AsmBB v2.4 has been released

What is AsmBB?

AsmBB is a web forum engine, written entirely in assembly language and using SQLite as a forum database engine.

AsmBB is aimed to provide the fastest and the lightest possible forum engine, able to handle huge communities on a very lightweight servers like cheap VPS or even shared hosting.

What's new in this release?

This v2.4 is important release because it contains several major new features. In brief:

Now is possible to attach files to the posts. The attachments permissions are managed per user.

"Limited access threads" were implemented. LAT are something like private messages on steroids. The owner of the thread can set some list of users that have access to the thread. The thread is invisible for the other users and can be used for private conversations.

Improved users permissions management. The users permissions can be edited by the administrator from the user profile. Separate permissions for the not logged-in visitors (anonymous users) were implemented. This way, now is possible to make closed forum, where only the registered users will be able to read the threads. The registration of new users can be closed as well, creating totally private forum closed for the outer world.

The real-time chat service was refactored in order to serve all connections in single thread. Now almost unlimited number of visitors can chat. Now the chat can be merged with the main forum pages with very minor performance degradation.

And of course, the new version is about 20% faster than the older versions, after the optimizations of the template rendering engine, the scheme of the database and the SQL requests.

New "Terminal" skin was developed for the lovers of the console user interface.

All revealed bugs were fixed.

The structure of the source code was changed as well. Now the dependency binary files (musl and sqlite library) are removed from the repository and instead a building script was developed that to download from Internet and build the latest versions of these libraries. This way only the latest versions of these libraries will be released with AsmBB.

How to download and install is explained in the following threads:

How to download the binary package and install AsmBB on shared hosting

How to install asmbb on VPS.

Get the source code, learn it, hack it:

AsmBB source code repository - browse the timeline, source files, download or clone.

Learning AsmBB source - source code discussed and explained.

Migrating to v2.4 from the older versions of AsmBB.

Because of the new features, the database schema of v2.4 if a little bit different than the schema of the older releases.

I have a migration script for this test forum, but this script will need some edits in order to be able to migrate from v2.3 and older.

If you have installed and working AsmBB forum and want to preserve the content of the forum, open a new thread here and post the check-in number of your AsmBB engine. It is located on the footer of the forum.

Then I will be able to provide a migration script that to convert your existing database to v2.4 database allowing updating the engine.