🚀 Flatboard 5.2.0 — Release Notes

Release date: March 7, 2026

✨ Highlights

🔍 FlatSEO — Full SEO Suite, Now in Flatboard Pro

Flatboard 5.2.0 ships FlatSEO, a professional-grade SEO plugin that covers every aspect of search engine optimisation without requiring any third-party service or external dependency.

What FlatSEO brings to your forum:

Feature	Description
🏷️ Per-page meta overrides	Customise title, description, canonical URL, robots directives and Open Graph image for every discussion, directly from the admin panel.
📣 Open Graph & Twitter Cards	Rich social previews generated server-side for all public pages.
🧩 JSON-LD structured data	`DiscussionForumPosting`, `QAPage`, `BreadcrumbList`, `Organization` and `ProfilePage` schemas injected automatically — no JavaScript required.
🗺️ XML sitemap	Auto-generated with per-type priority, `changefreq` and image sitemap support. Invalidated in real time on discussion create/update.
🤖 robots.txt editor	Edit and publish your `robots.txt` directly from the admin panel.
🔀 Redirect manager	Create 301 and 302 redirections without touching your server config.
📊 SEO audit	Per-discussion scoring on title length, description presence and keyword density. Cached and refreshed automatically on override saves.
📈 Analytics & verification	Configure GA4, Google Tag Manager and webmaster verification tags (Google, Bing, Yandex, Pinterest) from one screen.
🚫 `noindex` controls	Individually prevent indexing of search results, tag pages and profile pages.
🌐 Fully translated	All labels and breadcrumbs localised in all 5 bundled languages (fr, en, de, pt, zh).

🔑 FlatSEO is available exclusively in the Flatboard Pro package.

⚡ Significantly Faster Page Loads

5.2.0 consolidates the performance work started in 5.1.5 and 5.1.6 into the most responsive Flatboard release to date. The improvements span both the SQLite and JSON storage backends and target the root causes of slow pages rather than applying surface-level caches.

🗄️ SQLite backend

Improvement	Impact
Schema migrations run once, not on every request	Overhead drops from 20–50 ms to under 2 ms on a warm filesystem
`StorageFactory` returns a shared singleton	Connection and migration cost paid once per request, not per component
N+1 discussion-number queries eliminated	Query count drops by 30 on a page listing 30 discussions
Profile tab pagination pushed to SQL	Memory for a user with 10,000 posts drops from ~80 MB to under 2 MB per page
Attachment subqueries replaced by a denormalised flag	30 fewer subqueries per list page
`getPermissions()` reduced to a single JOIN	One `GROUP_CONCAT` query replaces one query per permission row
Username lookup full-table scan eliminated	New `username_normalized` column + dedicated index
Email ban lookup full-table scan eliminated	Predicates pushed into SQL; covered by two new indexes
`PRAGMA auto_vacuum = INCREMENTAL` enabled	Progressive page reclamation reduces the need for blocking `VACUUM` runs

📁 JSON storage backend

Improvement	Impact
Per-request in-memory caches for discussions and posts	One bulk scan per request instead of dozens of individual file reads
Count methods use the shared cache	`countUserDiscussions()`, `countUserPosts()` etc. no longer re-scan the filesystem

🔧 Other Notable Changes

📊 Analytics Dashboard

A dedicated analytics page is now available in the admin panel (Flatboard Pro). It provides:

Visit and unique-visitor KPIs for 7 d and 30 d
A 30-day visit chart
Top pages ranking
Traffic sources table with favicons and share bars
Engagement ratios and member/content health indicators

All data is collected locally — no third-party tracking service is involved. Referrer domains are stored with 90-day retention; no full URLs or IP addresses are ever saved.

🔐 Login Redirect Improvements

After authentication, users are now returned to the page they were trying to reach instead of always being sent to the home page. The "Log in to reply" button passes the discussion URL with #reply-form so the reply editor opens automatically after login. Open redirect attacks are prevented by validating that the target is a relative URL.

Reported by arpinux

🐛 Bug Fixes

📧 Email notifications — the "Manage preferences" link is no longer empty (template variable mismatch fixed).
💬 Reply editor — opens and scrolls into view automatically when the URL contains #reply-form on page load.

Reported by arpinux

📦 Upgrade Notes

✅ No breaking changes. Drop in the new files over an existing 5.x installation.

	Note
🗄️ SQLite	Migration runs automatically on first boot. Adds indexes `idx_bans_email`, `idx_bans_expires_at`, `idx_discussions_created_at_id` and columns `has_attachments` (discussions), `username_normalized` (users). No manual steps required.
🔑 FlatSEO	Requires a Flatboard Pro ~~licence~~.

📋 Full Changelog — For complete details on all fixes, changes, and improvements, see the full changelog.

Edited on Mar 19, 2026 By Fred .