to use TC 9.)

As to upgrading JForum, check out https://community.jforum.net/posts/list/285.page for the experience of someone going from 2.1 to the current version

If you're an admin of the JForum installation, check the Admin Control Panel. If it is set to check for new versions, it will tell you which one you have, and which one is the latest.

Alternatively, check the installed files - WEB-INF/config/SystemGlobals.properties has the version at the very end of the file.

Hi- I think you looked at the wrong column on that page. What it tells you is that any Tomcat version 8.0 or newer supports Servlets 3.1. I would advise to use 9.x or 10.1.x.

As to the Java version, JForum requires at least Java 8, and it runs fine under Java 11.

Be aware that starting with version 10, Tomcat implements JakarteEE servlets, not Javax servlets, so you will have to run JForum (which uses Javax servlets) in the webapps-jakartaee folder, as described in https://tomcat.apache.org/migration-10.html#Specification_APIs. if you want to avoid that, just use Tomcat 9.

We're way behind with this announcement, but back in October we released JForum 2.8.3, which had the following improvements:

fix problem when using Oracle as database

use system-wide date format in the user profile for the registration date

fixed a couple of bugs in the mail sending code

made a couple of changes for Wildfly compatibility

fix Commons FileUpload vulnerability

added Admin Config option to disable private messages

fixed another XSS vulnerability

A full list of new features is at https://sourceforge.net/p/jforum2/wiki2/NewFeatures283/, upgrade instructions are at https://sourceforge.net/p/jforum2/wiki2/UpgradingFrom282to283/ and you can download it from https://sourceforge.net/projects/jforum2/files/. The documentation is at https://sourceforge.net/p/jforum2/wiki2/Documentation/

All feedback is welcome.

Can you say that in English?