LES - Progress Update - 19th June 2026

AnthonySmith

Thought I would provide another update.

The PHP and MariaDB conversion is complete, I now have a fully functional vanilla 3.x (if you can still call it that) running on PHP 8.4.22 and MariaDB 11.8.8, even the polls plugin works

All the plugins are now going to be written in the development version and tested there. Once it is done, I will schedule some downtime and move LES to the new server with the new code base, but I will continue to provide updates anyway so you know what's coming when the switch is made.

Doing it this way to save having to make a 7.x version and an 8.x version then change after.

Plugin: Necro Post Gate done in dev version

Before necro

After

When done, negative karma will count x2 for necro posting.

--

Plugin: Flagged posts

This one will show you if a post has already been flagged and how many times, you can add weight to it by also flagging or you can just see it has already been reported and ignore it.

A mod/admin can take whatever action, and then this indicator will clear.

If a threshold is hit the post will be automatically hidden. This threshold is set lower for <XX day accounts, so for example, if someone signs up from PurplePeopleHost and immediately starts advertising, ignoring the rules, 5 flags would basically remove the post, so only mod/admins can see it.

somik

@AnthonySmith said:
someone signs up from PurplePeopleHost

Wont that be being racist towards purple people?

AnthonySmith

The admin side pattern automod plugin has also been done (a basic version)

Simple text replace on post or URL, auto block for known spammers and new accounts>

Nothing added yet, it won't be used lightly, but essentially if you write #dicks it will say #donkey when you post or if you create a link for https://hammertime.com when posted it will be https://www.colocrossing.com/ when posted etc etc.

AnthonySmith

@somik said: Wont that be being racist towards purple people?

I did not really want to admit this so publicly, but I am a racist against purple people specifically, sorry if that disappoints anyone.

ahnlak

@AnthonySmith said:
A mod/admin can take whatever action, and then this indicator will clear.

Is it worth leaving some sort of "mod checked" indicator, to avoid it getting re-flagged every time the indicator is cleared?

AnthonySmith

@ahnlak said:

@AnthonySmith said:
A mod/admin can take whatever action, and then this indicator will clear.

Is it worth leaving some sort of "mod checked" indicator, to avoid it getting re-flagged every time the indicator is cleared?

Well the theory was that the mods or admin resolves the issue it was flagged for so it shouldn't need to be flagged again.

I guess leaving some small indicators behind can't hurt.

SocksAreComfortable

LES quite literally operating in the future!

AnthonySmith

@SocksAreComfortable said:
LES quite literally operating in the future!

Ha ... Well spotted

stupidgenius

@AnthonySmith Would the eventual migration/update add the ability to click on a quoted username's and jump/go to the quoted post rather that user's profile?

I wasn't sure if this was intentional behavior or not, but I found it helpful on the other site when following active discussions with nested quotes.

AnthonySmith

@stupidgenius said: @AnthonySmith Would the eventual migration/update add the ability to click on a quoted username's and jump/go to the quoted post rather that user's profile?

Thats probably a really good thing to have, I dont really use the other site much so if there is anything there that is cool let me know we will add it.

I would be tempted to leave the users name as a link to the user and add a "view quoted post" button

stupidgenius

@AnthonySmith said:

@stupidgenius said: @AnthonySmith Would the eventual migration/update add the ability to click on a quoted username's and jump/go to the quoted post rather that user's profile?

Thats probably a really good thing to have, I dont really use the other site much so if there is anything there that is cool let me know we will add it.

I would be tempted to leave the users name as a link to the user and add a "view quoted post" button

Thanks, testing it on this post right here it looks like it adds the link to the usename in the nested quote, but not the top level username.

Not sure if I've ever paid enough attention to notice before now. So its partially there.

Mason

Amazing to see LES getting the breath of fresh air it deparately needed. Great to have you back at the helm, Ant!

somik

@AnthonySmith any plans to "enable" image uploads for regular users?

