Ugh, 2.1.4 is seriously outdated. But I'm happy to hear that even after all that time, JForum continues to be useful

To my knowledge, no such script exists. You'll have to go through the scripts in https://sourceforge.net/p/jforum2/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/upgrade/ one by one.

You're bound to bump into some issue or other, but feel free to come back here with questions, and we'll try to help out.

I don't remember that discussion (might have been before my time), but currently this option does not exist. But I can see how an unlimited PM capability might be unwanted or downright problematic, so I'll add that switch for the next version. But it might be a while until that is released, so for the time being commenting out the PM button (in default/user_profile.htm and default/mobile/user_profile.htm) and the link to the PM page (in default/header.htm) is your best option.

Thanks for the feedback, it's good to hear that the code does what it is supposed to do

As to #1: Hard to say if MySQL doesn't tell what the warnings are. But being warnings, I wouldn't be concerned.

#2: Yes, start modifying header.html and bottom.htm, and see how far that gets you. The FreeMarker language has extensive docs at https://freemarker.apache.org/

#3: https://sourceforge.net/p/jforum2/wiki2/Documentation/ links to a few pages about SSO. But I've never used that, and the code hasn't been touched in a long time, so I'm not sure how well that still works. If you want to abandon SSO, I think any value in there is OK - nothing but the login process touches the password.

#4: The jforum_users table has a column user_posts which track the number of posts, but for the purpose of deleting accounts I'm not sure I'd trust it.

select u.user_id, u.user_email, count(p.user_id) from jforum_users u left join jforum_posts p on p.user_id = u.user_id group by u.user_id
shows you which user has how many posts

select u.user_id from jforum_users u left join jforum_posts p on p.user_id = u.user_id group by u.user_id having count(p.user_id) = 0
picks the ones that have 0 posts

delete from jforum_users where id in (select u.user_id from jforum_users u left join jforum_posts p on p.user_id = u.user_id having count(p.user_id) = 0)
deletes those having 0 posts - I think, but haven't tested it

JForum indeed doesn't have plugins or themes, so you would make any changes to the only available theme, which is called "default". When you run JForum, there is a top-level directory called "templates", in which you'll find the front-end code (HTML enriched with FreeMarker code to make it dynamic) and the images, JavaScript and CSS.

we would need to adapt a WYSIWYG text panel to that forum instead these one

You mean you want to use rich text editor like one of https://itsfoss.com/open-source-wysiwyg-editors/? That's possible in principle, although you'll want one that can output BBCode, since that's what JForum uses to format text. The template that contains the textarea for posts (which is where you would need to plug in the WYSIWYG editor) is called post_form.htm

So in that cas, can we take the code and try to adapt ir or it don't work in that way?

JForum is open source software, so you're free to modify it and run it with your modifications within the bounds of its license (which is quite permissive).

172.28.200.26 is a private server on your network - so you have a sys admin to talk to

That's JForum logging output, which doesn't add anything to the exception you posted earlier. What you want is the JavaMail debug output.

"Connection reset" frequently points to a networking issue rather than an application issue. You can add "mail.debug=true" to the mail properties on the Config page. After restarting the web app you should then see lots of debugging output in the logs; maybe that points to something.

I haven't encountered problems running JForum on Java 11. If there were any, that would certainly be a bug that would likely be fixed soon.

As to Jakarta 9, I have just done a quick test on Tomcat 10.1, and it seems to runs fine in Tomcat's webapps-javaee folder. Have you tried that? I'm not sure if other servlet containers have a similar facility.

As to the underlying question: eventually we'll certainly require newer Java and JakartaEE versions, but given that it seems to run fine as is, it's not a high priority right now.

You can try this jar file - it has the mail sending fixes.

Turns out that there were not one, but two bugs in the mail sending code - which must have been there for ages, without anyone ever noticing them. Kudos for triggering them!

My reading of the situation was pretty much completely wrong, including the use of the "Allow HTML" setting. The relevant setting that goes with "notifyText" is actually "Include the message contents within the notification email".

But that doesn't seem to have to do anything with the bug, which I suspect is caused by reusing the MimeMessage object. I need to look into avoiding that.

That doesn't look like the right fix, but don't worry - I already have a fix, and just need to test it. Patience

Yes, that's exactly what it is.