phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:26:48
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

Okay, so it’s not all-new and it probably won’t blow your mind (not in a good way, at least), but nevertheless, phpBB Weekly is back! With a new presence on uStream, a new timezone, and (for Douglas) a new “studio” and a new operating system, it could be called all-new, except that we still have the same outlook on life. And the same tendency to talk, and talk, and talk.

On the phpBB news front, the second release candidate of the phpBB Support Toolkit is out now, and it’s also the first release to be officially supported and recommended for use. The deadline for the Best CAPTCHA Plugin Competition has been extended to this Friday, and we will be covering it in much more depth next week.

In the “At what point will they quit tinkering and finally get a ‘gold master’ label out” category, development of the much-anticipated 3.0.6 release continues and more new features continue to be inserted. David and Douglas focus on two significant additions on this episode: the Newly Registered Users Group (to make it easier for moderators and administrators to observe the actions of newly registered users to ensure that they aren’t tending towards spam), and Submitting Statistics to phpBB.com (to optionally and anonymously submit usage and server statistics to the phpBB Development Team).

Finally, David and Douglas spend some time recapping our interview with Lorelle VanFossen by bringing the discussion about helping to bring around more community events and meetups into the phpBB community. We cover a range of thoughts on what the phpBB teams and community members can do to help phpBB reach out beyond its own online community.

Our phpBB Weekly Poll Question is “What should be the next ‘tool’ added to the Support Toolkit?” The poll will start in the next day or two on the right sidebar, and will end on September 12.

The MOD of the Week is IE6 No More by VSE, and the Style of the Week is Blue Stripe by BlackburnRavers.

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Episode Duration: 1:07:51
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and Lorelle VanFossen

Surprise! Sure, we’re on a three week break, but we couldn’t just leave you in the lurch without an episode of phpBB Weekly to regale yourself with. We’re joined on this special non-live episode by one of Douglas’ good friends, Lorelle VanFossen.

Lorelle is primarily affiliated with the community of WordPress, the popular open-source blogging/CMS software. However, we invited her on this show to discuss her experiences with WordCamps, various WordPress community events that have been organized all over the world during the past few years. On this episode, Lorelle shares some of the energizing experiences from past WordCamps that she’s been to and spoken at, and David and Douglas also share some of their experiences from Londonvasion and OSCONvasion.

More importantly, though, Lorelle shares some guidelines for individuals interested in organizing local community meetup events, and share some of her opinions on how the phpBB community could help ignite more local community meetups for our project.

But this podcast isn’t all just talk, this is probably one of the funniest episodes we’ve had to date, because Lorelle is a riot. Without a doubt, one of the craziest moments comes when Douglas shares that he won the grand prize from the OSCON Passport Program, a Pogo Linux Intel Workstation.

Links mentioned in this episode:
Douglas’ Previous Podcast Interview with Lorelle
No Fact Zone
SOBCon
Kickstarter
WordCamp Whistler
Teens in Tech Conference
An Open-Source Look at the Cost of WordCamp Dallas
WordCamp Hong Kong
WordCamp Portland and the Fairy Blogmother
Beer and Blog
Now if those links don’t get you interested in listening to this episode, nothing will!

Other Resources for Organizing Meetups:
Upcoming
Meetup.com
Tips for Planning and Organizing a WordPress Event and WordCamp (via The WordCamp Report)
WordCamp and WordPress Meetups – The Events Heard Round the World (via Lorelle on WordPress)
phpBB Events and Meetings forum
And a new resource for phpBB event/meetup organizers that we’re going to start working on soon…

Find Lorelle at…
Lorelle on WordPress
The WordCamp Report
Camera on the Road
Her AWESOME book: Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging
… and almost every WordCamp event out there!

That said, enjoy this special episode of phpBB Weekly, and join us when we return on Saturday, August 29th at 1 PM EDT (1700 UTC) when we return live on uStream!

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Episode Duration: 56:39
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), Francis Lewis (Handyman), Adam Reyher (AdamR), Cullen (Brainy), and OSCONvasion Attendees

Listen in to the “Berties of a Feather” session that we held at OSCONvasion 2009 and streamed live on the internet. During this hour-long session, we discuss a bit about community management with our audience members, Adam delivers a PowerPoint presentation on how to successfully build a new community with phpBB, and Douglas leads a discussion on how community members can get more involved in phpBB and discussion of some ideas that we would like to see in the future to foster even more community involvement in phpBB.

Much more info (with photos) about OSCONvasion is available here. We will have a complete wrap-up of our great time at OSCON and OSCONvasion on tomorrow’s regularly-scheduled episode.

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Episode Duration: 1:05:02
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples)

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Note: This episode was recorded before we learned the news of David’s leave of absence.

This episode of phpBB Weekly goes back to the show’s roots, to a darker time when the show only had one host. As David was away on a business trip, Douglas steps up and goes solo for the first time in who knows how long. And when he has the microphone all to himself, there’s no telling what he’ll talk about.

Well actually, there is. Douglas dusts off our old “Building a Successful Community” series and today’s topic is moderator etiquette. Douglas discusses the importance of locking topics responsibly, avoiding the “Why didn’t you search for it?” syndrome, and focusing on actually helping out your users.

And, partially inspired by this post, Douglas talks about a topic a bit more near and dear to his heart: eliminating age stereotypes among your members and staff and valuing the contributions of younger members. As a younger person himself, Douglas has quite a bit to say in this department.

Finally, Douglas sorts through the phpBB.com Events and Meetings forum to take a look at some of the upcoming events scheduled or in planning, including an update on the exciting San Francisco event that he and David will be putting together.

Our last Poll Question of the Week was “What’s the best Valentine to give to a forum moderator?” There were 4 votes (44%) for “A day off.”; 3 votes (33%) for “A chocolate bar with your forum rules engraved on it.”; 2 votes (22%) for “Singles Awareness Day propaganda.”; and no votes for “A rank image with little hearts on it.” or “A chance to be administrator for a day.”. This week’s poll is “What’s your favorite web browser” Vote in the poll on our right-hand sidebar, and leave a comment as well if you want to. The poll closes on March 14th.

The MOD of the Week is Special Chars by Mr_Simon and the Style of the Week is PS3 by Jester-fr.

Be sure to join us on Saturday, March 14th for our one-hundredth episode! It’s sure to be a blast.

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Episode Duration: 1:14:56
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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Man, it seems like we can’t seem to get our episodes recorded weekly, doesn’t it? Well, hopefully we’ll start to turn that bad habit around, starting with this episode.

We start on this episode with an update from our President Bertie Election Contest, in which two candidates, Lyndon Bertie Johnson and Sir Bertie Jr., have qualified for the ballot. The two-week campaign season has now begun, and the fun is happening now in the forum!

Speaking of new forums, the teams announced earlier this week the launch of a new Events and Meetings forum for people to organize local phpBB events and meetups around their locality.

Finally, for the main portion of our show, we turn to a blog post made this week by Support Team member iWisdom on handling support requests. We talk a bit about how Support Team members and community supporters go through the Support Forum to help users out with phpBB, discuss some of the more common support requests, and finally offer our tips for interested users who want to start contributing in the support forum.

The MOD of the Week is Topic Solved by tumba25, and the Style of the Week is Jedi Knights by Scott Stubblefield.

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 People’s Choice Podcast Awards; voting begins on Thursday!