If the disk space is a concern, you can consider using a third party image hosts, like postimages.org (which is designed for forums to upload their images using javascript ajax requests) or catbox.moe (which allows easy image upload through PHP curl calls).

AnthonySmith

@somik said: @AnthonySmith any plans to "enable" image uploads for regular users?

yep, worked on it a bit over the weekend, update post is half written i found some bugs during testing.

Update to come out today.

AnthonySmith

I might as well post it now, as I actually dont think I will finish the next thing today:

Some of this was already done/started but tested this morning.

Images / gifs

We have Imagick now instead of (as well as) the standard GD supported in Vanilla, so on the admin side we can now manage compression levels, max hight/width with auto scaling, auto strip EXIF, and convert to the most desirable format.

Defaults for now:
Width = 1920
Hight = 1080
Quality = 85
format = webp (might change to jpeg, having an internal struggle with that, opinions wanted)

Not really any screenshots for this one, we are also adding the ability for you to add alt text in the ui, its available anyway, but not everyone understands markdown. A bit of help for hosts, more than anything, that target keywords.

This, in the longer run, means that the user image upload will come back when the new VPS is sized appropriately.

Not a lot else to say except that when ran on the existing images in dev, we saved around 65% space.

So simple terms, images automatically resize, compress, strip exif data and change to webp on upload, or you can use an external image, you can set your own alt text or accept the default LowEndSpirit alt text. (same for copy-paste into input for images or drag/drop)

Was much harder than expected but worth it, when v2 of LES is live image uploads will be self hosted and available again to end users.

havoc

@AnthonySmith said: webp (might change to jpeg, having an internal struggle with that, opinions wanted)

Don't think anyone is browsing the forum from their non-webp fridge...so whatever is cheaper to host

Mason

@havoc said:

@AnthonySmith said: webp (might change to jpeg, having an internal struggle with that, opinions wanted)

Don't think anyone is browsing the forum from their non-webp fridge...so whatever is cheaper to host

Speak for yourself....

Sent from my iToaster

rpqu

@AnthonySmith don't forget to strip xmp, icc, exif

imok

@AnthonySmith said:
I might as well post it now, as I actually dont think I will finish the next thing today:

Some of this was already done/started but tested this morning.

Images / gifs

We have Imagick now instead of (as well as) the standard GD supported in Vanilla, so on the admin side we can now manage compression levels, max hight/width with auto scaling, auto strip EXIF, and convert to the most desirable format.

Defaults for now:
Width = 1920
Hight = 1080
Quality = 85
format = webp (might change to jpeg, having an internal struggle with that, opinions wanted)

Not really any screenshots for this one, we are also adding the ability for you to add alt text in the ui, its available anyway, but not everyone understands markdown. A bit of help for hosts, more than anything, that target keywords.

This, in the longer run, means that the user image upload will come back when the new VPS is sized appropriately.

Not a lot else to say except that when ran on the existing images in dev, we saved around 65% space.

So simple terms, images automatically resize, compress, strip exif data and change to webp on upload, or you can use an external image, you can set your own alt text or accept the default LowEndSpirit alt text. (same for copy-paste into input for images or drag/drop)

Was much harder than expected but worth it, when v2 of LES is live image uploads will be self hosted and available again to end users.

Finally you will be able to see images again!

rpqu

@imok said:

@AnthonySmith said:
I might as well post it now, as I actually dont think I will finish the next thing today:

Some of this was already done/started but tested this morning.

Images / gifs

We have Imagick now instead of (as well as) the standard GD supported in Vanilla, so on the admin side we can now manage compression levels, max hight/width with auto scaling, auto strip EXIF, and convert to the most desirable format.

Defaults for now:
Width = 1920
Hight = 1080
Quality = 85
format = webp (might change to jpeg, having an internal struggle with that, opinions wanted)

Not really any screenshots for this one, we are also adding the ability for you to add alt text in the ui, its available anyway, but not everyone understands markdown. A bit of help for hosts, more than anything, that target keywords.

