It's truly awesome to see that CuteNews is being maintained again officially. Nonetheless, I'm afraid to say I don't trust what's going on; this new update makes me feel screwed over.
This has started ever since CuteNews was sold. Even support members have no idea who the new owners are, and as far as I know no one has ever heard anything from them. My attempts to contact the new owners a handful of times because of UTF-8 CuteNews have always been unanswered, though to be fair I may always have been writing to the wrong place.
Spam has decreased, that's good. The Twitter thing is finally gone, that's even better. Sorry, that thing was bliss.
Meanwhile, pretty much everything about this update is bugging me.
a)
In this version, we have fixed a number of bugs and tried to take your suggestions into account.
Could you supply a concrete example of such a suggestion?
b) A quick search for 'ereg' in /inc/addnews.mdu reveals there are still ereg functions in them, e.g. at line 387.
c)
* admin interface webpages design has been modified;
... Where? All I can find are a few tables whose width have been changed.
d)
* access rights for news editing actions have been added.
Again: Where? The only changes in editnews.mdu and options.mdu are ereg functions to an equivalent function that is compatible with PHP version >= 5.3.
e) Some changes are obviously taken from UTF-8 CuteNews, e.g. /inc/editnews.mdu line 251 in CN 1.4.7, or line 233 in UTF-8 CuteNews 9:
if(strpos($single_line, '<'.'?') === false){
Writing "<?" as '<'.'?' is an awfully suspicious coincidence; I initially added all instance of <? and ?> as such because I thought it could be buggy to just do '<?' a few years ago. It's weird that it's identical in CuteNews when there's no rational explanation to do this, while at other places where it's '<?' in UTF-8 CN, it's '<?' in CuteNews 1.4.7 as well.
I don't mind my changes being taken, I really don't, but since the new owners are obviously aware of UTF-8 CuteNews and obviously have given the code a good luck, one would think he or they (I don't even know what pronoun to use!) would have time to get back to me as well.
With that said, I'm really sorry for the attack. This is just becoming frustrating, and I have a lot of doubts since there seems to be a lot of lying already in the first update(!). I'm having trust issues.