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After all the um, interesting results we had on last week’s episode involving multiple people connected via SkypeOut on their cell phones, you’d think that we’d want to jump back to normal this week, but no. David and Francis were both out of town this weekend in the Middle of Nowhere, Montana, at a horse show, and joined us on this episode via their phones in the middle of the horse show, as could be somewhat easily heard throughout the episode. In addition, we were joined on this episode by phpBB’s new Operations Manager, Eric Faerber (wGEric), by former team member Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), who claims to be married to Bertie on Facebook, and by Francis Lewis (Handyman) who is serving as the head manager of SCOFF Media, Bertie Mons’ independent media organization.

The phpBB teams made some dramatic reorganizational changes this week by expanding their group of Team Leaders into a new “Management Team,” which in addition to the team leaders consists of three “managers.” wGEric is the new Operations Manager, ChrisRLG is the new Business Manager, and dhn continues his work under his newly-renamed title, Website Manager. And, taking Eric’s place, Igor Wiedler (eviL<3) is succeeding Eric as the new MOD Team leader. Douglas, David, and Eric talk in-depth about these changes, why they were made, and what they mean for the future of phpBB.

Oh, and by the way, the MOD Team just posted a Q&A with the MOD Team topic, so if you have questions you’ve been dying to ask the MOD Team members, hie thee hence to that topic!

Finally, our panel of guests analyzes the campaigns in our President Bertie Election Contest, looking at the progress of the four candidates and discussing what strategies they’ve done well and what more they could/should have done. Voting for the candidates in our contest begins Monday, November 3rd at 9 PM EST (0200 UTC on Tuesday), so be sure to participate! More details will be posted later this week in the contest forum.

The MOD of the Week is Post Count Requirements by SyntheticChaos and the Style of the Week is AZ_Retro by ayashazoelle.

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 People’s Choice Podcast Awards! Voting ends this Thursday, so don’t miss out!

Today, Eric Faerber (wGEric) announced that he is stepping aside as MOD Team Leader, to be succeeded by Igor Wiedler (eviL<3). This is a very significant announcement, and one that particularly touches both myself and David as we both have served on the MOD Team under Eric’s leadership, and I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect back on this announcement and the many contributions that Eric has made to the MOD Team.

During the past three and a half years, the face and scope of the MOD Team has radically changed. When Eric was first promoted to MOD Team Leader in February 2005, the team’s primary focus was simply on validating MODs in the queue and moderating the MOD development/discussion forums. The team only validated phpBB2 MODs; after all, the first beta of phpBB3 was still fifteen months away, and the only MOD template that was used was the old text-based MOD template. Now, the MOD team no longer accepts new phpBB2 MODifications (and three months from now, will no longer accept any phpBB2 submissions of any kind), and are pretty much exclusively validating phpBB3 MODs. They now exclusively use their MODX template format, and in the span of three and a half years, they not only previewed the XML format to the MODding community and got feedback on it, but have put out multiple iterations of the MODX format, both the XML spec AND two versions of the XSL stylesheet for it. The MOD Team took over EasyMOD, which had originally been a project independently run by Nuttzy, and has released numerous versions of it for phpBB2, and they are now working on a MOD Package Manager (”Blinky”) to provide similar functionality for phpBB3. Following the unexpected move over to the new phpBB3-powered phpBB.com in March 2007, the MOD team completely rebuilt a brand new MOD Database and MOD Queue (as well as a new Styles Database and Queue to boot for the Styles Team) for the new site, and, under pressure, got a beta version of it up and running in just under three months. They organized three MOD Author Conventions (2006, 2007, and 2008) on their IRC channel to improve their back-and-forth communications with the MODding community and receive feedback from MODders. More recently, they have built a new MOD pre-validator for MOD authors to use, launched a phpBB Code Wiki to share MODding and coding documentation, and just last week launched their new Junior Validators team to help them better recruit new validators.

I spent nine months on the MOD team, having been accepted to the team in November 2005, and stepping down in August 2006, when I realized that I am far too busy in my personal life to have the necessary time to contribute to the team. Nevertheless, during the time I spent on the MOD Team, Eric was the team member that I looked up to the most. I was the youngest team member at the time, and at only fourteen years old, I was certainly less mature than I am today. Nevertheless, Eric was always willing to listen to my concerns and was always supportive. And that wasn’t just the case with me, but with the whole team. He epitomizes the best kind of leader: someone who leads by supporting and encouraging his team members to do their best job, and who seeks to listen to the concerns of each of his team members and help to work them out. Despite all the additional responsibilities that he has had as a team leader, he has always led the MOD Team to greatness through the support and encouragement that he has given to his team members, and he is to be greatly commended for it.

