phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:12:25
On This Episode: David Lewis (Highway of Life), Francis Lewis (Handyman), and Michael Williams (mtotheikle)

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NOTE: These show notes do not contain as many links as we would like them to due to the phpBB.com outage. We will add more links where appropriate once phpBB.com is back.

Douglas was at a conference in San Francisco during this episode, and you know what that means: David brings on guest team members to help him out. He was joined on this episode by Paul of the MOD Team, Francis Lewis (Handyman) of the MOD Team and StarTrekGuide, and Michael Williams (mtotheikle), Development Leader of StarTrekGuide. And the topic of discussion? Our well-known favorite topic of discussion–MODs.

First off, MODX 1.2.2 and AutoMOD 1.0.0 beta2 have been simultaneously released. MODX 1.2.2 mainly contains a number of XSL fixes and tweaks, and AutoMOD 1.0.0 beta2 includes a few new features and a number of bugfixes. The four of them also discuss some of their favorite MODs, take a look at some of the biggest MODs for phpBB3 and phpBB2, and chat about how MODding has evolved from phpBB2 to phpBB3.

February 1st marked the last day that the Development Team would release security patches for phpBB2, thus ending any and all support for phpBB2. It also marked the last day that any phpBB2 submissions would be accepted into the MODs Database. We talk about the ending of security patches as well as discuss how long it would take for very large boards to upgrade from phpBB2 to phpBB3. Finally, they also discuss the recent blog post on phpBB.com discussing why team members don’t give private support to users.

Last week’s poll question, “If you could add one more feature to the new WhiteHouse.gov website, what would it be?”, is still open and will run through Saturday, February 7. So go vote!
The MOD of the Week is Mods Database by lefty74, and the Style of the Week is Hermes by CyberAlien.

Be sure to join us next week when we will have a special edition phpBB Weekly episode with featured discussion of the ongoing phpBB.com outage, joined by members of the phpBB teams who have been busy this week rebuilding the site.

You may have noticed that since late Saturday night/early Sunday morning (depending on your timezone), phpBB.com has been down. According to this post from Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty), a hacker utilized a vulnerability in PHPList to gain unauthorized access to phpBB.com and take down the phpBB.com website. PHPList is used by the phpBB teams for their opt-in mailing list which they use to send out e-mail notifications of new phpBB releases. The PHPList vulnerability was patched in a version 2.10.9 security release which was put out on Thursday morning. The teams had not updated their installation of PHPList during the three days after the 2.10.9 release, and as a result, an attacker was able to use that info to access the phpBB.com Database, including the database for the community forums.

David really wanted us to be able to do a special mid-week episode of phpBB Weekly to cover the outage, but unfortunately life is busy for us and so we will not be able to do so. However, we will be having a very comprehensive discussion of the outage on Saturday’s episode of phpBB Weekly, including a discussion with one or more team members on the issues behind this outage.

Until then, please read the post for more details, including some important warnings if you have not logged in on phpBB.com since March 2007 (before phpBB.com was upgraded to phpBB3) concerning your password security. Support is temporarily available on the Area51 forums. And the next time we tell you to be prompt in keeping your software up-to-date, remember this as a very good reason why you should do so.