This, in the longer run, means that the user image upload will come back when the new VPS is sized appropriately.

Not a lot else to say except that when ran on the existing images in dev, we saved around 65% space.

So simple terms, images automatically resize, compress, strip exif data and change to webp on upload, or you can use an external image, you can set your own alt text or accept the default LowEndSpirit alt text. (same for copy-paste into input for images or drag/drop)

Was much harder than expected but worth it, when v2 of LES is live image uploads will be self hosted and available again to end users.

Finally you will be able to see images again!

https://kernelkeepers.com/clickreroute

somik

@rpqu said:

@imok said:
Finally you will be able to see images again!

https://kernelkeepers.com/clickreroute

You guys are on a forum for hosters. All of you already own one or multiple servers. Just host your own proxy or VPN on that!

Easiest one to setup and run: https://github.com/wg-easy/wg-easy

Keep your data in your control.

rpqu

@somik said:

@rpqu said:

@imok said:
Finally you will be able to see images again!

https://kernelkeepers.com/clickreroute

You guys are on a forum for hosters. All of you already own one or multiple servers. Just host your own proxy or VPN on that!

Easiest one to setup and run: https://github.com/wg-easy/wg-easy

Keep your data in your control.

pigeonhole principle

david3

Imgur often blocks data center IPs and VPNs (unless something has changed). I stopped using it years ago because of this. I use Rimgo, instead, as an imgur proxy.

https://codeberg.org/rimgo/rimgo

I usually use postimages.org for posting images, but even better if it's included on the forum.

Some screenshots are clearer and take up less space as png vs. jpeg.

AnthonySmith

I am probably going to just batch download and rehost all the imgur posted images and then ban it and any other service the geo restricts content like that.

It's too annoying for a forum, I blame the governments, not the services.

somik

@AnthonySmith said:
I am probably going to just batch download and rehost all the imgur posted images and thæn ban it and any other service the geo restricts content like that.

It's too annoying for a forum, I blame the governments, not the services.

If that's the plan thæn you definitely need to host the images yourself as you have no idea when which image host goes down or when they are required to geo-block people from certain countries...

somik

@david3 said:
Imgur often blocks data center IPs and VPNs (unless something has changed). I stopped using it years ago because of this. I use Rimgo, instead, as an imgur proxy.

https://codeberg.org/rimgo/rimgo

I usually use postimages.org for posting images, but even better if it's included on the forum.

Some screenshots are clearer and take up less space as png vs. jpeg.

I use my own script to run my private image host, https://imageperl.com/ . I usually host jpg/png/gif as is, only converting webp back to jpg, but now I am wondering if I am doing it the wrong way. Maybe I should be converting all to webp instead...

AnthonySmith

@somik said:

@david3 said:
Imgur often blocks data center IPs and VPNs (unless something has changed). I stopped using it years ago because of this. I use Rimgo, instead, as an imgur proxy.

https://codeberg.org/rimgo/rimgo

I usually use postimages.org for posting images, but even better if it's included on the forum.

Some screenshots are clearer and take up less space as png vs. jpeg.

I use my own script to run my private image host, https://imageperl.com/ . I usually host jpg/png/gif as is, only converting webp back to jpg, but now I am wondering if I am doing it the wrong way. Maybe I should be converting all to webp instead...

WebP is more efficient if quality is not a main goal, we already started work on the imgur auto pull/convert system but I think we will probably set up a batch to pull all existing imgur links and do it retrospectively. It will be handy to be able to do that as more and more internet sensorship takes place due to the professionally offended and the hurty words gangs.

rpqu

@somik said:

@david3 said:
Imgur often blocks data center IPs and VPNs (unless something has changed). I stopped using it years ago because of this. I use Rimgo, instead, as an imgur proxy.

https://codeberg.org/rimgo/rimgo

I usually use postimages.org for posting images, but even better if it's included on the forum.

Some screenshots are clearer and take up less space as png vs. jpeg.

