phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:14:08
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

Well, this episode of phpBB Weekly certainly did not run as intended. We had planned to have guests from the Tech Podcast Network join us to talk about their experiences with bulletin board-based websites, but to our surprise, none of them have worked with them before! Then, TalkShoe surprised us when they ended up doing a hardware move (and not warning us about it until half an hour into the show), which forced us to record this episode off of TalkShoe. And then, David ended up having to do the second half of the show from a car en route to the airport to catch a flight after the show, resulting in, well, not the greatest audio quality possible. Nevertheless, we did have a good (albeit technical) episode.

On this episode, David and I start out by welcoming the five (count them, five) new members of the Moderator Team, whom are cherokee red, ChrisRLG, darcie, dellsystem, and will_hough. We then take a look back at what caused the phpBB.com Outage last weekend, including what caused it, how serious it was, and how the teams have responded to it.

For the main part of the show, David takes a look at the many changes that will be coming in phpBB 3.0.RC6, including a new location for download.php, new dynamic login forms, the new use of check_form_key() and add_form_key() on all forms, new option so that you don’t have to use MD5 hashing anymore if you don’t want to, checking for the ‘IN_PHPBB’ constant in all files, and a number of other minor changes. MOD authors may want to check and see if their phpBB3 MODs will be RC-6 compatible.

The MOD of the Week is Last Posts Titles for phpBB2 by LEW21 and the Style of the Week is Sniper_Blue for phpBB3 by Sniper_E.

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 (47.1 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:22:14
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and Yuriy Rusko (Marshalrusty)

David did do one thing for this show when he joined the phpBB teams: he found a bunch of team members who were anxious to be guest hosts on phpBB Weekly. On this episode, we’re joined by guest host Yuriy Rusko, better known on phpBB.com as Marshalrusty, a member of the Support Team.

First off, David and Yuriy talk about the first episode of the new Official phpBB Podcast, which I guess is meant to differentiate it from this podcast. But then, they end up talking about the Official phpBB Podcast so much, including recapping a bit on their talk about the COPA and COPPA laws, that this show effectively is now the phpBB Podcast podcast.

However, we do have an interesting discussion with Yuriy about dealing with spam, (including CAPTCHAs and other anti-spam measures), security, and his experiences giving support for phpBB. David also takes a moment to recognize a few of the phpBB team members who have recently stepped down to return to their normal lives, and their many many contributions to the phpBB project.

The MOD of the Week is Font Type BBcode for phpBB2 by Templater, and the Style of the Week is BF Vista Style for phpBB3 by Frost.
If you want to recommend a MOD or Style for us to promote, bookmark it on del.icio.us with the tag “phpbbwmod” or “phpbbwstyle”, and we might feature it on a future episode.

Additional links mentioned during the show:
Marshalrusty’s Preventing SPAM post
Dave Rathbun’s Doctor Blog
Marshalrusty’s Registration Auth Code (RAC) MOD
Info/Application to be a MOD Team Member

Thanks to our sponsor, Audible.com. For your free audiobook, go to audible.com/talkshoe. phpBB Weekly is also a proud member of the Tech Podcast Network.