phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:36:42
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty)

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“Hooray…new features!” was the headline of this episode of phpBB Weekly as the long-awaited phpBB 3.0.3 update was released. We take another look at some of the new features in this release.

Also, Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty) joins us on this show to talk about his recent promotion to Support Team Leader and to give us a glimpse of the direction that the future Support Team will be taking.

Finally, in the third segment of our Building a Successful Community series, we talk about the things you should know about recruiting and maintaining quality staff members on your forum. Yuriy shares some experiences that the phpBB.com teams have learned, David shares his experiences from StarTrekGuide, and Douglas shares some experiences from communities that he ran in the distant past.

The MOD of the Week is Milestone Congratulations by MartectX, and the Style of the Week is coffee_time by abble.

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

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Episode Duration: 1:32:36
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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Douglas returns on this episode of phpBB Weekly to lead the second segment in our “Building a Successful Community” series. Once again stealing/borrowing some content from Patrick O’Keefe’s book, Managing Online Forums, Douglas and David talk about developing user guidelines for your community. They talk about the importance of having user guidelines to help your community get along and succeed, and then go through a number of ideas and suggestions for things that you might want to include in your user guidelines (depending on the makeup of your community, of course).

During the discussion, they also touch on some other important topics, such as dealing with users who try to post advertising and spams on your board, dealing with copyright violations and protecting yourself from the wrath of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), ensuring that you know when/how you have to deal with COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998) law, and having a Privacy Policy.

David also welcomes the newest member of the MOD Team, david63, who now brings the phpBB teams’ “David count” to four, not including former team member David Smith (smithy_dll).

And, Douglas introduces phpBB Weekly’s newest contest, the “President Bertie” Election Contest, which will be launching on this website on Tuesday (so check back to find out how to participate).

Other Links Mentioned in This Episode
Bertie Bear for President Facebook Group
Privacy Policy Generator
phpBB.com Rules (for inspiration)
StarTrekGuide Rules (for more inspiration)

The MOD of the Week is RSS Feed 2.0 by leviatan21, and the Style of the Week is parrot by darkbeing-designs.

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 (53.1 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:32:51
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

Sponsor: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.gotomeeting.com/techpodcasts/.

We start out this episode of phpBB Weekly first by taking a look back at last weekend’s MOD Authors Convention and briefly recapping some of it (see last week’s episode for full coverage of the event). Then, we tackle a topic that we didn’t get to last week: a discussion about CAPTCHAs in phpBB, as well as some of the difficulties of utilizing CAPTCHAs in open-source projects, along with a look at some of the other efforts at preventing spambot registration on various websites. The moral of the story: whatever you do, turn on User Activation in your phpBB Settings, because no CAPTCHA is perfect.

Then, we turn to the first part of our segment on “Building a Successful Community,” in which Douglas and David discuss the things that a user who wants to create a brand new community needs to plan out from the start, and the skills and qualities that new administrators will need for their community to be successful in the long run. Most of the content for this segment comes out of Patrick O’Keefe’s book, Managing Online Forums.

The MOD of the Week is th23 Domain by th23, and the Style of the Week is Black Pearl by Mighty Gorgon.

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