phpBB Weekly

You may have noticed that since late Saturday night/early Sunday morning (depending on your timezone), phpBB.com has been down. According to this post from Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty), a hacker utilized a vulnerability in PHPList to gain unauthorized access to phpBB.com and take down the phpBB.com website. PHPList is used by the phpBB teams for their opt-in mailing list which they use to send out e-mail notifications of new phpBB releases. The PHPList vulnerability was patched in a version 2.10.9 security release which was put out on Thursday morning. The teams had not updated their installation of PHPList during the three days after the 2.10.9 release, and as a result, an attacker was able to use that info to access the phpBB.com Database, including the database for the community forums.

David really wanted us to be able to do a special mid-week episode of phpBB Weekly to cover the outage, but unfortunately life is busy for us and so we will not be able to do so. However, we will be having a very comprehensive discussion of the outage on Saturday’s episode of phpBB Weekly, including a discussion with one or more team members on the issues behind this outage.

Until then, please read the post for more details, including some important warnings if you have not logged in on phpBB.com since March 2007 (before phpBB.com was upgraded to phpBB3) concerning your password security. Support is temporarily available on the Area51 forums. And the next time we tell you to be prompt in keeping your software up-to-date, remember this as a very good reason why you should do so.

But I don’t want to spoil it, so head on over there to check out the winners! I will say that I’m quite satisfied with the results…

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Episode Duration: 47:32
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

Despite us being somewhat early, this episode was our special for April Fools Day 2008: our best attempt to pretend to be a weekly live podcast all about vBulletin. We tried our best, but we couldn’t resist throwing in a few good doses of surprise and sarcasm.

On this episode of vBulletin Weekly, we look at the history of how vBulletin came to be and where it is today. For those of you who are new to vBulletin, we discuss the requirements of running vBulletin, the licensing fees (ever heard of those?) for vBulletin, and the long multi-step installation process. Plus, the first release candidate of the next major release of vBulletin, 3.7, just came out a week or two ago. We take a look at some of the wildly inventive new features coming in 3.7, as well as our opinions on them. Plus, we discuss a bit about the unique idea of “threads” that vBulletin offers, and answer some questions from our angry mob chat room about vBulletin.

Links mentioned in this episode:
vBulletin Info and History (Wikipedia)
vBulletin Community Forums
vBulletin Customizations Website
Comparison between phpBB and vBulletin
First Look at vBulletin 3.7

The Hack of the Week is the Post Thank You Hack for vB 3.6 by Abe1, and the Skin of the Week is Jedi Knights – Star wars for vB 3.6 by foruma-z.

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

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Episode Duration: 1:31:47
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and Patrick O’Keefe

Today marks a very special milestone for phpBB Weekly (for any podcast, actually): our fiftieth episode! To celebrate, we bring you an interview that Douglas has been looking forward to for ten months. Patrick O’Keefe, the administrator of the iFroggy Network and phpBBHacks.com, joins us for a very interesting discussion.

During the interview, Patrick talks about phpBBHacks.com, including how and why it was started back in 2001 (yeah, it predates phpBB2!), and how it has grown and expanded in its seven year history. We also take an unbiased look at some of the differences between phpBBHacks.com and the phpBB.com MOD Database, and how phpBBHacks.com has become one of the most popular third-party phpBB sites on the internet (well, according to Google, anyway). He also talks a bit about his two websites for community administrators: ManagingCommunities.com (a blog) and CommunityAdmins.com (a community for communities). Finally, he tells us about his new book, Managing Online Forums, coming in late April. We will be reviewing his book on a future episode of phpBB Weekly, as well as giving away a copy! Stay tuned for more details on that.

David also answers a question in the TalkShoe chat room revealing that Ascraeus will feature the much-requested RSS Syndication feature built-in. We briefly talk about the significance of that feature addition.

And at the end of the show, David gives us his exclusive ski tips, based on the bloopers he endured earlier this week.

The MOD of the Week is SEO MOD for phpBB3 by Handyman`, and the Style of the Week is Macinscott 3 by Scott Stubblefield.

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