phpBB Weekly

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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.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3 Episode (24.2 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:00:17
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples)

This episode was supposed to be the first episode with David “Highway of Life” Lewis as our new co-host, but unfortunately, he couldn’t make it. It was still a full episode as Douglas tried to explain MODX without getting too technical or too boring. A big thanks goes out to the many who participated in the show and called in!

Hot off the presses, phpBB is a finalist for the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards for “Best Project for Communications”. It’s a high honor to be winner of this award, so go and vote for phpBB!

In this episode, Douglas gives a brief history of MODX, talks about its advantages and disadvantages, and also talks about the MODX Packaging Guidelines and Versioning System, as well as identifies some resources for MOD authors to use MODX. Many of these can be found at the MODX Resource Centre. It’s also encouraged that MOD authors verify that their MODX package is correct with the mEAL pre-validator tool. There were a few things that the MOD team had not made 100% clear at the recording of this episode. They will probably be submitting me corrections to mistakes that I may have made; these will be mentioned in the comments section of this post and at the beginning of the next show.

The MOD of the Week is Oops – Database Down by eviL<3, and the Style of the Week is Chairs Template by AngusThermopile.

Douglas will be away in Sacramento on the 14th and at the WordCamp conference on the 21st, so the next live episode will not be until Saturday, July 28th, at the usual time. If there is a big announcement/news from phpBB in the interim, we may release a special episode (not live) to talk about it. Think of this as like my “summer vacation”.