phpBB Weekly

Hello everyone!

We’re still in the middle of our August break and are looking forward to returning next weekend. However, you may have heard today that the deadline for the Best CAPTCHA plugin competition has been extended to Friday, September 4th. That means that if you want to write a CAPTCHA plugin and are still working on it, you’ve still got two weeks left!

Obviously, we’re going to be covering the competition very closely during the month of September, and we want to start by hearing about some of the ideas that you, the phpBB MODding community, have come up with.

Therefore, during the next two weeks, we will be running a small survey asking CAPTCHA plugin authors to tell us all about your CAPTCHA plugins! On phpBB Weekly #121, which will be live on Saturday, September 5th (the day after the submission deadline), we’re going to take a look at the submissions that we receive and discuss them on the show. That’s right, this is a golden opportunity for you to get free exposure to your CAPTCHA plugin, and more exposure might mean more votes in the competition!*

*This does not mean that we will lobby for or against any particular plugin; all coverage of CAPTCHA plugins on phpBB Weekly will be fully objective during the duration of the contest.

Our only requirement is that your plugin must be a stable version and submitted to the MOD Database (and thus qualify for the contest). So what are you waiting for? Fill out our survey after the jump.
(more…)

Meik announced today that the phpBB teams (according to the copyright at the end, it was apparently mainly him) have created a phpBB “Code Swarm” video, which I gather is a visual space-age representation of phpBB development activity from March 2001 (right before the release of phpBB 1.2.1) to May 2009 (obviously, right after the release of phpBB 3.0.5). If you haven’t seen it yet, here it is (you really oughta go full screen for the entire effect):

phpBB code swarm from phpBB on Vimeo.

Now at the end of his announcement, Meik said that “We wish everyone to have fun with this video, simply enjoy it.” Well, if you know us on phpBB Weekly, and me in particular, we’ll be sure to have fun with this video, but not just by simply enjoying it. No, we (mainly I) have to have fun with it in our (my) own special way. So be sure to tune in tomorrow to phpBB Weekly #108 (or wait until it’s released this weekend) for a zany interpretation of the code swarm that might rival the fun we had with BBGourmet, performed live on the show. Sound like fun? Yeah, if the internet can survive it. Until then, later…

This has been one heck of a week for phpBB, as evidenced by the dozens of e-mails that David and I have been sending back and forth to each other. (We rarely e-mail each other at all usually.) Not only has phpBB.com suffered a major outage caused by probably the most severe hack they have experienced to date (noting, of course, that it was NOT a fault of the phpBB software itself), but in a completely unrelated incident, many phpBB users have been reporting a sudden spike in spam registrations on phpBB boards. Of course, this has been quite a lot for the phpBB teams to handle all at once, and I commend them for their hard work to stay afloat this week.

David and I have been preparing for a very significant episode of phpBB Weekly tomorrow during which we will fully cover and address all of the details surrounding these two critical issues. David is also arranging to hopefully have some members of the phpBB teams join us to provide more inside details on both of these issues, but we will not know for sure in advance who will be joining us because of the massive amount of work that the teams are facing right now.

Nevertheless, we would like to invite you to join us tomorrow, Saturday, February 7th at 12:00 EST (1700 UTC) for this critical episode of phpBB Weekly, and please spread the word about this episode as much as you can, in particular to any administrators of phpBB boards that are being affected by the spam registrations issue. We also want to remind you that we invite you to participate in the show by asking us questions either in the chat room or by calling in live. We represent all of you, the listeners, and so we want to be sure that we fill you in on the current situations that the phpBB community is facing. We will also do our best to release the episode on phpBBWeekly.net within 12 hours of the end of the live stream.

If you can’t join us during the episode tomorrow but have any questions that you would like us to cover, you may also feel free to ask them in this topic on our forum.

Click on the ShareThis button below to quickly spread the word about this episode on one of your social networks or blogs, or e-mail it to your friends. And we hope to see you during tomorrow’s episode. Thanks!
–Douglas Bell
Co-Host and Editor, phpBB Weekly

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.

But I don’t want to spoil it, so head on over there to check out the winners! I will say that I’m quite satisfied with the results…