The infamous makers of the vBulletin forum software announced Friday that it had released a revised version of its new vBulletin 3. The release, which was not expected, reportedly closes security holes in the vb3's WYSIWYG editor. The editor is a new feature native to vb3 allowing users to post messages in a graphical format. Buttons for Bold, Italics, and Underline among others replace tradtional BB code, which many users find tedius.

The software revision includes other 'non-security' updates from Jelsoft's vBulletin 3.01. Among the upgrades includes an option to allow “custom profile fields” to contain more than 250 charactors. In addition, viewing permission for certain custom profile fields is now controllable by usergroups.

In addition to other features, the release features a new option to create a moderator log when users edit threads, polls, or modifies an attachment.

The release contains two “unsupported improvements.” Forum administrators will have to make “minor code changes” in order to take advantage of two new improvements. The two improvements are

• “Full-text searching for MySQL 4.0 users.
• Ability to use an external SMTP server (with username and password) instead of PHP's built-in mail() function.”

A lengthy list of bug fixes accompanies the release. Template changes have also been made.

For more information on the new vBulletin 3.02 and it's bug fixes, visit the official announcement at http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?postid=696712.

About vBulletin
vBulletin is a powerful community solution that makes it easy to add a forum messaging system to your web site. vBulletin is developed using PHP and MySQL (a highly efficient open-source database). This solid back end technology allowed us to develop a product that is both amazingly fast, yet reassuringly stable.