Software Update: vBulletin 3.5.1 / 3.0.10 / 2.3.8

Many websites have a forum where users can engage in various discussions with each other. To do this in a clear form, a handy piece of software is needed so that you can assign different rights with which the forum can be managed. Of these forum packages, vBulletin is one of them and has been developed for a web server with a PHP-MySQL environment. An update has been released for three branches with version numbers 3.5.1, 3.0.10 and 2.3.8 to fix two security vulnerabilities. In addition, a number of changes have been made in version 3.5.1. The announcement looks like this:

Newly discovered flaws in Internet Explorer and PHP have necessitated a security release for all three vBulletin branches.

The first flaw is in Microsoft Internet Explorer. It affects vBulletin image uploads and potentially opens a cross-site-scripting exploit. It has affected many web-based applications that allow image uploads, including phpBB and Hotmail.

The second flaw is in PHP and may allow the entry of unsanitized data into several areas in vBulletin. This may create security holes that are not directly caused by vBulletin, simply exploited through vBulletin as it uses affected PHP code. PHP 4.4.1 has been released to address this issue (no updated PHP5 is available yet).

Version 3.5.1:

• New AJAX disable option
  This allows the administrator to enable AJAX, disable AJAX or disable just those AJAX features which can be troublesome due to character set issues.
• IconV use where available
  If IconV is installed on your server (which we strongly recommend) vBulletin will now use its character set conversion abilities rather than relying on its own for AJAX-submitted data. This is of especial interest to boards running with non-latin characters such as Chinese, Arabic etc.
• Option to switch email banning system back to 3.0.x settings
  An option now exists to change the new email banning system’s behavior back to the more aggressive method employed by vBulletin 3.0.x. This means that banned words / letters etc. will be matched anywhere within the email address, rather than matching from the end of the address towards the start. This means that you can specify ‘@example.’ to ban both example.com and example.co.uk, whereas with the 3.5.x system you would have to expressly ban both.
• Product install code execution order changed
  Install code specified in a product XML file is now executed before the product record is inserted into the database. This allows far more flexibility to the code to be run when installing a product.
• Increased Compatibility with MySQL 5
  MySQL 5 has now been declared stable and is therefore supported by vBulletin. With 3.5.1 previous compatibility issues with MySQL 5 have been addressed, allowing vBulletin to run without errors. However, it should be noted that vBulletin is not yet compatible with MySQL 5 running in Strict Mode, and this should be disabled in the MySQL configuration or using the new option in config.php.