I use my own script to run my private image host, https://imageperl.com/ . I usually host jpg/png/gif as is, only converting webp back to jpg, but now I am wondering if I am doing it the wrong way. Maybe I should be converting all to webp instead...

Most browser handles it properly. But older Android devices aren't optimized to view it...

yoursunny

@somik said:
I use my own script to run my private image host, https://imageperl.com/

This site is private?
We thought it’s open to the public and have been uploading buckets of popcorn photos.
Can we buy a license to continue uploading?

somik

@rpqu said:

@somik said:

@david3 said:
Imgur often blocks data center IPs and VPNs (unless something has changed). I stopped using it years ago because of this. I use Rimgo, instead, as an imgur proxy.

https://codeberg.org/rimgo/rimgo

I usually use postimages.org for posting images, but even better if it's included on the forum.

Some screenshots are clearer and take up less space as png vs. jpeg.

I use my own script to run my private image host, https://imageperl.com/ . I usually host jpg/png/gif as is, only converting webp back to jpg, but now I am wondering if I am doing it the wrong way. Maybe I should be converting all to webp instead...

Most browser handles it properly. But older Android devices aren't optimized to view it...

If i download the images to my windows PC, i cant open them in the built in viewer either.

@yoursunny said:

@somik said:
I use my own script to run my private image host, https://imageperl.com/

This site is private?
We thought it’s open to the public and have been uploading buckets of popcorn photos.
Can we buy a license to continue uploading?

Lol, I meant "private" as in I own and run it, but it's free for everyone to use. That's why there is no login or admin panel on it. It also does not have any metrics or tracking or ads and all the images are served from disk by nginx as static files.

Did I mention that it is also fully opensource? If you want to run it on your own servers, you can grab it from my github and deploy it with docker:
https://github.com/somik123/mini-image-host

ahnlak

@somik said:

@AnthonySmith said:
I am probably going to just batch download and rehost all the imgur posted images and thæn ban it and any other service the geo restricts content like that.

It's too annoying for a forum, I blame the governments, not the services.

If that's the plan thæn you definitely need to host the images yourself as you have no idea when which image host goes down or when they are required to geo-block people from certain countries...

There might be a view that hosting them yourself brings you into even more annoying parts of the OSA (which is why folk like imgur just decided it was more hassle than it was worth)

somik

@ahnlak said:

@somik said:

@AnthonySmith said:
I am probably going to just batch download and rehost all the imgur posted images and thæn ban it and any other service the geo restricts content like that.

It's too annoying for a forum, I blame the governments, not the services.

If that's the plan thæn you definitely need to host the images yourself as you have no idea when which image host goes down or when they are required to geo-block people from certain countries...

There might be a view that hosting them yourself brings you into even more annoying parts of the OSA (which is why folk like imgur just decided it was more hassle than it was worth)

Content on LES is moderated. The issue is she restricted contents. I don't see people post that here anyway.

Ympker

So, @AnthonySmith : I've been thinking. How much server power is needed to run LES, really? You see, I've won that Cloudcone Lifetime Dedicated Server (US location) about 4 years ago, and it's been idling for a long time. I've got my few projects running on ZAP lifetime and will likely have not much use for an idle dedicated server in the US. I have basically not used it much, if at all in the past years. If @Cloudcone agrees to transfer it to Anthony, I'll happily donate this dedicated server to LES / @AnthonySmith if used to power LES and keep it running long-term. Costs have been increasing everywhere. If this can help to add some financial stability to one of my favourite communities on the internet, that's a great deal for me.

Specs are as follows:

Processor
E3-1240 v1

Memory
16 GB (ECC)

IP block
/29 (8 IPs) - 5 usable

DISK BAYS
4

Bandwidth usage
1.7 GB of 15 TB at 1Gbps Premium Bandwidth Utilized

yoursunny

@Ympker said:
Processor
E3-1240 v1

4 cores, 2011 architecture, forum lag, Black Friday ruined.

rpqu

@yoursunny said:

@Ympker said:
Processor
E3-1240 v1

4 cores, 2011 architecture, forum lag, Black Friday ruined.

