Automatic subscriptions—the ability to enforce a website owner’s policy that all members of the site “automatically” receive email notifications whenever there is some new forum activity (a new topic created or replies made to existing topics)—is a subject that has been discussed going back as far as I can remember. People have asked for the Kunena project team to deliver features that allow them to “autosubscribe” members of their forums to categories and topics without their members having to do anything except to join their websites. This is a subject that has as many different views about how to implement a solution as well as different opinions about whether such methods are ethical, “legitimate”, workable, worthy or legal in terms of the protection of an individual’s right to privacy or an individual’s right to choose.

The different views and opinions expressed by the wider Kunena community exist within the Kunena project team, too. In short, there is no simple answer to this very complex issue.

Running a PC-hosted website and trying to diagnose problems that people might have with Kunena are always difficult. They’re difficult because no-one else can actually see the problems first-hand.

Running XAMPP on a Windows 7 64-bit system (for example) is particularly troublesome.  XAMPP or WAMP don’t like to work on 64-bit Windows systems.  This is the main reason that I abandoned my web development on Windows 7 (64-bit) but I occasionally do some experimentation in Windows 7 (32-bit). The bigger problem that I have—and still not fully resolved—concerns the Windows firewall which makes it virtually impossible—the response times are far too long—trying to access web pages across a Windows-based LAN.  Perhaps these issues don’t occur with UNIX-based servers but I really don’t have the time, energy or motivation to set up a webhosting environment on my LAN.

The problems don’t end there, either, and some problems may be unusual because different versions of this kind of software install unusual implementations of PHP—unusual in the sense that real web-hosted solutions don’t run into those issues.

As a general background to this subject, there are many topics on the Joomla and Kunena discussion forums that help people who want to know how to migrate from J! 1.5. Basically there are three things that need to be moved from your existing website:

1. Joomla users;
2. Kunena forum messages; and
3. Kunena forum attachments.

Migrating from J! 1.5 is not the easiest thing to do and requires good planning beforehand. J! 1.5 is completely different to J! 3.x—the user tables are different, the Joomla articles are different, and the source code used in templates, components, plugins, languages and modules is completely different. Add to this that J! 3.x uses a different security model to J! 1.5 and you can see that you could spend days or weeks trying to update your old website.

For those people who are prepared to spend as much time as it takes to migrate their old J! 1.5 website, this article may not be for you. This article describes the service I can provide if you decide that you do not have the time or skill to this job yourself.

When you install Kunena for the first time it usually works “out of the box” without making any changes to the configuration settings. There are, however, a few changes you might consider making to improve the way your forum works and to make it better for your members.

Based on my own experience using Kunena for several years, this article discusses some of those changes.