Hello everyone,

As I am blogging right now, the weather folks are predicting a very bad rain/wind storm headed towards the San Francisco Bay Area (where I’m located), and have mentioned that it’s very possible that the high winds could cause power outages tomorrow and Saturday. With any luck this will not happen, but in the slight chance that I am without power on Saturday morning, I will not be able to alert anyone online about it, nor will I be able to be here live for phpBB Weekly. Furthermore, David will also not be on this Saturday’s episode as he is still in the process of moving to Spokane. So, in the chance that I am unable to make it this Saturday for phpBB Weekly due to power outage or any other possibility, you’d just have to live with the fact that the TalkShoe stream would be silent and that episode #046 would be postponed to next weekend.

I am not canceling this weekend’s episode, I am just alerting you all to the possibility, due to this storm, that I may not be able to make it in the event that there is a power outage here. Hopefully nothing will happen and phpBB Weekly #046 will proceed as normal. See you all (hopefully) on Saturday!
–Douglas Bell

Hello everyone!
I am really excited to be able to announce that after being down for 18 days, phpBBWeekly.net is back online!
On December 4th, something happened to my cPanel username/password causing them to change. I’m not sure what happened to cause the change, but I certainly had nothing to do with it.
So why did it take 18 days for the site to come back up? Well, I had bombarded my web host for weeks with support requests, and never got a response. Yesterday, I finally got angry enough about it that I did a WHOIS on my host’s domain name, found a phone number, called them up, and found out that my host strangely still had my old Mac.com e-mail address on file–an e-mail address which expired five months ago. (Their policy–which is a good one–is to only accept support requests from the e-mail address which they have on file, for security reasons.) So, once the guy on the phone updated the e-mail address I had on file, my support request got a response, and my username and password got reset, and now the site is back online.
So, I guess I do kind of owe my web host, Kazix.com, an apology, because I had honestly started telling people that they had packed up shop and left town. That wasn’t the case at all–just a bit of a miscommunication, which caused the outage of the past 18 days.
Anyway, phpBB Weekly episodes #042 and #043 will be posted on here shortly, and then hopefully we can move on from all of this. I’ll just consider the fact that the site is finally back up a nice little early Christmas present.
Again, I’m very sorry for the outage and tried everything I could to get it out of the way ASAP. Thanks for continuing to stick around with phpBB Weekly!
–-Douglas Bell

Download Episode

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.