They also noted that their ISP occasionally reassigns IP addresses, so it's possibly they just got one with an abuse history.

IP reassignment is common for both DSL and cable. Although users usually keep their IPs for weeks or months at a time these days, at some point it does get changed.

It's also possible to ban by user ID, so be sure to check for that as well. But it seems unlikely to be the problem here, if they're not banned by email.

As an admin you can see the IP address of where people posted from - maybe check a few of the IP addresses that user posted from, to see if one or more of those are listed in the Banning list.

If I go to the "users" section and try to look up their account, I can't find it.

That is really odd. Note that you can search the user list by email, so you should find it that way. Or maybe the user misremembered under which email address they registered?

I'm not aware of a war archive of the original JForum (the versions that came before 2.2). You can find the final source code of version 2.1.8 by the original maintainer (Rafael Steil) at https://github.com/rafaelsteil/jforum2. From that, you can build the war.

We've upped the container and Java requirements at various points in time as older versions became obsolete, but we haven't documented which JForum version required what.

But all your software is so old that it doesn't matter much - compared to upgrading from Windows Server 2003, upgrading Java and TC should be a piece of cake (And as discussed above, TC 5.5 will not do - TC 8 is the minimum, and there is no good reason not to use TC 9.)

As to upgrading JForum, check out https://community.jforum.net/posts/list/285.page for the experience of someone going from 2.1 to the current version

If you're an admin of the JForum installation, check the Admin Control Panel. If it is set to check for new versions, it will tell you which one you have, and which one is the latest.

Alternatively, check the installed files - WEB-INF/config/SystemGlobals.properties has the version at the very end of the file.

Hi- I think you looked at the wrong column on that page. What it tells you is that any Tomcat version 8.0 or newer supports Servlets 3.1. I would advise to use 9.x or 10.1.x.

As to the Java version, JForum requires at least Java 8, and it runs fine under Java 11.

Be aware that starting with version 10, Tomcat implements JakarteEE servlets, not Javax servlets, so you will have to run JForum (which uses Javax servlets) in the webapps-jakartaee folder, as described in https://tomcat.apache.org/migration-10.html#Specification_APIs. if you want to avoid that, just use Tomcat 9.

We're way behind with this announcement, but back in October we released JForum 2.8.3, which had the following improvements:

fix problem when using Oracle as database

use system-wide date format in the user profile for the registration date

fixed a couple of bugs in the mail sending code

made a couple of changes for Wildfly compatibility

fix Commons FileUpload vulnerability

added Admin Config option to disable private messages

fixed another XSS vulnerability

A full list of new features is at https://sourceforge.net/p/jforum2/wiki2/NewFeatures283/, upgrade instructions are at https://sourceforge.net/p/jforum2/wiki2/UpgradingFrom282to283/ and you can download it from https://sourceforge.net/projects/jforum2/files/. The documentation is at https://sourceforge.net/p/jforum2/wiki2/Documentation/

All feedback is welcome.

Can you say that in English?

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