phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:20:16
On this episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Francis Lewis (Handyman), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), and Paul Sohier (Paul)

Talk about one whacky reunion episode. Douglas comes in fresh off of his high school graduation and is stumped as to why he is not entirely fast asleep during the show. David and Francis make their grand return after 3 months’ absence, and as a skit, they hold a SCOFF News-style interview of Australian Senator Collins about a crashed oil tanker. Paul will slap Douglas to high heaven if this episode isn’t released before the end of May, and we have all kinds of crazy technical difficulties throughout the show. (And yes, that stuttering that happens during the first 2-3 minutes? That’s David’s fault too.)

Nevertheless, we have kind of a random discussion episode, during which Micheal shares a bit more about the FTP Trojans that we discussed last week, we share rumors on what’s taken so long for the release of phpBB 3.0.5 (and typical to fashion, it was just released today), and David shares the incredible saga that has taken him and Francis away from phpBB for the past few months and continuing for the next few months as well. Douglas takes the opportunity to share some plans for helping to revitalize phpBB Weekly during the remaining summer months of David’s prolonged leave of absence, and we also talk a bit about the best readme file ever.

There is no MOD or Style of the Week this week. Our phpBB Weekly Poll Question is “Who would be your favorite guest on phpBB Weekly?” Vote in the poll in our sidebar on the right; the poll closes Saturday, June 13.

And don’t miss the little bonus featurette at the end of the episode; I spent a lot of time editing that!

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Episode Duration: 42:02
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), and Paul Sohier (Paul)

Michael and Douglas are joined on this episode by an old friend, Paul Sohier, who is now on a new team: the Support Team. For obvious reasons, Micheal is pleased and Douglas a bit confused, but Paul explains that he’s been working in support longer than he’s been working with MODs, and has been enjoying the change of pace.

The MOD Team, however, hasn’t been standing still. Once again, a new release to talk about: AutoMOD has hit RC-1. Exciting, you bet, particularly since EasyMOD never made it out of beta! While it’s not approved for fully-stable use yet, AutoMOD is about to hit the big time, and we’ll continue to follow its progress over the summer.

Micheal mentions that this old blog post simply identifies possibilities that injections could be created by MODs if the authors aren’t careful–it does NOT list actual injection vulnerabilities in phpBB3! Beware the naysayers!

And for our main topic of discussion, a new phpBB.com blog post discusses the Gumblar and Martuz trojans, two trojans which track down your FTP credentials and then use them to trash your site(s). We go over the blog post and discuss what these trojans do, how they work, and how to keep yourself safe (hint: keep your antivirus definitions up-to-date!). Also be sure to keep regular backups of your site so that if it does get hacked (it may not be your fault if your site IS hacked), you can completely wipe the hacked site and start fresh. If your site has been hacked, use Unmask Parasites to do a thorough check once you’ve cleaned house.

The MOD of the Week is Posting Template by eviL<3, and the Style of the Week is Prospace by spaceace.

Be sure to join us on Saturday, May 30th, for David Lewis’ return to phpBB Weekly and important announcements about this show, as well as Douglas’ post-graduation attempts to stay awake!

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Episode Duration: 1:00:21
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal)

Again, sorry about the late release on this one; it’s been near-impossible to find a chance to get this episode edited! In our defense though, phpBB 3.0.5 STILL hasn’t been released, even though we talked about it on this episode eleven days ago!

On this episode, due to a late start, we wound up being joined again by phpBB Support Team Leader Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty) alongside Micheal Cottingham and Douglas Bell. Having missed out of two weeks’ worth of episodes, we primarily spend this episode recapping on a bit of phpBB news.

UMIL’s third release candidate is out, and so we spend a little bit of time recapping UMIL and its future importance for phpBB3 MOD authors. We also note that RC-1 of phpBB 3.0.5 has been released to the QA Team for testing, which contains a number of new features and changes and lots of bugfixes. (It has, after all, been more than five months in the making.) It should be released on phpBB.com fairly soon.

Finally, the MOD Team announced that they have released policies for MOD validation which contains details on what they look for during validation, insta-deny/repackage policies, etc. All MOD authors planning on submitting to the MODs Database should read these policies carefully, as following this policies will help you avoid having your MOD be denied!

Our last Poll Question of the Week was “What’s the most importance advice to give to a phpBB Supporter?” The top answer was “No matter what your signature says, you can kiss the sanctity of your PM box goodbye” with 5 votes (42%). Next up was “If someone actually figures out that they should use the Support Request Template, then they deserve premium service” with 4 votes (33%). Next up was “Let the Support Team deal with idiots. That’s where they get their fun.” with 2 votes (17%). And last was “Speak softly and carry a big stick” with 1 vote (8%). Receiving no votes was “Never tell people to ‘search,’ only to ‘follow directions.’”

The MOD of the Week is phpBB Mood Swings by Xanta Media, and the Style of the Week is SkyLineBlue by MartectX.

Hello phpBB Weekly listeners,

If you haven’t noticed, it sort of has appeared recently that we’re dead or something. Well, that’s not exactly true, but I guess some explaining is in order.

You obviously know that David has been away for the past two and a half months due to work commitments that have taken time away from him. Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), and on a few occasions, Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty) have very graciously filled the gap and offered some good insights during the show in David’s absence.

Unfortunately, David hasn’t been the only busy one. I have been dealing with a number of commitments during April and May that have eaten up a number of Saturday mornings (namely, April 11, April 25, May 1, and this morning) from me, which is why we have not had episodes of phpBB Weekly during those times, and is also why it has taken so long to release the episodes of phpBB Weekly that we have recorded. I still need to get the episode from last Saturday edited and released!

We have also had some difficulty in that we have kind of grown accustomed to the significant number of major announcements that came out from the phpBB teams in 2008, and that frequency has somewhat dropped off in 2009. And so we’ve had a bit of a void in terms of coming up with our own content to fill up our episodes.

So what does this mean looking forward? Well, my understanding is that David will be rejoining the show within the next few weeks (yay!), and we’re going to be collectively looking at phpBB Weekly and determining what we want it to be looking forward. We will be considering some new ideas for content to discuss on the show, and may consider doing some thinking outside of the box as well. We also hope to reinvigorate our shows with some more guest interviews. (Did you know that we’ve only done one full-fledged guest interview in the past year? Remember back when we used to have guest interviews on like every third episode?) And I’m also considering the idea of putting together another fun little contest to do this summer. We’ll see how that goes…

Most important is that we want to get back to our roots: our community. We really want this podcast to reflect your interests, your questions, and what you want to know about phpBB. Therefore, please comment in this post or on our forum with any suggestions that you have about the content on phpBB Weekly and where you would like us to take this podcast as we move forward and revitalize our show.

A number of things in the future are uncertain, particularly for me, since I’m going to be moving east a couple of time zones in August. But what I do know is that as long as I am still able to produce this podcast and as long as we have interested people listening to the podcast, we will continue to keep this podcast going for you, the community. Thanks for your patience with us during these turbulent few months.
–Douglas Bell, phpBB Weekly Co-Host