phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:09:18
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

phpBB Weekly is back, Douglas is on a normal computer, and all is right with the world!

We cover a lot of ground on this episode. Douglas recaps our interest to find a phpBB Weekly Clerk (Editor’s Note: we’ve now found one!), voting for the CAPTCHA Plugin Competition begins, and a few new members join the phpBB teams.

In addition, we spend some time discussing a post made on phpBB.com concerning accessibility issues with CAPTCHA plugins, particularly for the visually impaired. We also look at the MOD team’s recent blog post on the MOD Validation workflow, and ponder why “Insta-Deny” is a trademarked term. Also, David tells us a bit about the upcoming new StarTrekGuide MOD Manager, which they are currently soliciting feedback on.

Our next phpBB Weekly Poll Question, which goes until Saturday 10/31 (a week longer than indicated on the podcast), is “If you were to add a step to the MOD validation workflow, what would it be?” Cast your vote here!

The MOD of the Week is Forum SEO by stokerpiller, and the Style of the Week is Gerbang Kasih by napy8gen.

Join us on Saturday when we’ll continue our discussion about CAPTCHA accessibility with special guest Bernard Maldonado of Solona!

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Episode Duration: 1:15:18
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Ashley Pinner (NeoThermic), Phil Crumm (iWisdom), Igor Wiedler (evil<3), and Damian (Obsidian/Desdenova)

It’s kind of ironic that for this podcast, 2009 has turned into a year where CAPTCHAs seem to get all of our focus. Especially considering how much we hate them. They’re simply a necessary evil, kind of like insurance companies. Nevertheless, we dedicate yet another episode to the discussion of Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

But why? Well, the submission period for the phpBB MOD Team’s Best CAPTCHA Plugin Competition just ended. Once the MOD validators finish validating the submitted CAPTCHA plugins over the next few weeks, then both the phpBB teams and the community will have the opportunity to vote on their favorite CAPTCHA plugin (the winners of which will receive a free Bertie). However, we couldn’t wait for the voting to start, so we ran our own survey asking MOD Authors to tell us about their CAPTCHA plugins, and so we spent some time describing and critiquing those plugins.

CAPTCHA Plugins Featured:
Crazy Maths CAPTCHA by eviL<3
Sortables CAPTCHA Plugin by Derky
Fancy jQuery CAPTCHA by mtotheikle (similar to this CAPTCHA)
SimpleMath by nickvergessen
Rotate Image CAPTCHA Plugin by Brainy

Douglas also pointed out that in a recent checkin to Subversion, the Development Team is apparently almost ready to seed phpBB 3.0.6 RC-1 to the QA Team. He and Igor discuss a bit about if phpBB 3.0.6 might have qualified as 3.1 under the new development roadmap, and why the teams decided to keep it as 3.0.6 instead of switching to 3.1. Douglas also shares that he’s hoping to organize another phpBB users meetup in Washington, DC in early 2010. And Damian and Igor talk a little bit about the phpBBModders.net community which they are a part of.

Our poll question, “What should be the next ‘tool’ added to the Support Toolkit?” continues until Saturday, September 12. Vote in the poll on the right-hand sidebar.

The MOD of the Week is Ban Hammer by SyntaxError90, and the Style of the Week is Reds by Culprit.

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Episode Duration: 1:21:43
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), Cullen Walsh (Brainy), and Samuel Thompson (SyntaxError90)

We hit this episode of phpBB Weekly coming right off of the excitement from OSCONvasion (all except Micheal, who couldn’t make it). Despite the fact that it was just a small meetup, most of which was spent touring the OSCON Expo Hall and downtown San Jose, it was still a lot of fun, with a lot of good discussions that took place. And it does go down as the first-ever phpBB meetup event in North America, after all. Douglas, Cullen, and Sam (who were all there) spent the first half hour of this episode recapping the various things we did and discussed at OSCONvasion. Be sure to follow the OSCONvasion tag on Flickr to see some of the great pictures we took around OSCON. And of course, audio from our live session is on phpBB Weekly #115, and video will be posted this week by AdamR.

It was announced just a few hours before this show that UMIL 1.0.0 Gold was released. The Unified MODs Install Library (UMIL) truly is the missing tool to allow actions like making database table changes, adding permissions, config options, or modules to be done automatically, and now that it’s fully stable, MOD authors and MOD installers can take full advantage of it.

Finally, the MOD Team has announced a Best CAPTCHA Plugin Competition. This contest, which will help make a broad and diverse number of CAPTCHA plugins available for download and install at the launch of phpBB 3.0.6, offers free phpBB3 Berties to the best CAPTCHA plugins developed by MOD authors and submitted beginning in late August. The first submitted CAPTCHA plugin to be approved to the MOD Database will automatically receive a Bertie, plus a Bertie will be awarded to the team’s favorite CAPTCHA plugin and another to the favorite CAPTCHA plugin voted on by the community-at-large. We also take a look at the recently-revealed details of the default CAPTCHA plugins coming in 3.0.6, and go over what you need to know to build your own CAPTCHA plugin.

