BAM/Board Announcements Manager is officially ready for MyBB 1.6 and MyBB 1.8 forums. BAM allows you to create and to manage announcements in your forum header without requiring edits to the templates, and uses a style for announcements that is similar to that of the MyBB official support forum. It also allows for features such as usergroup based permissions and random selection of announcements.
2/27/2020: Bam 2.0 update! New features:
Dismissable announcements!
Paste a link to specific pages to display your announcements. Most MyBB pages are fully supported! (Including SEO-friendly URLs built into MyBB. )
Global announcements are now handled on a per-announcement basis. You can also make announcements display on multiple pages, specific forums, and more.
Random mode redesigned and significantly improved.
Three new color styles, for a total of seven.
New jquery effects, style settings, and many polishes.
Activate or deactivate an announcement with only a single click.
Add new tags, variables, and directives for more features.
New tags to load announcements with a custom template, or only on specific themes and languages. (HTML is also supported in BAM 2.0)
1.0: Key Features:
Support for an unlimited number of header announcements, with reordering capabilities.
Four included color classes, with additional support for custom classes.
usergroup permission control by announcement.
Support for BBcode and emoticons in announcements.
Ability to optionally display the date posted on announcements.
Ability to display announcements globally.
Ability to parse the username if {$username} is placed in an announcement. (Parses to "Guest" if the user is not logged in. )
Optional random mode functionality.
Ability to turn announcement into a link.
Random mode
BAM includes an alternative mode that allows it to select announcements randomly instead of displaying all available announcements, similar to SMF style announcements. This feature is disabled by default, but can be enabled and configured in the plugin's configuration settings. You can also "pin" announcements, allowing them to display consistently, regardless of additional randomly selected announcements.
Global Announcements
By default, announcements only display on the forum index. BAM allows you to configure announcements to display globally across your forum if desired. BAM also has an advanced setting that allows you to define which page will be considered the "index" page, so if you rename index.php or use your portal page as the homepage, the announcements plugin can be configured to work properly under the changed file names/index pages for more advanced users.
Screenshots: These screenshots were taken on MyBB 1.6 forums, but the 1.8 version of this plugin is very similar.
Deutsch (German) Translation: See this post courtesy of tc4me for German translation.
Licensing & Copyright:
This plugin is licensed under the GNU GPL, version 3.
You may not claim this plugin as your own work.
This plugin comes with no warranty. It has been tested and has no known issues, but it cannot be guaranteed to work perfectly on your forum. You are using this plugin at your own risk.
MyBB 1.6: Download BAM 1.6. This version is a very old version that is ONLY compatible with MyBB 1.6.x forums. It is exclusively available here. You cannot find the MyBB 1.6 version anywhere else!
MyBB 1.8.x Download BAM 2.0. This is the the official release for the latest version of BAM, and is the recommended release for download!
If you would prefer to use the original BAM, I recommend downloading BAM 1.0 from here instead of the MyBB mod site version. I have a slightly updated version of BAM 1.0 here that has a fix for MySQL 8.x and PHP 7.3.x forums. You can also find the updated version on GitHub. The MyBB mod site version is unpatched from the original, and is thus not recommended for newer servers.
It's officially approved on the MyBB mod site[/url]. I made some changes to it and also licensed it as open source under the GNU GPL. I've updated the version for MyBB 1.8 posted here.
The 1.6 version is a backport of the 1.8 version and hasn't been updated yet. I will be doing an updated version for BAM 1.6 as well as soon as I can find time to test some ACP changes on MyBB 1.6. Looks like the MyBB 1.6 version will only be found here as they've pretty much closed the 1.6 mod site on mybb.com.
When the plugin "Board Announcements Manager (1.0)" is enabled members can no longer respond to forum posts.
It can only create new topic ..
<snip>
Mod Note: We advise you to not publicly post login information on the forums. I've forwarded the information to Darth-Apple (aka Hans-Squeaky) on your behalf. -SL (Makestation Mod)
After over five years, I am finally updating this. I have had an influx of requests for this for a very long time. Dismissable announcements, more granularity on which pages announcements are posted (on a per-announcement basis), more color classes, and a number of other things are being implemented.
A beta release is going to be coming in the next couple of weeks on github, and a final release will be coming in 2-3 months. I have not announced this on the MyBB community forums yet. I'm looking for ideas on what people would want to see in it before I finish the beta and release it!
What I want to hear from the community is on ideas on how to make this plugin better. Your feedback is very important to me, as it allows me to get things working well before I post it at MyBB and throw it to the wolves. In particular,
- What variables would be useful to have in announcements? Currently, only {$username} is supported.
- What would be a good use of announcements on Makestation? What features would be useful that have not been implemented?
- How should "random mode" be used? To my understanding, this is a rarely used feature. I would like to find ways to make it more useful, e.g. by making it easier for admins to put "random announcements selectors" on different sections of the page.
- What new features would be helpful for administrators in this plugin? What does the current BAM version lack respective to other ways of handling announcements on forums and communities?
If anyone has any suggestions on how this plugin could be made better, please send them my way. I'm wrapping up the initial code changes and have everything mostly working! Testing, debugging, and some fine tuning will be happening over the next few weeks, and I will be pushing an official beta to be announced over at MyBB very shortly.
(And please, by all means, don't hesitate! I'd rather get ideas here before I get feedback at MyBB. People there tend to be very critical of plugin developers, so it's always a little nerve-wracking once things get moving in the public eye of things. )
If you're arriving here from Google or from the MyBB community forums, please be aware that this plugin is still in the final stages of development, and there is still a lot of testing that is in progress. It works and is installed here on Makestation as we develop it. It is, however, nowhere near as stable as BAM 1.0 while it is still in beta status. If you aren't okay with dealing with a few bugs, hang tight for the next several weeks and the official release will be out shortly!
Beta #2 released on github. This version is the first version I'd say is safe to use on a live board. It's been working very well over here and I think I've ironed out most of the bugs. https://github.com/Darth-Apple/BAM/tree/BAM-2-Beta
If you used BAM 1, you won’t want to miss this version. It is a huge update. About 75% of the code was rewritten and reworked, and a lot of very advanced functionality you can’t find elsewhere is in the new version. Release coming in about a week, very soon!
There are some Easter egg features too. I truly believe it’s going to be a useful update for a lot of people in terms of some of the things the new version can do. It's probably d*** near the hardest I've ever worked on a plugin.
Nice input sanitation.
Was trying to figure out why using HTML encoded payloads wasn't working in event handlers or as src="javascript:" wasn't working, then rage-clicking "Edit as HTML" led me to find &zwnj being injected in both javascript and event handlers. LOL
Dunno if you added that or if it's a MyBB feature by default, but pretty good antiXSS lmao
Haha, you made my day by NOT reporting that as a bug. People used to complain that it wouldn’t let JavaScript be posted in announcements. I went out of my way to make sure it didn’t. Incidentally, the MyBB ACP is full of security holes (I’ve seen several SQL injections out in plain code), but it’s the ACP. If someone can access the ACP, you’re already screwed.
If you absolutely need JavaScript, you have to explicitly declare a different template with the [@template:] tag, and then it just loads the raw template (which could have whatever you want in it) and runs with it. You can add templetes anyway from the ACP, so this is more of an advanced mode feature than it is a security issue. It’s there, for people who wanna do crazy things with it and who want to get a little more creative.
There was technically little reason to really sanitize anything from the ACP because any function that is loaded by the ACP at all kicks you out if you aren’t logged in as an admin. But I felt it was lazy to not sanitize anyway.