phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:27:42
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

Our penultimate episode of 2009 was also Douglas’ last episode of 2009 coming from Washington, DC. David and Douglas actually spent a lot of time at the beginning comparing notes about finals, the weather, Christmas trees, etc. Douglas also offered an early review of Google Chrome for Mac, and placates the many demands from everyone in the #startrekguide IRC channel who wanted it mentioned that SyntaxError90 is the newest member of the MOD team.

Our main topic of discussion on this episode takes a look at a question posed this week in the phpBB Discussion forum asking if phpBB is falling behind, to which we share our thoughts. We also take a look at some early (and unconfirmed) details about phpBB4 that appeared on the phpBB Development Wiki and discuss what they would mean for the potential long-term future of phpBB.

Finally, we recognize the winners of the 2009 phpBBHacks.com Awards, including the MOD and Style winners, which are our MOD and Style of the Week. The MOD of the Week is Censor Block by Thoul, and the Style of the Week is 1impression by gokin.

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Episode Duration: 1:40:42
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and special guest Bernard Meldonado

Disclaimer: We’re still trying to get used to uStream! Unfortunately, the audio for David and Bernard got double-recorded (as we found out after the fact), and we spent a lot of time trying to fix it to no avail. We’re quite disappointed about this considering how wonderful this episode was, but the sound isn’t awful. It just adds some space-agey reverb. We’ll try to avoid this problem in the future, and sorry for the inconvenience on this episode.

Last week, we briefly spent some time discussing CAPTCHAs and their effect on people who are visually impaired. Well, for this episode, we are joined by Bernard Meldonado, the founder of Solona, a volunteer-driven website that helps solve CAPTCHAs for such visually impaired users. In our extended conversation with him, we discuss the state of CAPTCHAs from a blind person’s perspective, the lameness of audio-based CAPTCHAs (with funny examples), and discuss some other services and laws to help make the web accessible. We also discuss a bit about what we would like to see in future phpBB CAPTCHA plugins (any MOD authors listening?), and really consider the future of CAPTCHAs from an accessibility standpoint. And Bernard tells us a lot about Solona and how it operates. If you’ve got some free time to spend and want to help make a difference, we really encourage you to volunteer for Solona and help solve CAPTCHAs! (We have not yet determined if solving that many CAPTCHAs improves or degrades the quality of your eyesight.)

We also cover the recent news of the week, including the phpBB 3.0.6 RC-3 release and the Best CAPTCHA Plugin Competition results.

Our Poll Question is “If you were to add a step to the MOD validation workflow, what would it be?” and continues until October 31. What are you waiting for? Go vote!

The MODs of the Week are Fancy jQuery Captcha by mtotheikle and Sortables CAPTCHA Plugin by Derky. The Style of the Week is Afterburner by RocketTheme.

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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.