It might be April Fool's Day, but JaxBoards 2.0.2 is anything but foolish.

Time zone oddities and issues with topic/forum read markers should be fixed now. Fingers crossed.

Sean fixed an annoying bug where users who don't have a birthday filled out aren't able to update some of their profile fields.

The Quick Reply button has a close button again. We're not sure when the "X" button ran away, but either way, it's back now. Thanks again to Sean for looking into this.

One of the nice things about the Googlebot is it basically serves as an automated testing suite. If it can't crawl a page for whatever reason, it'll tell you in Google Search Console. This analysis has helped me fix a few bugs that could break things for human users as well. For example, it helped me find a bug that caused JaxBoards to crash if a guest user tried to access any topic containing a poll. Whoops. Similarly, I found an issue with certain YouTube links (I think those containing start/endtime parameters). The problematic code should be fixed now. Also, I expanded the size of the "location_verbose" field in the sessions table from a maximum of 100 characters to 128. This fixed a rare bug where JaxBoards would crash if anyone tried to view a topic with a topic title of more than 87 characters in length.

Some of these bugs have been issues since the beginning and prevented a nontrivial number of pages from being visible in search engines - if Google runs into too many broken pages, sometimes it'll stop trying to crawl other pages as well.

Bots and crawlers become a LOT more active almost as soon as I made these changes. This is basically a good thing, since a lot of traffic comes from search engines like Google and Bing, and since it's helped us fix bugs in the JaxBoards software. On the other hand, I don't want to roll out the red carpet for every bot, since many bots provide no value to site owners and communities, and some bots (especially bots training LLMs) consume so much bandwidth that they can crash your site. That's not to mention some of the other ethical quandaries with gen AI bots. For now I want to monitor how bots are behaving after I made these changes, though soon I'll probably need to start blocking or throttling the less useful bots.

Also, WTL has been cooking up some great updates that add more professional rigor to the JaxBoards codebase. Not all of these changes in production yet, but I am impressed with what he's doing! If you'd like to follow along with the latest code changes, here's another reminder that our GitHub is a thing.

Thanks for the shoutout Bibby! Thank you for using Jaxboards for so many years. You were the inspiration behind all of this work (truly!), and it means so much to me that you'd stay with the software despite it gradually declining in reliability (until this recent maintenance, which hopefully makes it work well in 2025!)

I've thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of rewriting and rebuilding all of the parts of Jaxboards that needed to be redone to deal with this modern world we live in.

At this point, most of the major user-facing bugs have been fixed (if you find any, just let me know). The remaining work is all what I would call "low priority" and I'll just continue hacking away at it.

s***, man. Thanks for making this software, Sean. I didn't know we'd still be using it in 2025, but I'm glad it's still quite reliable.

Actually nearly all the changes I've done so far are live in the codebase too although they're mostly stuff that shouldn't impact the end user experience and more for development process improvements- it's a big passion of mine and it's cool to see an old code base come back to life and get as much help from modern tools as possible- it's the kind of thing I'm already doing professionally anyway right now, might as well use those skills for something fun.

@Sean Aw thanks - I am forever a JaxBoards megafan! I am most grateful for all your help and support for the last decade and a half, and it's been awesome to see JaxBoards get modernized.

@Mario Perhaps I should clarify. When I wrote the original post, I was deploying changes in an ad hoc manner, and some of your changes weren't live on this site yet. However, Sean helped me set up Git on the server, which has made it a lot easier to make sure that the production code matches what's in GitHub.