Our next phpBB Weekly Poll Question is “What would be the coolest CAPTCHA plugin to have installed on your board?” Vote in the poll on the sidebar at right; the poll ends on August 8th.

The MOD of the Week is Show First Post Only to Guest by Primy, and the Style of the Week is jblue by jbones.

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Episode Duration: 1:07:11
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

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Emerging from the serious tone of last week’s episode, we decided to have a little bit more fun this week in light of it being Valentine’s Day. (Or, as Techie-Micheal frequently reminds us, Singles Awareness Day.) And so in honor of SAD, we led the show off with Always the Bridesmaid (Never the Bride) by Michael Weston King.

However, the phpBB news continues, and on Tuesday, phpBB.com made its triumphant return. It’s currently residing on a temporary server at OSUOSL while the main phpBB.com server continues to be investigated. Of course, PHPList is no longer being used on phpBB.com, and it’s so far not fully clear what will replace phpBB’s mailing list or how much differently the teams will address the use of third-party software on their site.

Lost amidst the downtime was the fact that on February 1, support for security patches for phpBB2 officially ended, and as a result, so did all support for phpBB2 MODding. All of those fora have been condensed into a phpBB2 Forum Archive. The styles fora continue to be open until May 1, when it is believed that all phpBB2 information on phpBB.com will be hidden from public view. Of course, we will continue to keep an eye on the continuing phpBB2 retirement process over the coming weeks.

And finally, we continue our coverage of the cracked phpBB 3.0.4 CAPTCHA by taking a look at some of the other new settings that have currently been added to the CAPTCHA in phpBB 3.0.5-dev. However, since it’s likely that most people will not want to take the time to check out a copy of the new CAPTCHA in Subversion, David put together a list of anti-spam MODs that offer a number of different tactics to help prevent automated spambots from reaching your board, and we provide an overview of what each of these MODs do and which ones may be appropriate for your boards. Given how many spambots David dealt with on STG, he’s also been installing some of these MODs for himself as well.

Our last Poll Question of the Week was “If you could add one more feature to the new WhiteHouse.gov website, what would it be?” There were 10 votes (58.82%) for “A community bulletin board, powered by phpBB.”; 3 votes (17.65%) for “The ability to comment on that new blog of theirs.”; 2 votes (11.76%) for “A slideshow of presidential pets.”; 1 vote (5.88%) for “Twitter. Need I say more?”; and 1 vote (5.88%) for “Assurances that the new government is NOT putting secret spyware on my computer that is tracing every move I make…”. This week’s poll is “What’s the best Valentine to give to a forum moderator?” Vote in the poll on our right-hand sidebar, and leave a comment as well if you want to. The poll closes on February 21st.

The MOD of the Week (although not really a MOD) is phpBB3 Website Integration Framework by Highway of Life, and David talked a bit about how you can use it to utilize the phpBB framework (sessions, auth, DBAL, request_var, etc.) for your website. The Style of the Week is WintersDay by BillStur Styles.

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Episode Duration: 1:12:25
On This Episode: David Lewis (Highway of Life), Francis Lewis (Handyman), and Michael Williams (mtotheikle)

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NOTE: These show notes do not contain as many links as we would like them to due to the phpBB.com outage. We will add more links where appropriate once phpBB.com is back.

Douglas was at a conference in San Francisco during this episode, and you know what that means: David brings on guest team members to help him out. He was joined on this episode by Paul of the MOD Team, Francis Lewis (Handyman) of the MOD Team and StarTrekGuide, and Michael Williams (mtotheikle), Development Leader of StarTrekGuide. And the topic of discussion? Our well-known favorite topic of discussion–MODs.

First off, MODX 1.2.2 and AutoMOD 1.0.0 beta2 have been simultaneously released. MODX 1.2.2 mainly contains a number of XSL fixes and tweaks, and AutoMOD 1.0.0 beta2 includes a few new features and a number of bugfixes. The four of them also discuss some of their favorite MODs, take a look at some of the biggest MODs for phpBB3 and phpBB2, and chat about how MODding has evolved from phpBB2 to phpBB3.

February 1st marked the last day that the Development Team would release security patches for phpBB2, thus ending any and all support for phpBB2. It also marked the last day that any phpBB2 submissions would be accepted into the MODs Database. We talk about the ending of security patches as well as discuss how long it would take for very large boards to upgrade from phpBB2 to phpBB3. Finally, they also discuss the recent blog post on phpBB.com discussing why team members don’t give private support to users.

Last week’s poll question, “If you could add one more feature to the new WhiteHouse.gov website, what would it be?”, is still open and will run through Saturday, February 7. So go vote!
The MOD of the Week is Mods Database by lefty74, and the Style of the Week is Hermes by CyberAlien.

Be sure to join us next week when we will have a special edition phpBB Weekly episode with featured discussion of the ongoing phpBB.com outage, joined by members of the phpBB teams who have been busy this week rebuilding the site.