A client asked me today “What, in your opinion, is the best forum product?”  Without hesitation I replied, “Kunena is the ‘only’ forum product for Joomla!”  Of course there are other forum products—there are other forum products for Joomla—but Kunena is the only product that I can recommend with total con­fi­dence.  The announcement in April this year about K 4.0 beta was good news.  It has taken the Kunena team more than 2 years to now be in a position to offer a version of the next generation of Kunena for the community to test.  How has the com­munity responded and how will the com­munity judge this next, new version that has taken so long to produce?  Only time will tell, of course.

The article about K 4.0 beta was well-written and I congratulate its author, Florian Dal Fitto, for taking charge of the marketing side of things.  K 4.0 still only exists as a beta version—and there is no shame in acknow­ledging that all beta software contains defects (even lots of defects).  Given the deepening mystery surrounding the project and the information vacuum that we’ve had for months, I was very pleased that Florian’s article contained more information (including some screenshots) about the team’s plans over the coming weeks.  Leaving aside the fact that the K 4.0 beta versions that have been released to date did (and still do) contain a lot of errors—we should not punish the team for those faults—overall the whole K 4.0 story has been a disappointing one and, I am sorry to say, it still disappoints me.

I’ve recently installed Kunena on my website and love its functionality. The only problem is I’m getting spam and it’s getting worse.  Are there recommendations or some sort of cheat sheet to follow to stop these bad guys/robots?a “forum user”, Kunena forum, 3 May 2015

The problem with spam is not confined to Kunena.  Indeed, the discussion about forum spam has been going on long before Kunena (or Joomla) first appeared.  People can spend almost as much time researching the subject as they may have to spend dealing with an outbreak of spam in their forums. The short answer to the question “How can I stop forum spam [in Kunena]?” is that you cannot.  You can never completely eradicate spam—there is no 100% guaranteed solution to combat spam.  Kunena does have some configuration settings that will help you to manage the amount of spam that you may get but those configuration settings, by themselves, will not completely innoculate you against the spam epidemic.  This article is therefore only a guide—a collection of some ideas that I have found useful—in minimising the level of spam in your forum.

One of the most commonly asked questions among users of Kunena (and the same thing is true for any Joomla extension) is “Which CSS file should I change …” (for all kinds of reasons).  This question has been “answered” in variously different ways—some good and some bad—including recommending that people directly edit the file kunena.forum.css (or, worse, the file kunena.forum-min.css).  This is actually very bad advice—and that’s not just my personal opinion!

Never directly edit or replace the original Kunena template source files including the .CSS files! Any changes you make will be overwritten when you upgrade or re-install Kunena.

Aside from the fact that Kunena installs its own CSS files (and minified versions of them) and apart from the fact that you can edit these files (if you really have the enthusiasm to wade through pages of not-very-well documented code) any changes that you make to these files will be lost when you install a new version of Kunena or re-install (or downgrade from) the version that you are currently using.

The Kunena team has heard the community and has produced K 3.0.8.  The announcement about K 3.0.8 was better handled than was the case with its predecessor with messages posted in the forum, on Twitter and in Google+.  The best news that I have seen is that the Joomla autoupdate feature works with K 3.0.8.

Although there are a couple of minor issues with this version—and from all accounts the developers are looking to fix those things in K 3.0.9—most of the reported problems have been attended to.

It is unusual for a maintenance release to add new features but a welcome improvement is that the team has looked at improving search engine page rankings by replacing <H2> elements with <H1> elements.  This change may affect the way that some Kunena templates are displayed on users’ websites but I don’t think these problems are impossible to overcome.  It was unfortunate to read in one case where a member of the community was unable to employ K 3.0.8 on his site and he felt compelled to downgrade to K 3.0.7.

However, a significant problem (discussed in a previous article) remains for K 3.0.8 concerning the recommended installation (or upgrade) method described in the Kunena Wiki site.

Imagine that you have decided to invite your family or friends to a restaurant: you’re not trying to impress anyone; you just want to enjoy a relaxing meal out.  You do the necessary preparations—book the restaurant, get a couple of bottles of your favourite wine from home—arrive and you’re seated at the table.  The waiter hands out the dinner menus and talks about the “specials”.  You and your guests decide to order the special meals and open your wine.  After a couple of hours, you’ve eaten the bread, the bottles of wine are empty but the meal still hasn’t arrived.  You start to get a little nervous (and impatient) because you and your guests haven’t eaten.

You call the waiter’s attention to your agitated state and and your growing concerns for you and your guests (even though other patrons at the restaurant seem to be enjoying “standard menu” meals).  The waiter smiles disingenuously and you hear something like “chef is just putting the final touches on your meals” and that you will be served “soon”.  Perhaps the alcohol has affected your judgement but with some reluctance you decide to accept the waiter’s explanation, remain seated at the table getting hungrier (and more impatient) as the night wears on.  What started out as a pleasant evening is soon turning into a nightmare.

Does this sound familiar?  Even if you haven’t experienced this, your appetite would have been ruined not to mention your embarrassment and reputation as an epicure.