phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 36:02
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal)

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We had a very short episode of phpBB Weekly this week, one that would be sure to make David jealous. For whatever reason. But what can we say? We’re at sort of a lull in terms of phpBB news to cover, and we adjust accordingly.

A new post on the phpBB.com Blog by battye asks us, “How many forums should I create?” Micheal and Douglas discuss this a bit in terms of why it’s a very poor idea to start your board with dozens of forums or to have so many forums that they overwhelm your users. We also share some experiences we’ve had with boards that had many forums set up, or, even worse, lots of subforums many levels deep.

We then take a look at the world of Bertie. For one thing, Micheal and Bertie are no longer married. It’s technically not a divorce, since there never technically were papers verifying the marriage to begin with, but Micheal tries to explain the back story here. Bertie 3.0 continues to be available, and should be a hot item since Bertie Bear has been running for President, according to Micheal’s Facebook group. We have a bit of a discussion about Bertie’s qualifications to become President. And speaking of presidents, we also take a look at the actions of Albertie Einstein, Bertie Mons’ new president, who seems to have been a bit of a lame duck, having done nothing since last November. We’ll have to see if the situation changes there soon.

The Poll Question of the Week is “What is the best April Fools prank to pull on your users?” Vote (or suggest your own alternate answer) by March 28th in the sidebar.

The MOD of the Week is Anti Double Post by Théonaute, and the Style of the Week is green_vision by abble CoSa NoStrA.

Contrary to what was said at the end of the episode, we will be having an episode next Saturday, March 28th, that Douglas will host by himself. It will be our infamous annual April Fools Day special, where we’ll be putting on an unusual type of episode! Tune in live to be the first to find out the surprise!

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Download MP3 Episode (39.6 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:09:07
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and Jordan Lewis (Hank the Cowdog, representing Albertie Einstein)

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The era of change must be upon us. Not only did Barack Obama get elected as the next American president, but the changes within the phpBB teams just keep on coming with each passing week. This week it was announced that Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic) is stepping down as Support Team leader (but is staying as a member of the Support Team) and will be replaced by Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty). We briefly discuss this announcement, and there’s word that there could still be more structural changes coming soon to the phpBB project; stay tuned…

In the more immediate future, however, phpBB 3.0.3 RC-1 has been sent out to the QA Team for testing, which means that the long-awaited next update to phpBB3 is likely on the way very soon. Why is it long-awaited? There’s actually a number of new features coming in this release, such as template inheritance, changes to the moderation queue, and new permissions for sending private messages to multiple recipients. We go through the new toys coming in this next release in detail.

Finally, our President Bertie contest has officially ended with two elections that were held during the week, and on this episode, we announce the winner of the Bertie Mons Presidential Election: Albertie Einstein of the Intellectual Party, sponsored by Hank the Cowdog! We perform Albertie Einstein’s inauguration ceremony live on the show, and Jordan (Hank the Cowdog) delivers an inaugural address as well. The contest may be over, but Bertie Mons will continue to thrive on StarTrekGuide. Oh, and if anyone has figured out where the good people at SCOFF Media have disappeared to, please let us know…

The MOD of the Week is Activation Justification by TerraFrost and the Style of the Week is 4poziomSEO_orange by gokin.

phpBB Weekly is a proud member of the Tech Podcast Network. Check them out for other great technology podcasts.

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Download MP3 Episode (47.7 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:23:18
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Paul Sohier (Paul), Sean (House, representing Lyndon Bertie Johnson), Tim (T50Webmaster, representing Sir Bertie Jr.), harmlessgoat22 (representing Barack O’Bertie), and Jordan (Hank the Cowdog, representing Albertie Einstein)

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The excitement in our President Bertie Election Contest is really heating up, now with four very strong, very active candidates, campaigning to be elected the next president of Bertie Mons. We invited the campaign managers of the candidates to join us on the show (since Berties can’t talk for themselves unless there’s a ventriloquist nearby) to participate in a presidential debate discussing each candidate’s plans for the future of Bertie Mons if they are elected.

Unfortunately, running an eight-way Skype call (with half of those participants happening via SkypeOut on the phone) caused technical difficulties, making Douglas impossible to be heard by anyone except David, so that wound up flubbing us up a bit. Nevertheless, we did have an interesting debate, with some, um, interesting conclusions. It will be up to SCOFF Media to detect any gaffes that the candidates made during this debate. Also, two of the candidates were forced to leave early towards the end; we will be posting their answers to the questions that they missed on the forum within the next day or so.

We also spent a little time discussing the phpBB MOD Team’s announcement about Junior Validators, a new group of potential MOD team members who will help out with validation and get trained for the future potential of becoming a full-fledged MOD validator. If you want to apply, make sure you’re familiar with the validation checklist, and fill out the application form.

We did not have a MOD/Style of the Week this week. However, please note that due to a number of countries changing their Daylight Savings Time during different times over the next few weeks, the time that phpBB Weekly is live in your local time zone may be changing. Beginning Saturday, November 8th, phpBB Weekly will begin airing at 17:00 UTC instead of 16:00 UTC, but that does mean that if you’re changing Daylight Savings Time this week instead of next week, our next episode will seem to be an hour earlier. Please double-check your local time so you know when our upcoming episodes will stream live.

phpBB Weekly is a proud member of the Tech Podcast Network. Check them out for other great technology podcasts. Also, be sure to check out and vote in the 2008 Peoples Choice Podcast Awards!