This is the story of a journey I am taking. I have a rough idea where I am heading but I feel like an explorer heading into unchartered territory with only a rough map sketched on a torn scrap of paper as my guide.  By the time I have finished writing this ar­ticle I will not have completed my journey; this is only the beginning but, I hope, others may benefit from reading my story.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us...Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859

People may be curious as to why I’ve chosen to open my insignificant scribblings with one of the world’s literary masterpieces, considering I haven’t written much about anything lately.  I’ve been away because I overhauled this website in order to install Kunena version 4.0.  This took weeks of investigation, sifting the morass of defects reported on the Kunena website and, generally, re-learning just about everything I thought I knew.  In the last 3 months there have been five new releases of Kunena and, in my opinion, K 4.0 is no better today that when the project commenced 2 years ago: new features are added every day; features that worked in one release break in the next; the product is largely untested; and, the initial excitement surrounding the new Crypsis template has all but evaporated.  I was prepared to give Kunena the benefit of the doubt but things have gone from bad to impossible.

It has become impossible because support for Kunena has all but disappeared.  Questions asked at the Kunena forum languish for days, sometimes weeks, without reply and the response, if one is given, is likely to be “looks OK for me”.  Recently the developers attempted to arrest the paralysis that has gripped the community by writing an outline of the direction where they want to lead the project, entitled “What’s upcoming on the next big version:  Kunena 5.0?”.  Although the outline is sketchy on details, it prompted me to ask some questions on the Kunena forum.  Some of the answers made me more than just a little nervous; some of the

In recent articles about K 4.0.5 I made some points about difficulties people will have installing third-party Kunena templates and the changed behaviour with the subscribe checkbox.  Another new feature added to this so-called “minor” release adds the ability to incorporate a “teaser” ability on your forum but it’s not for everyone and the devil is in the detail.

In addition to the features added to K 4.0.5, the Kunena development team has recently announced plans for the next major release of Kunena [K 5.0] together with plans to overhaul their website and update the user documentation.

Another unannounced (and apparently untested) change was made in Kunena 4.0.5 [K 4.0.5] that affects everyone who uses J! 3.4.  The change is embarrassing for me, personally, and for everyone who designs and sells Kunena templates.  The problem is:  people use K 4.0.5 with J! 3.4 will not be able to install other forum templates!

Kunena 4.0.5 [K 4.0.5]—a so-called “minor” update that was supposed to fix defects/bugs in earlier versions—added some new features.  One of the new features, in particular, has caused the community to openly criticise the development team for failing to engage with them about how the project is being managed.

The affected item is the configuration setting:  Components » Configuration » Users » Subscriptions » Check Subscription Box.

Without engaging the community beforehand, the developers decided to change this setting’s behaviour.  For those who do not know, I have previously documented this setting’s behaviour in one of my other articles.  The changes were “announced” in the release notes for K 4.0.5 as “Subscribe’s box (sic) is always enabled #3303”; the actual link to the GitHub item was not included in the release notes.  Instead it was left to the community to discover the change when it became apparent that the Kunena users forum had implemented the feature.  Until questions were asked on the forum, no-one had any knowledge about how to adjust to this abrupt change.  The result has been that the change has angered the community with some people “cursing” the day they had updated to this latest version of the forum software.

The Kunena development team has been working on a new feature (expected in a future release of K 4.0[1]) to automatically subscribe forum users so that they will receive emails whenever there is any forum activity on websites where Kunena is installed.  This article examines the legal implications of this feature as a core part of the Kunena framework.

In a previous article I wrote about autosubscription in terms of technical feasibility, design, viability and risk management.  Although it’s technically feasible to automatically subscribe all users to receive emails whenever a new topic or reply is posted on a web-based discussion forum like Kunena, there are a number of caveats if you intend to implement such a feature.  When I wrote my earlier article the Kunena team had no plans or intention to implement an autosubscription feature within Kunena.  The situation has changed and, aware of the risks that this may involve, the developers intend to add a new feature to the Kunena component that will give website owners the ability to automatically subscribe users of their websites to receive unsolicited content via email.

There are serious legal consequences of this idea that website owners need to be aware of and, in my opinion, that the Kunena developers have not properly considered.