README

Play Flash in posts again.

Write [swf]https://example.com/movie.swf[/swf] and the post gets a player. Not Adobe's plugin — Ruffle, an open-source Flash emulator written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly, running in the page like any other script.

Why this is not the Flash you remember

The vulnerabilities that ended Flash were in the runtime — the ActiveX control and the NPAPI plugin, native code with access to the machine, shipped to a billion desktops. Ruffle is none of those things. It shares no code with Adobe's player, runs inside the browser's own WebAssembly sandbox, and has no more reach into your computer than the page it sits on.

What a .swf can still do is talk to the page it is embedded in and open connections of its own — ActionScript's ExternalInterface, navigateToURL, Socket. Those are the sandbox's own doors, and on a forum the files come from members. Both are shut by default here, and an admin who runs their own archive can open them deliberately.

What you get

• [swf] in the composer. [swf]url[/swf], or with a size: [swf width=800 height=600]url[/swf].
• A toolbar button in Flarum's editor, and in Scribe if you use it — where a movie becomes a real block you can select, drag and delete.
• Plain links become players, optionally. A post containing a bare link to a .swf gets a player instead. Turn it off and they are links again — the post itself was never rewritten.
• Press-to-play by default. The player is several megabytes; nobody downloads it for a thread they are only reading.
• A real link underneath. Every embed contains an ordinary link to the file, which is what search engines index and what readers get with JavaScript off, in a feed reader, or in Flarum's notification emails.

Installation

composer require ernestdefoe/ruffle
php flarum cache:clear

Then open Ruffle in the AdminCP.

Where the player comes from

By default, a pinned version from jsDelivr. Pinned, never "latest": Ruffle emulates a twenty-year-old format and its behaviour on any given file genuinely changes between releases, and a player that moves underneath a running forum produces bug reports nobody can reproduce.

To host it yourself — no third-party request, and your forum's privacy policy stays shorter — download the selfhosted package from Ruffle's releases, extract it somewhere public, and point the setting at that folder.

Two things your server must get right:

• .wasm files must be served as application/wasm. Nginx does not do this by default. The player loads and then fails to start, which looks like a bug in the extension rather than a MIME type.

  types { application/wasm wasm; }
  

• If you set a Content-Security-Policy, it needs 'wasm-unsafe-eval' in script-src.

Settings

Works with Scribe

Scribe stores posts as HTML rather than Markdown, so it needs its own integration — and it has one. Install both and a Flash movie button appears in Scribe's toolbar; a movie is a real node in the document, shown as a card rather than a broken plugin box, and saved as an <embed> element that the server understands.

Scribe 1.2 or later is required for the toolbar button. Older versions still render posts containing Flash correctly; they just cannot insert one.

How it actually works

The server never builds a player and never touches a .swf. The formatter turns [swf] into an inert placeholder carrying the URL — that is the only design s9e\TextFormatter permits, since its template checker rejects <object>, <embed>, <iframe> and <script> in a template outright, and it is right to.

The browser turns that placeholder into a player, and only when a reader asks: the code that talks to Ruffle is a separate chunk, and Ruffle itself is fetched on the first press. A page with no Flash on it costs about 10 KB.

Requirements

• Flarum 2.0
• PHP 8.3+

Licence

MIT. Ruffle itself is MIT OR Apache-2.0 and is not bundled — it is fetched at runtime from wherever you point it. This extension is not affiliated with the Ruffle project.

Changelog

CHANGELOG.md