phpBB Weekly

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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.

This has been one heck of a week for phpBB, as evidenced by the dozens of e-mails that David and I have been sending back and forth to each other. (We rarely e-mail each other at all usually.) Not only has phpBB.com suffered a major outage caused by probably the most severe hack they have experienced to date (noting, of course, that it was NOT a fault of the phpBB software itself), but in a completely unrelated incident, many phpBB users have been reporting a sudden spike in spam registrations on phpBB boards. Of course, this has been quite a lot for the phpBB teams to handle all at once, and I commend them for their hard work to stay afloat this week.

David and I have been preparing for a very significant episode of phpBB Weekly tomorrow during which we will fully cover and address all of the details surrounding these two critical issues. David is also arranging to hopefully have some members of the phpBB teams join us to provide more inside details on both of these issues, but we will not know for sure in advance who will be joining us because of the massive amount of work that the teams are facing right now.

Nevertheless, we would like to invite you to join us tomorrow, Saturday, February 7th at 12:00 EST (1700 UTC) for this critical episode of phpBB Weekly, and please spread the word about this episode as much as you can, in particular to any administrators of phpBB boards that are being affected by the spam registrations issue. We also want to remind you that we invite you to participate in the show by asking us questions either in the chat room or by calling in live. We represent all of you, the listeners, and so we want to be sure that we fill you in on the current situations that the phpBB community is facing. We will also do our best to release the episode on phpBBWeekly.net within 12 hours of the end of the live stream.

If you can’t join us during the episode tomorrow but have any questions that you would like us to cover, you may also feel free to ask them in this topic on our forum.

Click on the ShareThis button below to quickly spread the word about this episode on one of your social networks or blogs, or e-mail it to your friends. And we hope to see you during tomorrow’s episode. Thanks!
–Douglas Bell
Co-Host and Editor, phpBB Weekly

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Download MP3 Episode (63.6 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:51:09
On This Episode: David Lewis (Highway of Life), Cullen (Brainy), and Francis Lewis (Handyman)

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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.

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