The entire project has now been moved from GoogleCode to SourceForge, so that's where you should look for the latest source code and create any tickets.

testing the post date

Not at the moment. Within the next few weeks, the project will be migrated to SourceForge (because GoogleCode will shut down), and all further releases as well as the source code repository will be hosted there. Does that help you, or were you looking for something sooner than that?

Not sure what NetBeans has to do with this. You would map the JForum resources in your web.xml file as appropriate.

What are the functions of "Message Approving" and "Ranking"? How to use them?

"Message Approving" should list all posts in need of approval - that ties in with your other bug report, which I haven't looked into yet.

"Ranking" allows you to automatically assign fancies titles to users once they reach a certain number of posts. You can try that on your local installation by creating a new ranking with, say, a minimum of 10 posts and some arbitrary title, and then that title should appear underneath the user name once you have posted at least 10 times.

"Can edit message" doesn't work: if I switch this option to "No" for admin group, the admin account are still able to edit all the messages in any forums.

You're right, that's a bug which will be fixed in an upcoming 2.4.1 release.

In addition to various bug fixes, new features include the possibility for forum administrators to block certain phrases from being used in posts as an anti-spam measure, and embedding of Vimeo videos analogous to Youtube videos. The release also contains a number of security fixes -some of which will be publicized soon- so all should upgrade. See https://code.google.com/p/jforum2/wiki/NewFeatures240 for more details.

A fix for that was not part of the release, and there is currently no ETA for a fix.

I'm afraid there is no such guide available.

With respect to the image, are you aware of the built-in avatar functionality? It lets each user upload an image which is then displayed alongside their profile (and next to each of their posts).

A partial list of the new and enhanced features in this release can be found here.

The war file contains the jakarta-regexp-1.4.jar library; does anyone know what that's needed for? JForum itself doesn't use it, and running the web app without it seems to work fine (although I'm sure I haven't done an exhaustive test).

I don't think I understand the problem - JForum's servlets and filter are mapped to "*.page" by default. That it would intercept an *.htm file sounds like you may have changed some things from their default...? What's more, JForum doesn't use JSP, so you shouldn't map any JSP pages.

This is a JCaptcha 1.0 jar file where I have replaced the com.sun.image.codec.jpeg stuff with javax.imageio.ImageIO. Replace the jar you currently have with this one and see what happens. Please understand that I have done no testing with this, it's just a build with the altered sources.

The problem is, JForum does not use that package, one of the dependent libraries does (jcaptcha in this case). If it was JForum, it might not be hard to replace with ImageIO (and would be a good thing to do), but as it is one would have to patch that library. A quick look at that source code finds it used in 9 files - I'll take a look at how hard it might be to patch that, but no promises.

What do you mean about the smilies - how are they affected? Those are just static images that are shipped with JForum, and should work on any platform.

While I don't understand what you mean by "why is not 3.X", if this question is about the beta version of JForum 3, then please note that these forums here are about a fork of the original JForum 2. I don't think there are any forums dedicated to the JForum 3 beta, but you can try your luck at the JForum forum at JavaRanch. But also note that JForum 3 is unfinished, and thus it's unlikely to be in use anywhere, so there are probably no people out there who can help you (unless you contact the developer directly).