phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:05:02
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples)

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Note: This episode was recorded before we learned the news of David’s leave of absence.

This episode of phpBB Weekly goes back to the show’s roots, to a darker time when the show only had one host. As David was away on a business trip, Douglas steps up and goes solo for the first time in who knows how long. And when he has the microphone all to himself, there’s no telling what he’ll talk about.

Well actually, there is. Douglas dusts off our old “Building a Successful Community” series and today’s topic is moderator etiquette. Douglas discusses the importance of locking topics responsibly, avoiding the “Why didn’t you search for it?” syndrome, and focusing on actually helping out your users.

And, partially inspired by this post, Douglas talks about a topic a bit more near and dear to his heart: eliminating age stereotypes among your members and staff and valuing the contributions of younger members. As a younger person himself, Douglas has quite a bit to say in this department.

Finally, Douglas sorts through the phpBB.com Events and Meetings forum to take a look at some of the upcoming events scheduled or in planning, including an update on the exciting San Francisco event that he and David will be putting together.

Our last Poll Question of the Week was “What’s the best Valentine to give to a forum moderator?” There were 4 votes (44%) for “A day off.”; 3 votes (33%) for “A chocolate bar with your forum rules engraved on it.”; 2 votes (22%) for “Singles Awareness Day propaganda.”; and no votes for “A rank image with little hearts on it.” or “A chance to be administrator for a day.”. This week’s poll is “What’s your favorite web browser” Vote in the poll on our right-hand sidebar, and leave a comment as well if you want to. The poll closes on March 14th.

The MOD of the Week is Special Chars by Mr_Simon and the Style of the Week is PS3 by Jester-fr.

Be sure to join us on Saturday, March 14th for our one-hundredth episode! It’s sure to be a blast.

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Download MP3 Episode (49.7 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:26:52
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

Sponsor: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.gotomeeting.com/techpodcasts/.

On this non-live episode of phpBB Weekly, David and Douglas go through a bunch of old news, recapping it and covering some new developments. We start by briefly mentioning the new phpBB Weekly theme/album artwork project that is in progress right now, and invite anyone who’s interested to participate.

You can now register for Londonvasion, which opened up a few weeks ago, along with a number of other details that Yuriy made available. We also (once again) do a recap on our latest plans for Londonvasion coverage, as well as answer a few questions that we’ve heard about it.

David gives us a recap on the MOD Team’s Package Manager (Blinky). In doing so, he also unveils some of the new features in the upcoming release of the MODX 1.2 spec for the first time.

Douglas and David then chat a bit about Sphinx for phpBB, another project in the phpBB Code Forge that is being put together by Development Team member Nils Adermann (naderman). Sphinx is an SQL full-text search engine that is already being used on phpBB.com and will likely be made available as an additional search plugin for a future release of phpBB3.

David then reveals that the new phpBB3 Styles Database has finally been completed and has been opened up! (The new Styles Demo only has one style in it at the moment: subsilver2.) You can now expect to start seeing styles hopefully be added to the database, and we’ll certainly be keeping our eyes open on there. We also speculate over whether or not there will end up being a Styles Demo for phpBB2 as well, but that question has yet to be answered…

And finally, we do a recap from our vBulletin Weekly April Fools joke by chatting about the recent vBulletin 3.7, which is virtually your own Facebook in a box. But since Jelsoft really knows the right way to celebrate a new release, we also take some time to discuss their simultaneous announcements of immediate end-of-life for vBulletin 3.0 and 3.5, along with end-of-life in six months for vBulletin 3.6; as well as unprecedented licensing changes (aka price increases) for vBulletin licenses. If you thought that phpBB’s end of life announcement was sudden, you probably won’t think that anymore!

The MOD of the Week is Forum Sponsor for phpBB3 by EXreaction, and the Style of the Week is VidoStyle for phpBB3 by [urban] & Shadow_One.

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