That's enough for LES

Ympker

@yoursunny said:

@Ympker said:
Processor
E3-1240 v1

4 cores, 2011 architecture, forum lag, Black Friday ruined.

But is there IPv6? 👀

AnthonySmith

@Ympker said:
So, @AnthonySmith : I've been thinking. How much server power is needed to run LES, really? You see, I've won that Cloudcone Lifetime Dedicated Server (US location) about 4 years ago, and it's been idling for a long time. I've got my few projects running on ZAP lifetime and will likely have not much use for an idle dedicated server in the US. I have basically not used it much, if at all in the past years. If @Cloudcone agrees to transfer it to Anthony, I'll happily donate this dedicated server to LES / @AnthonySmith if used to power LES and keep it running long-term. Costs have been increasing everywhere. If this can help to add some financial stability to one of my favourite communities on the internet, that's a great deal for me.

Specs are as follows:

Processor
E3-1240 v1

Memory
16 GB (ECC)

IP block
/29 (8 IPs) - 5 usable

DISK BAYS
4

Bandwidth usage
1.7 GB of 15 TB at 1Gbps Premium Bandwidth Utilized

Hey I really really appreciate the offer, but there would be around 12GB ram and 6 CPU threads and 4 IPs wasted.

When the community version of TierHive launches next year though you could always add it there, the plan is to give idlers a place to exist.

Ympker

@AnthonySmith said:

@Ympker said:
So, @AnthonySmith : I've been thinking. How much server power is needed to run LES, really? You see, I've won that Cloudcone Lifetime Dedicated Server (US location) about 4 years ago, and it's been idling for a long time. I've got my few projects running on ZAP lifetime and will likely have not much use for an idle dedicated server in the US. I have basically not used it much, if at all in the past years. If @Cloudcone agrees to transfer it to Anthony, I'll happily donate this dedicated server to LES / @AnthonySmith if used to power LES and keep it running long-term. Costs have been increasing everywhere. If this can help to add some financial stability to one of my favourite communities on the internet, that's a great deal for me.

Specs are as follows:

Processor
E3-1240 v1

Memory
16 GB (ECC)

IP block
/29 (8 IPs) - 5 usable

DISK BAYS
4

Bandwidth usage
1.7 GB of 15 TB at 1Gbps Premium Bandwidth Utilized

Hey I really really appreciate the offer, but there would be around 12GB ram and 6 CPU threads and 4 IPs wasted.

When the community version of TierHive launches next year though you could always add it there, the plan is to give idlers a place to exist.

Alright, that's fair enough. Guess, I'll find some other usecase for it after my vacation.

Regarding TierHive, I'll give that a thought

Cheers,
Ympker

AnthonySmith

Mistakes were made, but this was funny, so I thought I would share it

bikegremlin

@AnthonySmith said:
Mistakes were made, but this was funny, so I thought I would share it

AnthonySmith

There you go a little preview of the karma system that will replace the thanks system (You will be able to disable animations)

Popular threads change based on thresholds, OP +1's get 1 per +1 and then every +1 in a reply after that gets +0.25 until the bar explodes and you know its a popular thread and the users get time based avatar auras

All just testing now, probably won't look much like that in the final release, just doing shit quickly for functional testing.

This means spammer threads can be down voted into none existance by the community, bad offers will go grey and start to die and eventually vanish, popular threads will remain at the top, and the karma system becomes the LES currency essentially, you will be able to boost posts (not your own) spending your own karma on that and you gain karma from the community (or lose it)

Users with long-term negative karma may be limited as to what they can interact with, and eventually get banned.

I will also be doing something for the free services provider so they can interact with the karma system for verification of users and also requiring a karma spend to reveal option in offers, if people want to keep it private-ish.

