phpBB Weekly

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This episode was actually recorded on Saturday, September 20, but between some busy circumstances and a weeklong outage with TalkShoe’s uploading form, it took two weeks to get this thing released!

Douglas was out and about during this episode of phpBB Weekly, so David decided (as usual) to invite a few other team members to come along for the ride. He was joined on this episode by Cullen (Brainy) of the Moderator Team, and Francis Lewis (Handyman) of the MOD Team, and they talked about a plethora of topics. They start by discussing a few things that moderators should know about the dangers of over-moderating: over-zealously deleting signatures or posts. They then discuss a bit more about CAPTCHAs, why the work and don’t work, and some ideas for alternatives for a CAPTCHA.

Then, remember back at Londonvasion, when Meik Sievertsen (Acyd Burn) gave a presentation outlining the new features coming in phpBB 3.2 Ascraeus? He recently made a blog post explaining these features in more detail, and they cover this blog post in detail on this episode.

The MOD of the Week is Anti-Bot Question by CoC, and the Style of the Week is DarkFantasy by Daniel Exe.

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

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We return from our three week break energized and ready to go with our fall “season” of phpBB Weekly, and we kick it off with the realization that there’s a whole bunch of news for us to cover from just the past few days.

The MOD and Styles Databases have been upgraded with the ability to subscribe to individual MOD updates by e-mail (and, according to Paul, there’s a secret RSS feed as well). Speaking of the databases, thirteen phpBB3 styles have finally been approved for the Styles Database. In addition, the Styles Team has announced a new styles validation policy regarding how they will handle new releases of phpBB and how it will affect style validation. The Londonvasion videos are now available as well, and David shares some of his recommendations for the best ones to watch if you don’t have time for all of them.

The MOD Team will be holding its third annual MOD Authors Convention next Saturday, August 30 in the #phpbb-mod IRC channel. We briefly describe what sessions will be presented at the convention on this episode, and will be providing complete live coverage of the convention on next week’s episode. And finally, PHP 4.4.9 has been released, signifying the last release of PHP 4 as the PHP Group drops support for it, plus PHP 5.3 is in early release candidate stage, and we discuss some of the development team’s recent changes in the Subversion repository in response to the new version of PHP.

We then bring you a tutorial on the ways you can optimze search engine optimization (SEO) in phpBB3, from our local SEO expert, David Lewis, whose blog post on SEO and phpBB3 just appeared on the phpBB.com Blog.

Links from the SEO Tutorial and Other Recommended SEO Tools:
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Analytics
SEO MOD
Advanced Meta Tags MOD
What are Google Sitemaps?

This week’s MOD and Style of the Week are the winners of the recent phpBBHacks.com Idol (which means that these two authors won over $1200 worth of prizes for their products!). The winning hack/MOD is Log Connections by Elglobo and the winning style is Soul City by Abble CoSa NoStrA.

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

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Londonvasion is now officially over (can you believe it?), and to wrap-up the big event, we bring on a great panel of team members to tell us all about their experiences at the conference. MOD Team Member and phpBB Weekly Co-Host David Lewis (Highway of Life), Support Team Member and Londonvasion Coordinator Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty), and MOD Team Member and phpBB Team-Slapper Paul Sohier (Paul) join us for a delightfully fun and interesting episode as we look back on the accomplishments made in order to pull off the first-ever real-life gathering of the phpBB team members. We also look ahead at what 2009 will possibly bring. Plus, keep your eyes open for the videos from Londonvasion which will be coming out later this week, hopefully.

Douglas also gives us another update at the phpBBHacks.com Idol where Round 2 of voting is now open.

Additional Links Mentioned in the Episode:
Dave Rathbun’s Londonvasion Recaps
phpBB.com Announcement: Beyond Londonvasion
phpBB.com Blog Post: Things We Took from London
Londonvasion Central
David’s Londonvasion Photos
Yuriy’s Bertie Lawyers
The Magnificent Seven Touring London
Paul on the Bus
Yuriy’s Bertie Collection (mentioned in the after-show)

The MOD of the Week is Highlight from Search Engine by joebert, and the Style of the Week is Dark Fantasy by Daniel Exe.

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

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On this special episode of phpBB Weekly, we held a live stream of the Question & Answer Team Member Panel Discussion session taking place at Londonvasion 2008. A panel of team members answered various questions from the Londonvasion audience, from the phpBB IRC channels, and most of all, from the phpBB Weekly live audience. This quality wasn’t the best (had a number of technical difficulties to get the stream to work at all), but nevertheless, this was certainly an interesting session to be a part of. Listen in on this exclusively-special episode of phpBB Weekly!

Thanks in particular to David Lewis, Paul Sohier, Yuriy Rusko, and Eric Faerber for helping us get through the technical issues on the London side of this episode.

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

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IMPORTANT! Contrary to what was said on this episode, we are still going to be doing our live episode streaming from Londonvasion as planned.

This episode, however, did not go according to plan, due to the fact that the team members had an important presentation to be at that conflicted with this live episode, and the London hotel that they were staying at had a miserably poor internet connection. (The hotel has promised that there will be a much, much better connection at Londonvasion, according to an e-mail David sent awhile after this episode ended.) So Douglas, left by himself, tried to fill for time by discussing some of the team member photos from Londonvasion and covering what will be discussed at Londonvasion based on the finalized schedule.

In addition, voting in the phpBBHacks.com Idol has begun, and Douglas explains how the voting will work and who is up against who. Go help determine who will win all of the fabulous prizes and their own library of books (not to mention the ever-important bragging rights)!

Finally, on the request of the ever-helpful chat room on TalkShoe, Douglas summarizes the latest MOD team post on the blog concerning MOD author feedback and how they handle it.

The MOD of the Week is Advanced Meta Tags by Drugs, and the Style of the Week is Getaway by CyberAlien.

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