Hello everyone,

If you guys haven’t noticed, the month of June is quite a busy month for both myself and David. I had a trip to China earlier this month and will be leaving this Saturday and all next week on another excursion, and David just got back from a couple of days in Vancouver in addition to a very busy work schedule. So we’ve been kind of busy, but rather than cutting out almost all of our episodes for this month, we still wanted to try to get a full month of phpBB Weekly for you all, especially with everything that’s happening right now.

So here’s what’s up. Episode #065, which David recorded on June 7th, will be edited and released either today or tomorrow. David is in the process of getting the recording over to me. Episode #066 was already released on Tuesday.

Instead of doing the episode that we had scheduled for this Saturday live, we’re instead going to do it off of TalkShoe before I leave on my next excursion, which means that there will be no live episode this Saturday. It will be released tomorrow or really early on Saturday, unusually early for phpBB Weekly.
Our next live episode will be on Saturday, June 28th at the normal time. David will be doing it without me because I won’t be getting back until that afternoon, but we’ll try to get it edited and released on the usual schedule.

So that’s that; just wanted to fill you in. Thanks for your patience and thanks for continuing to listen to phpBB Weekly!
–Douglas Bell

You know, phpBB Weekly is no longer the young, fledgling, relatively-unknown podcast that it once was. This show is now almost seventeen months old, and we’ve got more than sixty episodes behind our belt, most of which have some outstanding content, whether it be tutorials, interviews, news coverage, or just random jibber jabber. However, because a lot of what we talk about is timeless–as relevant now as it was when we recorded it–we’ve been wanting to come up with a way to spotlight our past episodes, giving our long-time listeners a way to rediscover them, and our newer listeners a way to discover them for the first time.

And so, after a lot of work that I’ve gone through sorting, organizing, and linking, I’m excited to announce the introduction of the phpBB Weekly Zeitgeist! Ignoring the weird cool name, the Zeitgeist is essentially a grouping of our past episodes organized into different categories, so that you can discover past episodes that are of interest to you.

Of course, this is the first time I’ve tried doing something like this, so if you have any feedback, please feel free to let us know in the comments section of this topic. We hope that this will be useful to you.

I don’t know if you’ve been by our phpBB Weekly forum recently, but a lot has been happening there recently. David and I have been discussing the idea of making phpBB Weekly’s branding a little more “Olympusy”–that is, more in tune with the phpBB3 artwork. While I have been and continue to remain to this day a big fan of the phpBB2 “hut” image that graced the phpBB.com website until March 2007, times have changed, people have upgraded, and the upcoming “end of life” of phpBB2 has shown us that it’s time that we start getting caught up.

David has designed a cool new album artwork proposal which we’re currently seeking feedback on and are considering adopting sometime in the next month or two. However, we’re also hoping to adopt a new theme for our phpBBWeekly.net website that reflects the new artwork but still has some originality. Star Trek Guide member Midnight Phoenix is custom-designing a brand new WordPress theme just for us (and donating his services as well, by the way), but he’d be interested in hearing your suggestions, particularly since David and myself only have a very short wishlist. If you’d like to contribute your comments and participate, check out the discussion topic on our forum!

Hello phpBB Weekly listeners,

Those of you who have seen our TalkShoe page recently have noticed that we have a very exciting month of May planned (as far as phpBB Weekly episodes are concerned), and so I thought I’d take the opportunity to sum up what’s on the agenda for the next few weeks.

First of all, as you’ve noticed, there will be no episode on Saturday, May 3rd. The reason for this is partially because Douglas is out of town, and also because he has been (and continues to be) busy prepping for AP exams at school, and this will neither give him the opportunity to be at an episode of phpBB Weekly nor to be able to edit it, so we’re just going to give him the week off. (Actually, he’s already out of town–this post was scheduled a week ago!)

Patrick O’Keefe (who was on episode #050 on February 9th) will be joining us again on May 10th for phpBB Weekly #061. His new book, Managing Online Forums, was recently released (Douglas just reviewed it on his blog, too), and so he will be joining David and Douglas to talk about his excellent new book in detail. Plus, we will be doing the prize giveaway for the listener survey that we launched back in March, so this will be an episode that you will want to be here for. (By the way, you still have time to fill out the listener survey–we’ve only gotten about 30 responses so far, so hie thee hence and add yourself to the lot!)

David will be doing another solo episode on May 17th (Douglas has to present a workshop that day) and so we will announce the topic of discussion at that time.

On May 24th (episode #063), we will be joined by Matt Mullenweg, the founder and “Chief BBQ Taste Tester” of Automattic, the people who produce the very popular WordPress blogging software, and also produce the up-and-coming bbPress forums software. We’ll break away from phpBB a bit on this episode to chat with Matt about bbPress and the very different philosophy that it utilizes for BB-based communities, as well as learn about some of the experiences that Automattic has had building WordPress and bbPress as open-source programs, comparing them a bit with phpBB’s open source life. It should be an interesting episode.

Finally, rounding out the month of May, we will be joined on episode #064 (May 31st) by the hosts of the recently-created phpBBIreland podcast. They’ll join us to talk a bit about their new show, as well as the phpBBIreland.com community and the Stargate Portal, a portal for phpBB3 that they develop.

Anyway, we’re certainly looking forward to some exciting episodes this month, and we hope that you’ll join us!

Hello everyone,

I’ve gotten some notification from TalkShoe that they are making a minor change to their setup. Effective immediately, if you are not registered on TalkShoe and you enter the chat room as a guest (i.e. as Guest 1 or Guest 2, etc.), by default you will be blocked from having the ability to participate in the chat until I unblock you.

As was explained to me by Dave Nelsen (TalkShoe’s CEO), they have been hearing from many other calls on the network who have been affected by these anonymous guest chatters who have come in and typed a lot of porn and profanity into the chat, but once the hosts blocks them from the chat room, this person just has to close the window and reopen it to enter into the chat room as another guest, thus causing hell for the host of the TalkShoe call.

Luckily, phpBB Weekly hasn’t (yet) been affected by this, however for now, this change is universal (in May, they will be providing the ability to toggle this option once they build the toggle into the system). In the meantime, if you try to join in on the show as a guest chatter, you will not be able to chat by default until I notice and unblock you. It is annoying for me, and it’s annoying for you, but that’s what happens when a couple of rogue users spoil it for everyone. (I’m sure many of you have similar experiences in your own communities as well.)

If you would like to get around all this annoyance, feel free to register for free to TalkShoe. It only takes a minute, and once you’re registered, not only will you have your own username for us to identify you with, but you will not be blocked upon entering the chat room, and so neither of us will have to worry about this new obstacle.

Anyway, that’s just an FYI for you all to take note of. Hope to see you on Saturday!