I Will make sure its not too visually annoying and then start working on the themes a bit as honestly they were never finished the first time around

3 more smaller plugins to do, then I can move to a full dev server environment, which I will let everyone have access to probably it just won't have email capabilities, then I can get some bug reports in and any fixes before pushing to live.

---

ahnlak

Needs more pulsing neon colours

AnthonySmith

@ahnlak said:
Needs more pulsing neon colours

Oh ok, I was thinking less but.... If you insist

budi1413

@AnthonySmith said:
Mistakes were made, but this was funny, so I thought I would share it

@FAT32 is that you?

TemporiousOne

@AnthonySmith said:

When the community version of TierHive launches next year though you could always add it there, the plan is to give idlers a place to exist.

What is this community version of TierHive that you envision? Sounds interesting. Do tell more...

AnthonySmith

@TemporiousOne said:

@AnthonySmith said:

When the community version of TierHive launches next year though you could always add it there, the plan is to give idlers a place to exist.

What is this community version of TierHive that you envision? Sounds interesting. Do tell more...

It allows anyone to add a server as compute resources, you get a /29 instead of a /24 and obviously no billing just asset number of tokens each month.

Even a 2GB VPS can provide 20 or so 128mb micro instances.

We need time to iron out a lot of things in Alpha especially around the recovery after an outage as it's very manual right now.

Think of it like a community car pool where anyone can park their idle resources.

It will be simplified, Debian, Alpine, openbsd only and low ram, disk configs, no outbound mail, single haproxy location.

Probably a little way off yet but this was always in the plan.

msatt

@AnthonySmith said: I will also be doing something for the free services provider so they can interact with the karma system for verification of users and also requiring a karma spend to reveal option in offers, if people want to keep it private-ish.

Thanks for thinking about us Anthony - so what will happen with the current 'thanks' will these magically be converted into karma points or will everyone start with 0.

As far as pulsating icons - no thanks.
As far as temperature bars - I would prefer a single colour and deeper shades.

Thanks for all of your hard work you are doing a great job.

AnthonySmith

@msatt said:

@AnthonySmith said: I will also be doing something for the free services provider so they can interact with the karma system for verification of users and also requiring a karma spend to reveal option in offers, if people want to keep it private-ish.

Thanks for thinking about us Anthony - so what will happen with the current 'thanks' will these magically be converted into karma points or will everyone start with 0.

As far as pulsating icons - no thanks.
As far as temperature bars - I would prefer a single colour and deeper shades.

Thanks for all of your hard work you are doing a great job.

Thanks are converted to karma.

Yeah the pulse was more of a funny accident it was meant to be a slow transition more like a calming glow, seconds/ms mistakes were made and everything went all dragon ball Z, for the purpose of building and testing though it was handy haha.

As always it will be optional.

somik

I assume you are still going to have a dark mode for all of these as well?

rpqu

Damn, only got

67 karmas

AnthonySmith

Had to take a break from the karma system design visually, its pointless for me to guess what is going to make people rage quit, I will just find out when it goes to public dev and adapt. Still, for now the karma system is functional and has enough tie-in points for other plugins to feed from it.

But as it involved a lot of theme work I moved the theme picker out of the edit profile area and moved it to the top bar:

It works on desktop and mobile, and I also made grey mode actually grey.

I also stopped any of the custom theme bleed in on the mod/admin side so mods can use any theme when using the main forum and the admin/mod side is just the vanilla default, means nothing to most of you but its annoying as hell for mods/admins

Expanding the theme option a bit, too, with "Extras" so there is a more simple framework to import theme options going forward.

Google adsense was approved today, I completed the tax w8 forms, etc., for Google today, and they were accepted, so if you want a supporter tag, click on your avatar on the top right of the top bar and enable supporter mode

It is probably going to take a few hours before ads start to show up though as this is fresh, you will just see an empty space where they would load, nothing too intrusive but if you feel other wise let me knwo and they are 100% optional and without judgement, they will only be forced for none logged in users and even then ad-gurard etc freindly, I am human, I hate ads too, but I want to start paying for some community projects after the costs are covered.