Today, Igor takes over from him as MOD Team Leader, and he’s got some awfully big shoes to fill. He is, however, a highly-respected and very knowledgeable member of the MOD community, and he is definitely a good choice for the job. I’m sure that he’ll continue to lead the MOD Team to bold new frontiers (yes, I had to get the Star Trek theme in here somewhere for David’s sake!). And fortunately for us, Eric isn’t leaving the teams for good. He’ll be sticking around with the Team Leaders group (now newly renamed as the “Management Team”) as “Operations Manager.” I don’t know what that means yet, and all Eric said in his announcement was that he’s going to “take a different role with phpBB.” I have a hunch that we’ll find out just how much of a role he’ll be playing soon…

Nevertheless, from the bottom of my heart, thank you Eric for all of the contributions that you have made to the MOD Team and to phpBB over the past few years, and for the work that you will continue to do for phpBB in your new role. Also, congratulations to Igor for his promotion and for the many more contributions that he’ll be making to the MOD Team and to phpBB in the years to come.
–Douglas Bell, phpBB Weekly Co-Host

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Eric Faerber returns for his second appearance on phpBB Weekly, and one which probably is a bit more informative than his first appearance was (and the blame for that can go directly to Douglas). It’s also the day after Douglas’ birthday, and so we do a short celebration for him as well. We also do our best to run the show while phpBB.com is down for “unexpected maintenance”, and we also launch a new feature on this episode: the phpBB Weekly Trivia Question.

During the interview with Eric, David mentions a few more new Support Team members, and mentions that Acyd Burn has confirmed that there will be an RC-6 release coming. We also take a look at the new hooks system that was recently added into CVS and will be coming out with phpBB3 RC-6 and ask what it means for MODs, and Douglas reiterates his wish for a WordPressish plugin system for the MODding of the future. We also talk about other new things for MODs in phpBB3, and then ask Eric some user-submitted questions about the MOD Team. Eric also reveals a couple of details of the upcoming EasyMOD for phpBB3 (Codename: Blinky).

Since phpBB.com was down, we had to take our MOD and Style of the Week off of Star Trek Guide, which is probably the best alternative. Anyway, the MOD of the Week is PM Alert Layer for phpBB3 by angelside, and the Style of the Week is Aqua Glass for phpBB3 by Trent.

Incidentally, if you would like to send your birthday wishes to Douglas, the Star Trek Guide folks have already setup a topic for that.

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

We’re hearing from our listeners that you guys love it when we bring on guests to the show. And, now that David is on the teams, we’re hearing from all these team members that want to be guests on the show. Well, we’re probably not going to be going all out to bring guests on every week, but we’re probably going to start having more of them, and our next two episodes are going to be some exciting ones. I mentioned these briefly at the end of phpBB Weekly #031, but wanted to reiterate them here.

On phpBB Weekly #032, this Saturday, September 29th, MOD Team leader Eric Faerber (wGEric) will be joining us again on phpBB Weekly. I had kind of a lame interview with him back on episode #004 (and it was completely my fault), so David will be doing most of the questioning on this show, but I’ll be there as well. We’ll be talking about some of the projects that the MOD Team is working on now in preparation for the upcoming release of phpBB3, what you need to know about MODding in phpBB3, and we’ll also be talking a bit about the new hooks and events functionality coming in the next phpBB3 release. And of course, Eric will be answering your questions and comments, so be sure to join us for the live episode!

Then, on phpBB Weekly #033, which will be on Saturday, October 6th, we will be inviting a small panel of other members of the Tech Podcasts Network (of which this show is a member, by the way) to join us to talk about their experiences with building a true community around a bulletin-board/forum website, along with tips and answering questions. (Note that this is still subject to change as I’m still trying to arrange a panel, or at the very least, a guest!) Join us to get some expert tips on how you can attract members to your forum and build a community.

We have these shows and some other exciting shows planned, and we hope to have you join us for our upcoming episodes of phpBB Weekly!