phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:38:06
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and Phil Crumm (iWisdom)

Well, we had kind of an interesting setup on this episode. Douglas recently broke his laptop, and ended up calling in using Skype on his new iPod touch. This left him unable to see the uStream chat room, or to browse ANY websites at all for that matter, aside from those that he had printed out in advance. On the flip side, David wound up impersonating Douglas on uStream in order to control the live stream. And Douglas’ lack of a laptop is the primary reason why this episode, which was recorded a week ago, took so long to get released (our sincerest apologies for that).

Anyway, our one and only topic for this episode is phpBB 3.0.6 Release Candidate 1 which was unexpectedly made available in a public release a week before this recording. The release announcement offers a HUGE list of over 150 new features, changes, and bugfixes since 3.0.5, making you wonder how on earth the Development Team squeezed so many things into this release over a time period of just over three months. The length of that list also equivocates with the length of this episode, where we really did spend over an hour and a half discussing that one topic.

But in the course of the show, not only do we go through the major new features of 3.0.6 once again, but Douglas comes up with a creative competition between David and Phil to go through the lists of “minor feature additions” and “smaller changes.” They also spend a bit more time discussing the 3.0.6 release in relation to phpBB’s recent development changes and new versioning scheme.

Our last poll question was “What should be the next ‘tool’ added to the Support Toolkit?” Here are the results:
“A tool that says ‘YOU IDIOT!’ if the phpBB installation hasn’t been updated in over a year.” 6 votes / 46%
“A coffee maker. (Because Erik Frerejean wouldn’t have it any other way.)” 4 votes / 31%
“An animated version of Marshalrusty’s “DON’T PANIC!” avatar.” 2 votes / 15%
“A Staples Easy Button.” 1 vote / 8%
“Sanitize (sanitise) anonymous users — as in it automatically eliminates insane anonymous users.” 0 votes / 0%
Total Votes: 13

The MOD of the Week is Simple Profile Comments by platinum_2007, and the Style of the Week is CA Halcyon by CyberAlien.

Want to help Douglas replace his broken computer, or are you interested in the Linux workstation he won from OSCON? Check out the eBay auction!

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Episode Duration: 1:15:18
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), Phil Crumm (iWisdom), Igor Wiedler (evil<3), and Damian (Obsidian/Desdenova)

It’s kind of ironic that for this podcast, 2009 has turned into a year where CAPTCHAs seem to get all of our focus. Especially considering how much we hate them. They’re simply a necessary evil, kind of like insurance companies. Nevertheless, we dedicate yet another episode to the discussion of Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

But why? Well, the submission period for the phpBB MOD Team’s Best CAPTCHA Plugin Competition just ended. Once the MOD validators finish validating the submitted CAPTCHA plugins over the next few weeks, then both the phpBB teams and the community will have the opportunity to vote on their favorite CAPTCHA plugin (the winners of which will receive a free Bertie). However, we couldn’t wait for the voting to start, so we ran our own survey asking MOD Authors to tell us about their CAPTCHA plugins, and so we spent some time describing and critiquing those plugins.

CAPTCHA Plugins Featured:
Crazy Maths CAPTCHA by eviL<3
Sortables CAPTCHA Plugin by Derky
Fancy jQuery CAPTCHA by mtotheikle (similar to this CAPTCHA)
SimpleMath by nickvergessen
Rotate Image CAPTCHA Plugin by Brainy

Douglas also pointed out that in a recent checkin to Subversion, the Development Team is apparently almost ready to seed phpBB 3.0.6 RC-1 to the QA Team. He and Igor discuss a bit about if phpBB 3.0.6 might have qualified as 3.1 under the new development roadmap, and why the teams decided to keep it as 3.0.6 instead of switching to 3.1. Douglas also shares that he’s hoping to organize another phpBB users meetup in Washington, DC in early 2010. And Damian and Igor talk a little bit about the phpBBModders.net community which they are a part of.

Our poll question, “What should be the next ‘tool’ added to the Support Toolkit?” continues until Saturday, September 12. Vote in the poll on the right-hand sidebar.

The MOD of the Week is Ban Hammer by SyntaxError90, and the Style of the Week is Reds by Culprit.

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Sorry, no chat log this time! We haven’t figure out the best way to log the uStream chatroom yet…

Episode Duration: 1:26:48
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

Okay, so it’s not all-new and it probably won’t blow your mind (not in a good way, at least), but nevertheless, phpBB Weekly is back! With a new presence on uStream, a new timezone, and (for Douglas) a new “studio” and a new operating system, it could be called all-new, except that we still have the same outlook on life. And the same tendency to talk, and talk, and talk.

On the phpBB news front, the second release candidate of the phpBB Support Toolkit is out now, and it’s also the first release to be officially supported and recommended for use. The deadline for the Best CAPTCHA Plugin Competition has been extended to this Friday, and we will be covering it in much more depth next week.

In the “At what point will they quit tinkering and finally get a ‘gold master’ label out” category, development of the much-anticipated 3.0.6 release continues and more new features continue to be inserted. David and Douglas focus on two significant additions on this episode: the Newly Registered Users Group (to make it easier for moderators and administrators to observe the actions of newly registered users to ensure that they aren’t tending towards spam), and Submitting Statistics to phpBB.com (to optionally and anonymously submit usage and server statistics to the phpBB Development Team).

Finally, David and Douglas spend some time recapping our interview with Lorelle VanFossen by bringing the discussion about helping to bring around more community events and meetups into the phpBB community. We cover a range of thoughts on what the phpBB teams and community members can do to help phpBB reach out beyond its own online community.

Our phpBB Weekly Poll Question is “What should be the next ‘tool’ added to the Support Toolkit?” The poll will start in the next day or two on the right sidebar, and will end on September 12.

The MOD of the Week is IE6 No More by VSE, and the Style of the Week is Blue Stripe by BlackburnRavers.